I started this blog in 2008 after seeing a need to help those wanting support using the new technologies but who were getting bogged down with the complexity of the gear. I thought a few people might watch my YouTube videos and if I could help them then that would be mission accomplished. Some 14 years later and over 60 million page visits and around 35 million YouTube views, it got a little bit bigger than I ever imagined. When I started, there were a handful of sites like this, now it seems every man and his dog makes YouTube tutorials and runs sites to give music production help, what a fantastic situation. It seems after over a decade of doing this and the growth in this area, people need more help than ever in navigating modern music technology.
Since the blog started I’ve been doing a lot of other things, so I rarely make video tutorials, but last week I made one showing how to use the new Pro Tools I/O feature to enable routing of externals VIs. A couple of comments were made, one saying the technique was, “too complicated” and another saying, “it would stop the flow of their creativity”.
Part of me wanted to make some smart ass comment, but I refrained and considered the comments in the light of the original mission of this site, to help people be creative without getting bogged down. Were they right? Was it too complicated? Or did it point to a problem that pervades modern music making?
Before I continue I want to be clear, I don’t want this to become about a certain age group, or certain genre of music. Whenever we try and discuss the subject of complexity in music production it doesn’t take long for comments like, “all they want to do is make beats” or, “it’s all about loops” or “these kids don’t know how lucky they are”. So from the outset, as I try and unpack my thoughts about this subject, I don’t want it to turn into a “kids and beats are shit!” discussion - I think it transcends age and genre.
I was reading some research from Harvard on brain health; it highlighted some areas we need to take care of and pay attention to, in fact the opening statement was “use it or lose it.” From the list, two in particular leapt out at me; the need to keep learning and strain your brain and also the need for social interaction.
However, much modern music production thinking is encouraging us to do the opposite. To take the easy option and also to work on our own from home. These are the antithesis of what are considered to be the path for healthy brain ageing. It has made me wonder, are some of the things we are being sold as the “way to make music” things that may diminish our skills, not improve them.
7000 Calories A Week
Last week I shared a picture of myself with my Facebook friends having lost 30lbs since June. A couple of people joked “now you can breathe out” after seeing that my stomach was a lot smaller than it had been before. I wish taking that photo with the 30lbs loss was as simple as breathing in. It took me making a 7,000 calorie deficit every week since June. To achieve that, I had to work out every day, getting up at 5:45am to get to the gym to run several km. I then returned home, got my daughter up, made her breakfast, then took my dog out for another 45-60 minute walk. I also had to keep a track of all my food and drink consumption. Every single day. I checked my Apple Watch for this article, it tells me that during this time I’ve exercised for an average of 121 minutes a day, covering some 14.3km a day. On those numbers, I shouldn’t be thinner, I should be dead!
Joking aside, it’s taken a huge amount of effort to get my body in some kind of shape I feel happier with. I’m now seeing a trainer once a week who is helping me tone. The first week I did it I had DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) a couple of days later - I thought I’d been beaten up. However, my physio told me it’s my muscles tearing and then healing, after which I’m stronger.
So, to achieve my goals, I need to make sacrifices and work hard. By the way, I didn’t do this to be better than someone else, the only person I’m trying to beat is me.
I wish I could have simply breathed in, but isn’t that what a lot of modern music producers want, instead of putting in the hard work?
I want to be clear, a lot of people make music for fun. If you just want to make some songs to share with friends and family, then I get it, grab some backing tracks, or whatever you need to get your ideas together, throw them down and share them, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if you want to appear on the world stage and compete with the best this industry has to offer, then it’s going to take a lot of hard work. It’s “complicated” and goes “way beyond your creative flow”.
Being Around The Best
I’ve been around some great song writers and I can see why they create chart hits. They work for hours on a song, sometimes just on a line, or a chord. They attend song writing camps, they know that ‘iron sharpens iron.’ I’ve been around some of the best engineers and producers in the world too and the same goes for them, they work hard, every day, often without a break for weeks, to do their very best. I was on a call with Andrew Scheps on a recent Bank Holiday, at the end of the call I apologised for breaking into a vacation day, he told me he was working. Knowing Andrew, I wasn’t surprised. It took me a week to get a call with Darrell Thorp, for the very same reason.
These people don’t avoid hard work, they don’t take the line of least resistance, they take the hard road, and that’s often what makes them the best. Think of them as the music production equivalent of SWAT or SAS, do you think they are making the grade simply by ‘breathing in’?
I’m sure someone reading this can cite a story of someone who takes the easy road and is super successful. Of course you can, but that’s the exception and not the rule - that’s how they get people to buy lottery tickets, knowing people will think the exception is the rule.
The Solo Button
When the pandemic hit we all had to learn to work from home. In fact, many of us got used to it, a lot of us enjoyed it. After all, some people are annoying, or distracting, or both. It sped up the trend of more and more of us working from home. I really started to enjoy not going anywhere, even once restrictions had been lifted. People kept asking me when I was going to start travelling again and coming to meetings, industry events, and social gatherings. I had to stop myself from saying out loud; “how about never?”.
Over the years, the pro audio industry has responded to having more powerful computers and greater connectivity and now we have products that encourage us to work solo. Now you can make a track on a laptop. You can do it all and never have to see or speak to anyone… sounds like bliss.
But what if this is bad for us? Not just as creatives, but as human beings. What if solo is not the way it’s meant to be? What if the idea of online collaboration is not a healthy solution? Or perhaps it’s the answer to us working in silos?
