I'm just going to say it. You don't need any more mixtapes. Nobody needs any
more mixtapes. Don't. Cl. Don't. Hey, do not click that mixtape.
What's up, y'all? Welcome back to Progressions. My name is Travis Farance. I'm an engineer
and mixer based here in Los angeles with nearly 20 years of experience. Got
some Grammy noms and number ones and all that accolade bs. But what's important to
know for this video is I'm kind of old, like almost pre
Internet old. And why that's important is that I learned to
do this job before mixtape, YouTube and before social
media. The access to information that is available today is
amazing and should be empowering to all of us to learn
basically everything. But there's one problem, actually,
let's not call it a problem, let's call it a feature. There's one feature of
this current era and I think we all need to be aware of so that
it doesn't hold us back. So when I came to LA, it was 2006. I
still bought CDs. The Internet was for shreds videos and
social media was in its infancy. I think you still needed a college email to
be on Facebook. So if you wanted to be a recording engineer, you basically had
two choices. Go get a job in a studio or go to an audio
school and then go get a job in a studio where you relearn everything you
just paid to learn. So outside of some industry magazines like Sound
on Sound, Mix or Tape, up there just wasn't a lot of access
to knowledge about the craft without working in a studio and learning it from a
person who learned it from another person who learned it from another person. I was
fortunate in that I started my career at the legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood. The
people that I was learning from were some of the best that ever sat behind
a recording console. I'll never forget the first time I walked into Studio A while
a session was going. It blew my mind what it sounded like. It
sounded like what I thought was a final mix, but it was just the
band live off the floor during tracking and watching those
guys and listening to what they were doing. Those were my mix tips.
It's not actually that different from watching some tutorials on YouTube. I would just be
off in the corner watching how the session went down, the same way that you're
watching a video right now. The difference was that there was no voiceover describing
the process or, you know, zoom ins on the computer screen or anything like that.
But in some ways it was better, right, because you had to listen to try
to understand why people were making the choices that they were making. Then after
the session, if it felt appropriate, you could ask a few questions to the engineer,
producer, look at the racks to see what kind of compression was going on, check
out the EQ on the console, go in the live room, see where the mics
ended up, and then you go home. And it's what happened when you got
home. That's the big difference between when I started and today.
Once I got home, there was no content to watch. Sure,
there were some blogs and books, but really what you did when you went home
was you opened up whatever daw you had and you just messed
around, which wasn't always that exciting if you didn't have anything fun
to play with, right? So we just never went home. We'd stay at the
studio and play with gear all night. Everybody I knew
in town who worked at a studio was always at that studio, whether
you were getting paid or not. Because if you weren't at the studio,
you probably weren't learning anything new. So you'd just
always be there because you knew one day you would get thrown
into the hot seat and have to put into practice everything that you'd just been
watching up until that point. There's a great story about Jimmy Iovine, who is probably
best known at this point as the Interscope Records label head who started
Beats with Dr. Dre, which they ultimately sold to Apple
for $3 billion. But in the 1970s, he was just a young
assistant engineer at Record Plant in New York, and he got a huge
break when he was called in last minute on Easter Sunday to
engineer because nobody else was available. He showed up at
the studio to find out that the artist he was recording was John Lennon.
And successfully making it through that session while also leaving an impression on
John, would set him on the course to work with everybody from Springsteen to
U2. And that's a super common story on how so many engineers and
producers got their start. They were suddenly thrust into a
situation that mattered and had to go from observing and
learning to doing. And usually at a very
high level. Studio managers generally have a great read on who's
ready and who isn't. And the good ones, they'll push
those into a situation where they know that they can grow. So if you're asking
yourself what this has to do with mixtapes, that's fair.
There's been a lot of setup here. The point I'm getting to is that
today there is so much information that it's actually
overwhelming how much you can learn. You can go deep down the
rabbit hole and learn about how this person mixes vocals versus how that person
mixes vocals. How this plugin compares to that plugin compares
to the analog version. You can go on and on
constantly learning, but never doing. And that's the
stark difference between the pre Internet era and today.
Twenty plus years ago, there was a ceiling to how much you could learn
without doing it. Now you can learn
infinitely. But learning is not the same as doing.
Earlier, I made a subtle comment about going to audio school and then
relearning everything when you started in the studio. I believe that
education, formal or not, is teaching you the foundational
skills you need to go out into the real world and follow what
is being done. You learn the basics so you can see a session in
real life or on a video and digest why people are
making choices. Not ask what are they doing?
Mixtape. YouTube is giving you the what and the how, which
is important. But the why is going to be
unique to each of us. And the only way to really learn that
is to do it yourself. Example, slamming the input to a piece
of equipment to distort it. That's the what you're doing and how
you're doing it. But why you're doing it is your choice. Maybe
it's because you like the tone of it. Maybe it's because it brings out an
emotion in the part. Now let's go back to that assistant thrown into a
session situation. There's an important thing that happens when you're pushed beyond
your comfort zone and you pass the test. Confidence.
And this is something that the Internet cannot give you. In fact, this is where
the access to information actually works against us. Think about this.
How many times have you been working on music and thought, I wonder how
insert hit producer name here does this? And don't
say that you haven't. I have. I've been doing this for 20 years and I
will stop mid mix to check out how some great engineer does the same thing
that I'm doing. And it's because knowing that we can makes us want
to validate what we're doing. We don't always have total confidence in the things that
we're doing inside our vacuum. Most of us are working alone.
This wasn't the case 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Engineers did things and everybody
in the room liked it or they didn't. There was immediate
feedback to whether you were on the right path. And the more positive feedback you
got, the more Confident you became in your skills. A lot of us don't have
that anymore. So many people are writing, recording and mixing their own music, which
is amazing. But the more isolated you are in that
process, the more likely you are to turn to the Internet to see
whether you're doing the right thing, completely ignoring the fact that there
is no right thing. This is why it's important to find your version of assistant
thrown into a session. Right? You have got to balance the ability to constantly learn
and better yourself with taking action. Nothing will make you
better than doing the thing. So to go all the way
back to the beginning, this feature of mixtape YouTube that I
mentioned earlier that we need to be aware of so that it doesn't hold us
back. It's the same feature that makes it amazing,
the free and essentially unlimited amount of it. Now, it's
hard to think that learning as much as you can about something isn't a
good idea. But if you are using that learning to avoid doing because
of a fear of failure or a lack of confidence, then in
fact learning is actually holding you back. No amount of
learning will take away your fear. The only way to do that is to dive
in and put yourself in situations to test yourself. This is a
disadvantage of the Internet information age. It doesn't force you to test
yourself the way that that older apprenticeship or mentorship model
would. Which is why it's super important to recognize when you are
avoiding taking a step outside your comfort zone. And I tell you this because
I am fully guilty of this myself. I am no better than anyone else at
these things. I may not do this in my audio career anymore. When it comes
to the podcast or YouTube, the creator side of my life, I have done
this way too many times. The things I am doing right now are the things
I should have done three years ago. So I encourage you
to take a look at your life and see if there is anywhere that you
are using learning to avoid doing. So if I've convinced
you to step away from Mixtape YouTube for a bit and you want some rapid
fire non technical advice, check out this episode where
I share everything I've learned over the last 18 years about how to build a
successful career in the recording industry.