It only has to sound good to you

I spent a whole lot of the beginning parts of my producing and mixing career comparing myself to others far more than was healthy. I was thinking about that today, so I just wanted to encourage my people: you don’t have to do that!

It can be very healthy to listen to other people’s work as you’re working, to reset your ears. I’ve talked about that on here before. But when I talk about that, what I mean is just checking for general balances. Does my mix have too little high end / a boxy midrange / too much low end — that sort of thing. Too loud vs too quiet. Ballpark kind of stuff.

What I specifically and absolutely do not mean is to compare your sound to other people’s sound. Because … what if yours is better? What if there are a bunch of people out there who are hungry for what you’re doing, including all of its weirdnesses and idiosyncrasies?

I mentored a friends’ kid a few years ago for a while. His stuff sounded very … “wrong”? Extremely distorted, out-of-control pumping on the master bus compressor, way too loud, resultant limiter distortion, strange EQs. And I mentioned that stuff to him, because he was at a beginning place where it was possible that it was accidental.

But it was intentional! He was very firm about that. So I embraced it, and I shifted my frame to accommodate his point of view, and I sent comments subsequently from that adjusted perspective for the time in which we were having that interaction.

And now he is very famous. It turns out that there were a lot of people out there who were hungry for exactly the strage, “wrong”-sounding thing that he was doing. So it wasn’t really wrong at all, was it?

Do your thing! Be weird. Be yourself. Be different from everyone else. It’s a good way to be.

No wrong way to do art — jamie