I love getting comments from you. They’re always thought provoking and help me give you the content you ask for and need. They’re truly helpful and I’m very grateful for every comment and email I receive. Keep them coming!
A perfect example is this comment that I got on my ‘Don’t be a DAW Dummy’ article:
That end sentence really made me think. It’s so easy to get caught up playing around with the raw material of a mix; sometimes to the point at which we’ve forgotten the end goal.
That’s because creative people are natural “tweakers”. No, I’m not talking about some sort of weird drug addiction. What I’m talking about is another form of strange addiction. Music producers and mixers can get caught in a never ending loop of fine tuning a mix until it’s perfect in every single way.
How do I know that? Because I’m guilty of doing that myself. I’m guilty of spending a ridiculous amount of time on one mix that should have been easily completed before I moved on to the next job.
That is one of the most painful things you can do to yourself. If you’re diligent, creative and love what you do, that project is going to occupy space in your head while it remains incomplete. It’ll be nagging at you in the back of your mind when you’re spending time with your family or friends. And when you get back to working on it, you keep tweaking and fine tuning without actually finishing the project. It’s left sitting on the shelf. Sound familiar?
I’ve often heard Bono mention something fascinating about his approach to U2’s songs. Whether you love him or love to hate him, his idea of what makes a finished song is beautiful. He describes the end of their songwriting process as “letting them go” rather than finishing them. They’re never actually finished. Instead, they live, evolve and change over time and during their live performances.
But they got released! Without releasing songs to the world, their successes, failures and continued success would never have happened. They had to get the songs out there in the first place.
If you examine the writing processes of many artists from multiple disciplines, you’ll notice a similar strategy. And there’s nothing stopping you doing the same thing.
Yet I have one very specific example of how I failed to implement that method
Back in 2013, I was part of a music networking site that helped songwriters and producers connect to get their material out into the world. It was a great idea and I met some really great people. One songwriter and one of his songs in particular stood out to me.
He had produced a great pop song and had been working with a vocalist to get the “top line” in order. The difficult part of the process was getting the arrangement and production sounding exactly the way he wanted. That’s where I came in… I knew I could take the demo to where he wanted it to go.
He passed the stems over to me along with a rough demo of the vocals. While the vocal performance was great, my advice was to take everything into the studio and re-record the vocals in a professional setting.
So, I arranged for us all to meet one evening at one of my friend’s studios and get the vocals down.
At the end of a very full day in my 9-6 job as a studio engineer, I drove out to my friend’s studio and we kicked everything off.
Despite having a very busy day and driving an hour and a half to the studio, I was re-energised. I was connecting with new people and working on something I knew was going to be a lot of fun. It’s incredible how you can find that energy when you’re passionate about something.
We spent a couple of hours in the studio recording lead vocals, overdubs, ad-libs and generally hanging out. When we left, the arrangement and production was in a position where we had a lot of flexibility. I was very excited for what was to come.
Now, I mentioned that I was very busy engineering each day in my full time job as a studio engineer. And I was. But I was also working with music production and sound design clients in my own business, focusing on keeping myself fit and healthy, organising a move to London and trying to have some form of family/social life. It was an incredibly busy, exciting time and it turns out I had bitten off more than I could chew.
I ended up getting completely swallowed up by the process. The company that I worked with in Dublin was going through a period of rapid growth and I was an important part of that. The clients in my own business were wanting to work on bigger, more complicated projects. I was struggling to keep my fitness at the levels that I wanted. And there were a lot of fun and exciting things going on in my family/social life.
It turns out that moving country is a detailed, complicated process. Especially when you’re trying to establish connections in a new country and have a new job in place before you go!
Even though all of those things were happening, I still had a few hours here and there to focus on this “passion project” with my new friend. It was only one track but it had become a bit of a monster in my head. It felt like an unsurmountable task with everything else going on. I had started to doubt whether I could actually complete it.
I moved to London in early 2014 and kept in touch with my writing partner. My first year in a new country was full of very interesting challenges. The primary focus was on getting settled and generating revenue. So, the passion project got sidetracked once again. My writing partner was very understanding as he had a lot going on in his life too.
