Starting over

Apropos of my post from a couple days ago about “Help; my mix is driving me nuts,” our friend Mick sent this reply:

This is when I make myself a cup of tea, have a good, hard lie-down for a bit, listen to some other music (including mixes I have completed and liked), and then casually walk over to my DAW and select the option to Reset All Channels on my mix. I remove all plugins, set everything to zero and START AGAIN.

The next mix is always better.

I have two thoughts.

First: hell yes. This is how you do it! Recognize that there’s an issue, recognize that trying to unwind it might not work, start again. So clean, so simple, so productive.

Second: the subtext here is that Mick has freed himself from a scarcity mindset around his work, and instead replaced it with a spirit of experimentation and play.

I know that, in my personal experience, I have at times been susceptible to a feeling that I have to “see this mix through.” I think it’s some form of the sunk-cost fallacy at work, in which my brain tricks me into thinking that to start over would be to lose something. As though this mix, flawed though it might be, could be the best I have in me.

But that’s fallacious thinking! Of course we have better in us. We always do. We’re always slightly better than we were yesterday.

When you start a mix over, you generally don’t lose anything but problems. You still have all your experience with the song under your belt — a hands-on familiarity with its quirks and idiosyncrasies — and you will bring that experience to bear on the second try. What you won’t bring is all the baked-in technical issues that were surely causing your problems in the first place!

Going backward to go forward much more quickly — jamie