Dan:
I spent about five years being a grunt laborer and then a plan-drawer and then a greens finisher and a shaper and a lead associate before I ever tried to design anything on my own. Yes, of course, I was learning from everybody along the way. I am still learning. And I think have a bigger payroll to help me create courses than anybody who posts here.
The premise of this question is that posters could design a decent course RIGHT NOW, without that apprenticeship -- but many have qualified that they could do it if they had the right people looking over their shoulder.
I'm just trying to point out that there are lots of people in the business who are more trained to design and build courses than most of the posters here, yet most of them can't get a chance. So it's pretty naive to think that they would all help someone from Golf Club Atlas get their break instead.
I had a great advantage on that when I was 21. Nobody thought I had a freaking chance at it, so they were all willing to share their knowledge!
Tom
I think you would agree that your studies and apprenticeship make you an almost unique case in the field. I doubt anyone here is undervaluing that. I also doubt that Pat, desite his tendency to refine the parameters of his questions over time, was asking if we thought we could build a decent golf course without appropriate technicians.
Consider my case in 1983. I had not attended any courses to study music theory, composition, music production or anything to do with writing or producing music.
I did however have 12 years experience of critically listening to music, observing musicians, reading pretty much eveeything that was out there worth reading, and I developed an aethetic which proved to be pretty much unique.
I was lucky enough to assemble a team of 7 people - 4 musicians, all more technically gifted and more experienced than I, a great orchestrator, a manager and a sympathetic experienced engineer/producer. I was able to put the team together, I guess, because I had an idea, and it covered the music, the sounds, and the presentation, and I must have been persuasive. The manager certainly was and I believe his advantage was that he believed in my talent 100%. After one year we had produced a record which was a collaborative work, for sure, but at no time in the process was there any doubt about who was in charge. I was. I asked for advice when I needed it. I directed operations when it was clear to me what needed to be done. When I had an idea of how something should sound but didn't know how to get that sound - we consulted.
There were quite a few recording conventions rejected in the making of the record, and this wasn't a fight, because the producer knew it was my project and if I wanted my guitar to be completely unprocessed, then why not? My vocals were recorded on a microphone used for female vocals, normally, I liked the bright, almost abrasive sound, so that's what we did. There were numerous rules of musical theory that were broken, there are parallel fifths all over the record, there is unison everywhere. There is not one harmony vocal. Fortunatlely I wasn't aware of that any of this was in any way rebellious or even left field. I was just doing what I thought sounded good.
I had a clear picture of what I wanted and the team trusted me. I could not operate a mixing board, tape machine, I had no understanding of microphone positioning, I knew pretty much nothing of that side of things. Frankly, I wan't interested. I was interested in making a record.
That record has allowed me to remain in my field of work, pretty much as long as I like. It has often been in various lists of best this and best that.
I now know a great deal about how to record music, I even understand a little of music theory, I am not a bad musician, these days. I have gained knowledge by osmosis, mainly, by being around people who know what they are doing. And by trial and error in my own studios.
All this knowledge is useful to me now.
'Rattlesnakes' (the album we made which came out in 1984) may not be the Pine Valley of pop/rock, but it is highly valued by many, and I'm convinced that it could not have been made with a trained, experienced person at the helm. It was made, I should add, for 30,000 pounds - a relatively small budget for the times, even for a debut album.