We're all just making this up as we go

I was talking today with the person who could be described as my first mentor. It wasn’t an explicit mentorship relationship, but I made a lot of records with this guy in my twenties, and he was extremely tolerant of my innumerable questions.

Asking Justin questions did a couple of key things for me. One, it showed me that engineering wasn’t magic or a god-given talent — it was something you could learn.

And, two, it demonstrated that you didn’t have to have all the answers, or even most or many of the answers, to jump in and do this work.

When I first started working with Justin, he was mostly a recording and mix engineer, but he was just starting to dip his toes into mastering. He wasn’t doing what I would call hi-fi mastering at that time, either — he was mostly using circa-1997 plugins, which were amazing at the time but pretty crap compared to where we’re at 25 years later. I don’t even know if he had any strictly mastering-grade hardware, either; I distinctly remember him putting the mixes through the same EQ he’d been using for a bunch of other things, and I don’t remember it being a mastering-specific unit.

Point being, he was using the tools he had at the time, and he was doing the best he could with them. And it was great! We made records together that I was super proud of at the time!

These days Justin is actually a full-time mastering engineer, and his mastering practice has evolved leaps and bounds, and he can attract a higher-end clientele. But the high end isn’t the only place there are a bunch of people hungry to make art. Honestly, the people at the low end are generally hungrier; they’re usually the ones with more of something to prove.

The fact that Justin could just decide that he could master records was a key insight for young me. It’s what gave me the confidence to start mastering my own stuff back in 2014.

Like Justin, I started with what I had and did the best I could. What I lacked in gear I made up for with time spent and attention to detail. Like Justin’s, my early mastering efforts aren’t super hi-fi, but they’re cohesive and emotionally involving listening experiences.

And, like Justin, I took to mastering, and I started buying mastering-specific gear, and I kept reading and learning. And nine years later I’m much better at it than I was and I’m attracting increasingly better work.

We’re all just making this up as we go. Every one of us. And anyone who says they aren’t is either ego-bullshitting or has made a commitment to stop learning. And neither of those is a good thing in my view.

Learn, apply, repeat. Make art, release it, repeat. Keep growing and evolving. That’s all there is. How lovely.

Always moving forward — jamie