Developing your skill when your on your own.

Contra Studio

Contra Studio

Member
Jul 13, 2011
369
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Hell Paso
I've been trying hard to learn, read, study. Just eating everything I can get my mind on with learning to develop my skills in all thing music.... I was interning in a large studio down here about 4 years back and learned only what the cost and name of top end gear. I tried to learn more but the owner of the studio was a turd and never let me asked questions, just sit and watch! Watch what?!?! What that cool plug in is as and tweak out on the color?? I learned more here and on gearsluts but that's it... I want more, I need feed back I want to be pushed by a guy like Mick from Rocky... Today after mixing for a few ours I stop and listened to the mix and sure I've grown in my skill but man I hate that I can't even touch the lvl of some of you guys. And your working with less too.... Being married and working 50 hours a week and still having to balance a band is hard. Just trying to think of ways to better my skill and become better....
 
It takes time, just stick with it, keep learning and practicing, learn some more then practice some more. There's really no easy way, or magic bullet (with pretty much anything worth doing).

In general, if there's a book that says "Learn Whatever in 5 years" or a book that says "Learn Whatever in 5 Days", go with the first one, there are NO shortcuts, anybody looking for shortcuts is destined to fail.


(Does any one else's spell checker want to correct "practicing" into "practising"?)
 
You should practice a lot on your own, and THEN sit and watch more. The benefice is tremendous when you already know what you are dealing with, as opposed as being thrown in the water before you know how to swim
 
Never going to be perfect. Lately I've been just telling myself not to worry about every little transient or syllable and not try to please anybody but myself, which isn't easy either but fuck it, I've only got one life and it's stupid to put a microscope to everything, commit, accept that mistakes will be made and your mixes might not make you famous and get on with making music that you like.
 
more than anything, i would recommend that to make sure you fully understand the technical/scientific principles behind everything - from from signal flow thru a console and patch bay, to knowing how exactly a compressor shapes a waveform, shit like that. it's awesome if you know how to turn knobs and punch in numbers and make shit sound good, but to really get it down on your own, you need to know the how and why behind what you're doing.
 
colonel kurtz said:
more than anything, i would recommend that to make sure you fully understand the technical/scientific principles behind everything - from from signal flow thru a console and patch bay, to knowing how exactly a compressor shapes a waveform, shit like that. it's awesome if you know how to turn knobs and punch in numbers and make shit sound good, but to really get it down on your own, you need to know the how and why behind what you're doing.
Click to expand...

I'm 100% with you here. I'm still trying to fully understand the science of music and apply it. I sometimes wish I can quit my job and move to a city like LA and just work in a studio until I'm all bones or dead of cancer.... You have any links about what a compressor does to a wave form?? I know what it does more or less to audio.
 
^^^ A waveform IS audio, dude. Just a visual representation. If you know what it does to Audio, you know what it does to a waveform. The way I learned was going to an audio school, and THEN sitting and watching good engineers at a studio forever. Once I knew what all the equipment did, all I ever had to do was watch. I knew what an eq and compressor did, so I could just LISTEN and hear how things changed as they were processed. Also just about 80% of this business is listening, trying different things, and experimentation.
 
A lot has been said already, and I completely agree with all of it.

I would like to add: if you have spare days at your studio, you could dedicate an entire day to messing around with a single technique. Like turning knobs on a compressor, putting a mic on an amp, trying reverb on all kinds of stuff, etc.

Don't have any goals while doing this. Just change things and get a good feeling of what those changes do to the sound and feel of the signal.

Once you think you are getting the hang of it, you could try some small exercises to put your skills to the test. For example: make a snare pop more with a compressor in just a few seconds. Or make a voice sound like it's coming from the back of a church, while you are standing at the other extreme.

The idea here is to enable yourself to put your vision into action quickly while mixing. This can make the process a lot less frustrating and enable your creativity, because you aren't lost in the woods so much. Your thoughts go from "something is wrong with X, but I don't know what to do about it", to "X sounds like this, and I want it to sound like that, so I will use tool Y to reach this goal".

It's similar to learning an instrument. Why do people practice scales and all that stuff? Surely not because it sounds so great by itself. But once they are writing a song or jamming, and they need to build a lick to create a certain feel, they have a myriad of knowledge and patterns to draw upon.
 
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