Mixing ain’t easy, but somebody’s gotta do it

I’m a reluctant engineer. I studied classical piano, composition, and jazz when I was in school, and I used to chart most of my music by hand even when I had great software available, some kind of latent Luddite tendency that I still have. I’ve always loved keyboards and midi and computers, but only very specific parts of all that. So when I was doing my first home recording, I’d spend 20 hours on the music itself, and give or take zero dollars and more or less 5 minutes on actually recording the music. I figured ‘I’ve done the important, lofty work of actually “creating” the music, and if I ever need to document it better, I’ll just pay someone to mix it or record it or whatever.’

Fast forward 15 years or more, and even before this new millenium had started; I’d had the brilliant insight that if I never recorded my music, or if I never recorded it well, then I couldn’t really share it with anyone. And production is at least challenging and creative as writing the music itself. Fast forward another 5 years or so, and I’m in a new town in a new state and don’t know many people to play with, and I’m “back in the studio” recording my own stuff off and on again to stay a little involved with music, and it’s a good period – I feel like I’m learning again.

Step 1 has been to just force myself to finish and post work when I’m in one of the periods where I crank out stuff. I’m interested in restraining my “music guy” impulses and my experiments these days are designed around simpler ideas. I guess what I’m trying to learn more about is giving as much importance to “how things sound” as there is to what’s actually being played. Step one has been the exercise of starting things and finishing them.

Step 2 has been just to actually take Step 1 a little further. Forcing myself to just finish stuff is a good first step, and by starting to do that and then later listening on iMac speakers and laptops and $8 computer speakers and home stereos of all sorts, I’ve had to go back in and learn more. It’s chance to practice stuff that I’ve formerly just thought about, and every time I go through a period like this after a break from it, I learn a lot.

I’m not trying to become a studio engineer, I just want to feel competent enough that I’m either not holding back music I want to work on or can even improve music ideas through production choices. I still get most of my musical jollies out of the process of creating something and I still have irresponsibly little care whether anyone else actually ever hears it by the time it’s done, and this is another small but very important step for me toward breaking out of that mindset.

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