Yes, I can work alone, often faster and with less resistance. However, I know that some of my best creative efforts have been developed with other people in the room. I have terabytes of drum samples and loops, but nothing beats having a great drummer in the room to share their creativity with me - even if that’s to program the drum parts into a sequencer. The same goes for guitars, bass and many other instruments, especially the voice. I rarely come up with something in isolation that isn’t bettered by someone else bringing their expertise and unique point of view to the track.
However it goes deeper, working solo may be bad for our long term development. This from Harvard Health;
“While cocooned in our comfort zones, we run the risk of avoiding unfamiliar people as well as circumstances. The resulting social isolation, ageing researchers have discovered, puts people at risk for mental decline. "By isolating socially and mentally, you can lose the reserve you have," Dr. Fabiny says. "If you are not using those neural networks, they'll just go away."
What If We Are Getting This Wrong?
Coming back to the Harvard research, if we don’t stretch our minds and socialise then we are likely to lose it. In other words, some modern music production thinking could be making us less effective, not more.That’s unlikely to put us on a trajectory to be the best in the business.
As a working professional I get it, I’m often looking for faster ways to do things, especially when we have diminishing budgets and tighter deadlines, it’s sometimes the only way we get to hit the deadline. But what if we make that our modus operandi? The research seems to suggest we won’t get better at what we do, but worse!
What if trends like MIDI chord packs and one-click-instant-preset plugins are damaging the music production industry? I don’t mean because a real keyboard player doesn’t get the gig, or an engineer doesn’t get the mix. I mean, what if it’s actually making those using them worse not better? Yes, they may churn out some tunes that sound half decent (after all they are ‘pro level’ MIDI chords) but what if they genuinely want to make a career out of music production, can this help? I don’t think so. From Harvard Health;
“Use it or lose it: How many times have you heard that timeworn principle of healthy brain ageing? Scientists say that living a mentally active life is as important as regular physical exercise. Just as your muscles grow stronger with use, mental exercise keeps your mental skills and memory in tone.”
Is this about some of us not understanding the age and culture? Not according to Harvard, this is about the need for our minds to be stretched by learning and for us to extend beyond working solo.
That’s not going to happen if I’m sitting on my own using stuff that doesn’t stretch my skills and talents. I’m not talking about the tired cliche ‘dumbing down’, often used by the old guard to try and defend the status quo. This is a serious consideration, that not taking on the mental challenges is likely to make us less able to grow as writers, musicians, engineers, or producers.
Simple Isn’t Always Easy
When I started this blog it wasn’t to come up with a site full of ways to avoid the hard work, or the complicated techniques. It was to enable those wanting to be able to use the stuff to do so. When I saw the complicated comment I thought, ahh they want the music production equivalent of slip on running shoes. Then I considered it further and it led me to think, some people don’t just want slip-on running shoes, they want someone else to run the miles for them too. Some of this stuff is complicated and hard, there’s no way around that, and just like my health journey, no one but me can do the work.
The marketing lie pervading our industry right now is that you don’t need to learn music, or understand how audio works, or synthesis, or rhythm, or sentence construction, or rhyme. What the Harvard data tells us is this discussion transcends something as temporary as “making it in the music business” and goes to the heart of us being mentally healthy, at being the very best us.
The author Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, suggested that to become an expert in something took a person an average of 10,000 hours. This was based on a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. When Ericcson discovered that Gladwell had made this claim based on his research, he rebutted it, he said this;
“The 10,000-hour rule was invented by Malcolm Gladwell who stated that, 'Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.' Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalisation to a magical number," Ericsson writes.
Ericsson then pointed out that 10,000 was an average, and that many of the best musicians in his study had accumulated "substantially fewer" hours of practice. He underlined, also, that the quality of the practice was important. "In contrast, Gladwell does not even mention the concept of deliberate practice."
So, the man who did the original research said that 10,000 hours was an average and many people needed even more. If this is indeed true, then it’s a simple concept to grasp. However, simple isn’t always easy. How do I lose 30lbs? I need to eat less and exercise more - a fact so simple even a child could understand it, but it wasn’t easy. In fact that’s the number one question when people see my progress, “how did you do it?” The answer is simple, making it happen isn’t easy.
It’s taken a lot of hard work, sacrifice, discipline, and determination, but I’m where I want to be health wise. It’s certainly not a case of just breathing in for a photo. The question is, do you want to do the music production equivalent of breathing in, or do you really want to be a better you?
As I said, since we started this blog in 2008 there’s been an explosion of learning resources, much of it is free. There’s also some excellent training content from organisations like Groove 3 and PureMix. There really is no excuse for avoiding putting in the hours and mastering music production.
Easy is an attractive offer, but it’s rarely the option that gets us to the place we want to be. On the contrary, taking the easy option may well be killing the skills many of us long to cultivate.
Not The Last Word
This article is in no way a statement or the last word, it’s me doing what I find most helpful and that’s thinking out loud. I’ve become increasingly uneasy about certain aspects of the modern music production industry; no, not beats, or loops, or other cultural trends that some of us need to wake up to. I’m talking about something far more insidious, aimed at the core principles of modern music production, that is encouraging us to take the easiest possible route to achieve our goals AND working in solo, damaging us both as creatives and more worryingly, as human beings?
It’s worth thinking about, it’s certainly not an easy question to answer, but one I think deserves careful consideration and discussion, with those of us who care about the long term well being of the creative community.