Knowing when to stop is half the job

Yesterday I wrote a bit about how one’s engineering skills can evolve. And how eventually, if you keep at it, you can get to to a point where you can control literally every single aspect of every single moment of sound in whatever song you’re working on.

So here’s the corollary: just because you can doesn’t always mean that you should!

If I’m going to mess up on a song these days, it’s always going to be from over-tweaking. Taking something that was at 100% and doing an extra 10% to it, thinking I’m correcting small errors, when actually what I’m doing is sanding off all the little moments that made it interesting.

Because here’s the thing about trying to go that extra 10%: a song’s ceiling can be like a mirror, and that extra 10% can head you back down in the wrong direction, leaving you at more like 90% than 110%.

Here’s a good failsafe: any time you get to a point where you realize that you’re playing your song all the way through and it’s sounding great to you, duplicate the session file and name it with the date and time. I revert to these backups after going too far more frequently than you might imagine!

I think that’s part of getting good at your discipline — learning how to build systemic breakers into your work, so that you can escape back to a “known good” place when you get yourself into trouble. Because you will definitely get yourself into trouble! I don’t think that changes. I just think we get better at contingency planning.

This is the “great responsibility” part — jamie