I was working on the project here and there. It was taking shape but the monster in my head had become Godzilla. I kept tweaking and changing things, adjusting instruments, adding new elements, taking out others, re-arranging parts. It didn’t make any sense.
As I mentioned, we kept in contact on the project over email and the last email I can see is from November 2014. I mentioned that I was almost finished the project (which was true) and it should be done in the next few weeks. I never got a reply to that email and the end of 2014 turned out to be even more crazy and busy as the end of 2013.
Needless to say, that song sat on the shelf and never saw the light of day; at least in the form of the song that we were producing together. As we lost contact, he might well have finished it himself and released it to the world. Or he might have given up on it completely.
Now, I’m sure you can see that if you put something off, the chances of it not getting done are pretty high.
That fact is present in every aspect of life. A task as simple as completing a small project like the one I’ve mentioned can become a monster in your head. Its perceived complexity and difficulty grows in our minds. That in turn makes it even less likely that we’ll ever get it done.
In my case, I had one track to produce but I couldn’t do it. I had built it up in my had and convinced myself I didn’t have the skills to complete it. The ironic thing is that I had actually completed multiple complex and difficult projects throughout that time. On the face of it all, I was doing incredibly well but that one unpaid incomplete project was still bothering me.
So, as you can see, it doesn’t pay to be a “tweaker”. There’s nothing wrong with fine tuning things near the end of a mix but there’s plenty wrong with tweaking and tinkering with it for days, weeks, months and (hopefully not) years.
What does help is having a method to get you from the very start of a mix all the way through to the finished product. Perfection doesn’t exist but you can certainly strive to perfect your method over time.
Sometimes it’s better to let the mix go than to keep fighting and “tweaking” to get it towards your idea of perfection. Even if the the project doesn’t quite “feel” complete, it can always live on and be restructured during live performances or in the form of a new version.
During the process of writing this article, I felt inspired to revisit the mix that was sitting on the shelf. When I played it back, I could hear a few production elements and small sections of the mix that I would tweak. But for the most part, it was pretty good.
Rather than going through another mix pass or tweaking it even more, I bounced it out and sent it over to the man who originally sent it my way. It’s still not complete but I’m sure you can see that it’s a much better option than leaving it sit on the shelf for all that time. Whether I hear back from him is a different story.
I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the best approach to any project is to commit and get it done as quickly as possible. I’ve much more going on in my life these days than during that busy time in 2013/14 but I’m much more effective at handling competing demands now. That’s down to the strategies I employ in life and the mixing method I use on every project.
So, the next time you’re tempted to tweak your mix, it might be worth stopping and asking yourself if it’s really necessary. I’m sure the answer to that question will surprise you more than you think.
Now, I’d love to know…
Is there a project you’ve left on the shelf that you could finish? Is there something you could do right now to help move it forward? Be honest!
Leave a comment below!
professional sounding mix every time...
Steve,
Boy do I have “tweaking” stories……I have one song that I started in 1973 that still isn’t finished…….but that’s a ‘4 beer’ story for another time. On the flip side…..
Lately, I’m in the ‘publish or perish’ mind set.
I find working with my templates and really zeroing in on what the song is asking me to do, right up front, settles about 50% of my problems. Knowing each track, line by line is time consuming but definitely makes things go smoother later. I clear most things up in editing.
After balancing and adding whatever sweeteners I’m going to use with plug ins and EQ and compression, I listen with automation in mind. I spend the last few passes ‘tweaking’ my automation lanes and then I bounce to mp3 several times (it always sounds better in the DAW than it does on an mp3).
At the end of that, I just suck it up and mail it out to the client for their approval/opinion. Most of the time, they’re happy (sometimes overjoyed) at the finish. You can fuss with mixes forever, especially in the digital world where you can save all your mixes and go back to anyone of them when the customer says, “I like the mix from 2 examples ago…..”
Thanks for your column. I enjoy reading your topics and the ideas you shared. Keep doing this my friend, You Rock!!
My apologies, Dave… this one slipped through the net.
I love your current approach! It’s very much in line with where I’m at these days.
As an update for anyone reading this… I heard back from my original collaborator all these years later.
He’s still as awesome as ever and we’re going to see what we can do about getting the track out into the world.