Do you spend a lot of time learning or looking at tutorials, yet not making progress with your music?

Progress comes through effort. You already know that.

Learning about something feels like making progress, right? 

But is it, really?

In many cases, no.

It doesn’t require effort to passively consume information.

It can feel like we’re making progress because we’re gaining knowledge. But having knowledge is useless unless it is being put into practice.

In fact, that kind of knowledge is not only useless. 

To learn without putting the knowledge into practice is downright BAD for you. 

Aside from sapping your time from actually making music…

Absorbing lots of information without acting on it will lead you to a confused state.

Your brain becomes clogged with various disconnected (and often contradicting) pieces of information. Makes it harder for you to see a way forward. 

This is because you are missing an essential component – practice – that connects the knowledge you have gained with your existing skills, understanding and intuition.

Let’s recap:

1. Needless learning is a comfort zone.
2. To gain true understanding, we must interact with the subject matter. 
3. The only way to make progress is through effort and cultivating action. 

We must learn to recognise the difference between learning with the purpose of doing something, and learning in order to feel fake-good about ourselves and avoid expending effort.

Don’t you already know enough to create something?

It’s not for me to worry about what other people think of my work.

That is completely outside of my control.

Whether others like it or not, I honestly don’t spend my energy thinking about that at all. I’m not seeking feedback, criticism or approval. I’m focused on my own internal standards. I try to improve those standards as I go. That’s all I’m concerned about.

“Easy for you to say, right? You get many compliments!”

It’s inevitable I get compliments. I have been making music almost daily since the mid 90’s. I release music with many influential labels in my genre (in the past year alone: Metalheadz, R&S Records, Over/Shadow, Reinforced, Dispatch and others). 

Of course I get compliments. You will, too, if you do the same.

I am thankful of the fact that someone wants to say something nice. I really do appreciate the sentiment and effort behind it. It’s not pointless or meaningless. Like the act of giving a gift – it is beautiful in itself. 

It is making a positive contribution to the world and providing an avenue for beneficial relationships to be formed.

But here’s the thing: 

Just as I don’t care for criticism, I also don’t want compliments to have much impact on me or my work.

Frankly, I usually forget about them in seconds. It comes in – and just as quickly it’s out of my head.

Why?

First, nothing becomes better or worse for being praised.

Second, sand dunes.

“Just as sand dunes are always drifting over one another and concealing what came before, so in life also, what comes earlier is very swiftly hidden by all that piles up afterwards.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

For every person who enjoys something I’ve made, there are many more who couldn’t care less. 

Eventually, my work will be forgotten by everyone. That’s ok. 

Legacy is a product of our imagination. It gives us the illusion of control over an unpredictable universe, making us feel morally superior. It’s an ego-driven, ill-fated bid for everlasting fame. 

Why not focus on enjoying the process instead?

By the time other people are hearing my work for the first time, it’s already well in the past for me. I’ve lost my interest in thinking about it, talking about it or listening to it. I have let go of it and I’m fully focused on something new. 

This week, let’s all focus on creating work that satisfies our own internal standards.

Take pride and joy in your craft.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts about working with the stereo image in your mix.

Our hearing is ruled by ancient mechanisms that have evolved during the course of hundreds of thousands of years.

Our brain is always at work analysing things like the spatial properties, frequency content and the loudness of what we are hearing. It does this to determine our position in relation to our environment, and also the distance and direction of different sound sources.

This mechanism applies in all things we hear – including music.

The “stereo image” is a psycho-acoustical space created in the mind of the listener. Make full use of working within that space, utilising all of its dimensions.

• From loud to quiet. 
• From left to right. 
• From front to back.
• From the sub bass up to the highest frequencies.

