If you want to improve as an engineer or producer, there’s a good chance that, much like me, you want to learn everything you can about it. Every new piece of information deepens your understanding and builds your excitement for the work you do.
For me, I found this to be super addictive. Each time I got a grasp on a core concept, it led to a clearer understanding of the bigger picture of mixing and producing. It made me feel like I could truly start wielding what I was learning without really thinking about it. That’s, after all, what we’re aiming for: understanding enough to be effective while also having the capacity to flow creatively because we’re not thinking about processes that used to take up so much mental bandwidth.
When I first realized this, it felt like a cheat code.
I saw it as “the more knowledge you stack, the better you’ll be at this.” So that’s what I did, but, just like most things, there was a point of diminishing returns. There came a point when I felt the technical side was starting to get in the way of my decision-making.
It started slowing me down, causing me to overthink and pay attention to details that didn’t matter. One time, I started producing a track and got distracted because the snare wasn’t hitting the way I wanted it to. Thirty minutes passed, and I caught myself tweaking over and over until I got frustrated enough to look for another sample. In four clicks through my library, I found one that did the job and realized I’d wasted all that time and mental energy because I was stuck zoomed in. Up to this point, I’d heard of the Pareto principle, but this was the first time I noticed the pattern in my own work.
Pareto’s principle describes an established pattern in which a small share of decisions and choices drives a large percentage of the outcomes. It’s nicknamed the 80/20 rule, but in reality, the ratio varies. Sometimes it’s closer to 90/10 or 70/30, but there’s always a tendency for a few factors to drive the results.
And this is where it all started to click. I realized that there were only a few core moves responsible for making a track sound solid and professional, and the endless tweaking on the snare was me struggling with the other 80%. Worse, I didn’t know how to identify the most potent information, much less how to connect those core ideas. In the waves of information I was consuming, only a small percentage was actually helping me establish good principles.
It was clear that the core foundations were what sped up my progress and made the difference in the final export. I could see more of the bigger picture when it came to mixing and producing, which helped me be effective without slowing me down with the technical stuff. I think if more producers and engineers knew how to identify the most potent information worth learning, they could make progress toward their goals and win back some of their time each session.
Whether you’re entirely new to engineering or have been doing this for a long time, this trap catches people at every stage. At the end of the day, time is our most valuable asset, so I wanted to write this edition of Sound Advice with the intention of helping you move past this with three solid tips.
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1️⃣ Tip 1: Start with what you want to be making.
I believe that the thing that makes this whole process easier is having clarity on what exactly it is that you’re wanting to create.
What type of music do you want to be working on?
What’s your primary focus, producing, mixing or mastering?
Once you have a little bit better idea of that, you start to focus on what’s relevant to the work you want to be doing. The flood of information shrinks as you home in on that potent 20%. The more you can define what that end result sounds like, the more easily you can reverse engineer the processes and really start to notice the pattern of what drives most of the results in your focus.
A bass music producer’s 20% would look much different from an orchestral producer’s. For example, a bass music producer’s most potent information might revolve around sound design, bass mixing and processing, and mastering targets for really loud but dynamic music, while an orchestral producer may focus on composition and songwriting, recording techniques, and MIDI articulations, with an emphasis on more natural, transparent processing techniques. Although some underlying principles, like frequency balance and dynamics, apply to both genres, each has its own focus and potent techniques and information.
Write down some of that information and spend more time with those core concepts tied to your specific work.
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2️⃣ Tip 2: The listener test.
Before you go deep on a new technique, ask yourself, “Would the average listener (a non-engineer) be able to hear the difference?”
This helps prevent you from getting locked into the details by putting yourself in the listener’s shoes. If I had used this tip when I was tweaking that snare for 30 minutes, it would have helped me see the bigger picture. Instead of over-processing a sample that was never going to work, I could have picked a better one from the start.
The average listener tends to notice overall balance issues, vocal levels, and the overall tone, all the things that contribute to the bigger picture, energy, and emotion of the song.
Focus there first.
What other engineers can hear can wait until later in the process.
Non-engineers agree with audio pros about what sounds better, but they hear far less detail than people who train their ears regularly and work in audio. Even though they hear less detail, I’d argue that the listener’s perspective is really important because they’re the ones listening to and interpreting the music.
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3️⃣ Tip 3: Follow what keeps showing up.
Some ideas recur across many genres because they’re core concepts. Keep your ears open for concepts that keep coming up. Even though frequency and dynamic balance differ between the genres I mentioned earlier, the underlying concept of balance applies to both; it just means slightly different things in each.
Ideas that keep coming back across sessions, teachers, and genres are the vital few. One-off tips and tricks are usually polish that pushes a project from 80% to 100%. Important, but not vital. Take note of recurring ideas and concepts, and focus more of your study time on them. By doing this, you’ll start to see the patterns and core principles that tie everything together when creating a high-quality song.
When I started to understand how this made the process easier, I realized that stacking information was never the problem. It was that I couldn’t identify those core principles and, as a result, couldn’t spend more time focusing on them.
I found that instead of overindulging in information, I try to nail down the foundational concepts first until they run without me thinking too much about them. Then, stacking the next layer becomes much easier and comes more naturally because I already know the baseline information.
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You can still stay hungry on your quest to learn all there is about your craft, but now you have a few lenses to look through. I hope this helps you understand that a few things are really moving the needle for you. The sooner you identify those things and focus more time on them, the more time you’ll have in the studio, the less overwhelmed you’ll feel when creating, and the faster you’ll progress toward your goals.
