Th elephant in the room: because they have more talent probably.
Perseverance, gear, money, staff etc generally won’t do it alone.
I can do my best to emulate great visual artists, writers etc OR I can do my own thing. Neither are necessarily going to give the results.
When I say talent, this is often just experience but yeah, there are people who are just shit hot at making mix judgements and decisions, whether safe or bold, and they can be good at this from a very early stage.
It’s not simply about having the ears, it can be part producer hat, seeing the bigger picture etc.
Yeah, the old way of thinking is that talent is “inborn”, and while there may be some genetic or personality basis for some of it, it’s been pretty well documented that there are many other factors that help make people successful in their chosen field. Luck, timing, education, “nurture” / support, opportunity, drive, perseverance, vision, social skills / networking, and perhaps most important of all: practicing in effective ways (deep practice). Skill, accuracy, power, fluency.
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There’s the big one. You’ve got to be real lucky with timing now. About as lucky as Gavrilo Princip, that chap who started WWI by knocking out Franz Ferdinand while eating lunch. You’ve got to be the right type of person in the right place at the right time.
I’ve commissioned a plugin that will help with my workflow if it does what I hope it will.
Apparently it’s now ready for testing. I’ve been looking for a plugin with this specific type of function for a couple of years with no luck, so I took the plunge and had someone build it. It’s costing me one million pounds so it better be good…
You guys actually think that saying someone has a bad attitude is bullying? Classic deflection. There was nothing even remotely negative about his original post, yet you insulted him for even contributing to the discussion. Then he justifiably told you if you didn’t really want help then you shouldn’t have asked for it. I’m sure I’m wasting my time with you guys since you’ll just twist our words anyway, you’ve twisted Boz’s, Jonathan’s, and DTJ’s and when they called you out on it you acted like victims. He did contribute to the discussion, and you insulted him for it saying what he said was wrong, and that he was making everything up because he told you what you didn’t want to hear. I guess your opinion is the only correct one.
I will, since I did have constructive comments that you threw back in my face. I’m sorry that you felt attacked. I simply don’t consider it decent behavior to ask for help and then spit at people.
It wouldn’t be so bad, but he clearly didn’t bother reading the full thread, making the decision to go straight for the jugular instead.
If he had read the thread, he would have known that it is not about me complaining that I cannot match commercial releases, it is a discussion about what the real differences are between commercial productions and our own. Check out the thread title.
I have indentified the reasons that my recordings sometimes just fail to make the grade, and I am exploring ways of addressing that. Now if your mate wants to sling shit at me and twist my words to make me look like a self-destructive abject failure, he’s going to have to accept that there will be a challenge to these baseless, and vindictive assertions.
So please, will you and your mate go away and take your offensive posts with you. Make another thread to slag me off if you wish, just stay away from this one.
One thing that really makes a difference is that I now work a lot on my Retina display MacBook Pro. I have a duplicate set of plug-ins on it, and I can take it with me everywhere I go. I carry a great set of headphones with it, the Sennheiser HD600, a set of small powered speakers, the Pelonis Model 42s, and a DAC made by Black Lion, from which the signal goes XLR balanced into my monitors. It’s the perfect setup for mobile mixing.
In fact, I mixed three songs for Alicia Keys completely in my laptop
I feel the same pain too, and I understand where AJ is coming from too. Sometimes it is hard for me to get started on a recording knowing how much time has to go into it to get it into reasonable shape. For someone who is trying to do this professionally, I’m sure you feel like you’re getting buried by the next project as soon as you’ve finished the last one.
Aj, I think of mixing and editing as two separate stages, for the purpose of clarifying the process when I’m working with others.
Automation, half and half. For me there’s basic clean up automation that I think of as part of the editing stage. Then there’s mix automation that is part of the final product. I need other people to do the first part, I must to the second myself.
I find if I’m running low on stamina, I just take a break. But a mix isn’t complete until it’s finished and I’m happy with it. Even if that means moving on to something else and coming back to it tomorrow.