Some concrete things to think about:

• Don’t just pan or widen sideways. Work the depth of the stereo field as well using EQ and volume. 
• We perceive sounds with less high frequency content as being further away and vice versa. 
• We perceive louder sounds as being closer and quieter sounds further away.
• Our brain is very sensitive to picking up different kinds of reverb. Use spaces of different sizes to place things in the depth dimension. 
• Many synth patches and sample packs are created very wide to impress the potential buyer. If everything in your mix is wide, it will probably sound pretty weak. Control the width and check if your mix works in mono.
• Think about how all of the sounds in your mix sit together in the stereo image. Are some areas clogged up? Maybe to make your kick and snare come through better, you could create a clean corridor in the middle of the mix for them, for instance. Punch holes in the other elements for the kick and snare to push through, or pan them slightly to the side.
• Watch the phase meter. I recommend using something that shows the correlation by frequency. That allows you to pinpoint where the issues are happening.
• Use safe tools that don’t mess up the mono compatibility.
• Monitor your side channel in isolation from time to time. That can often reveal things you might have missed when listening to the stereo mix.

By imagining and placing sounds dimensionally and thus utilising the available space in full, you can make your music sound more balanced, nuanced and impactful.

The more you push your tools, the more side effects you create. 

Side-effects? 

Yes, off the top of my head:

• Phase shift.
• Pre-ringing.
• Post-ringing.
• Aliasing distortion.
• Intermodulation distortion.
• Increased floor noise.

And that does not include the collateral effects of heavy processing musically affecting things that you’re not actually targeting.

Now, you don’t have to understand what those side effects mean technically. Just know that they exist and the harder you push your tools, the more they come into play.

So what to do when there’s a task that requires heavy lifting?

Rather than pushing individual tools hard, do a little bit of processing at several stages.

This reduces the strain on your tools, fulfilling the task with less side effects.

Example:

I have an old breakbeat I want to bring up to modern standards. To do this, I will first need to do a lot of cleanup to make it easier to work with. Then I’ll focus on the dynamics, tonal balance, saturation, and stereo image. 

To do this, I will use a long chain of plugins.

I might do a little bit of dynamic EQ first, and then a little bit of static EQ on top of that. 

I might apply subtle transient processing from 2-3 different tools, each serving a similar purpose but doing their thing a little bit differently under the hood.

And so on.

Each tool is doing just a little bit of very focused work. But the cumulative effects of this process are night & day. 

This way of working allows you to achieve maximum punch and clarity because it keeps those nasty side effects at bay. 

To see this process in action, you can check out one of my videos in Patreon:

Processing a drum break – Loxy: Exodus (Resound remix).

I believe the best value I can give you is to document my approach straight from the trenches of my day to day work. Sharing my process as it really is, and not holding secrets.

If you have been reading my emails, you know that already. But there’s only so much I can do with emails.

By joining the Producer tier on Patreon, you will immediately unlock an exclusive library of 48 in-depth videos, providing value to people of all levels of experience.

The videos I do are much more comprehensive than your typical tutorials on YouTube.

You’ll also gain access to our private VIP Discord channel, where you can interact with me and other members to discuss the videos and ask questions. I’m there for you every day.

Making music for me is a lot like sculpting.

I start by setting the broad strokes of the project, creating the general shape for the initial idea.

As I move forward, I gradually put more and more attention into the details, chipping away like a sculptor until I’m only focusing on the fine intricacies. 

Do I always succeed?

Of course not.

It’s easy to get distracted by the endless possibilities of the modern DAW environment. 

If I get caught up in the details too soon, it’s often a lost cause. I lose momentum and motivation. 

Game over.

To make the most of my process, I am consciously training myself to manage my attention and focus on the big picture at the start. 

It allows me to stay in the flow more, keep the project moving forward and complete it faster.

I do a lot of mix feedback via Patreon and my mastering service. 

First and foremost, people tend to expect observations about technical mixing and processing. Which is totally relevant of course.

But often the problems I encounter can be traced back to the arrange.

Commonly there is simply too much going on.

The decisions we make with the arrange often affect our mix much more than any technical processing we do.

Some notes:

• Don’t make elements fight for attention and space. Avoid collisions from the get go when possible.
• Fine tune the timing of your elements and how everything plays together. 
• Micro timing and phase – small adjustments in phase can make a big difference in how something sits in a mix.
• The busier the mix, the harder it is to maintain dynamics (and the less loud it can go, if that’s what you want).
• When the mix has contrast and space to breathe, the listener has a better chance to intuitively comprehend what’s going on and take it all in.

In short: 

Arrange in a way that supports the mix. 

Dodge issues by not creating them in the first place.

Then focus on the processing to figure out the rest.