My wife and I lived in London for several years; part of her work meant finding great places to eat, to impress clients. This meant we've eaten at some of the best restaurants in London, and we've also eaten at some amazing places around the world. One such place is Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California. It's a glass box that hangs on the side of a cliff looking out across the Pacific Ocean. The food was almost incidental on that occasion.

With all that said, to have some of the best food I've eaten on my doorstep, namely Yugo in Belfast, is a treat. Some of the Expert team were in town a few weeks ago, so I took them. Before we went, I waxed lyrical about how amazing it is. Julian, our Editor, is a foodie, so I worried that I would overpromise and they would underdeliver. Thankfully, not so. The whole team made the usual positive noises that one tends to make at Yugo and asked many times during the meal, "how did they make this taste so amazing?" A few days later, I made one of my favourite meals; comparing it to Yugo was laughable. It didn't come close.

Earlier this week, I saw a producer friend post on his Facebook wall how he had acquired a new set of monitors and spent time listening to his old mixes on them. "Most mixes SUCK. Including my own. I've always had great speakers to work with, but both of these pairs are SO revealing."

The Problem With Quality

What connects these two events?

It's simple, quality raises our expectations. Furthermore, quality reveals our shortcomings

When I first took delivery of my Kii Three speakers, I was hearing stuff in music I'd listened to for years but had never heard. Worse still, it showed me the flaws in my own mixes. I responded to the Facebook comment, "Try doing that with Kii Three. They ruined 20 years of work for me!!" I got plenty of smiley emojis for that comment, but I was serious.

The desire of many of us in music and post-production is to get better at our craft.

This happens in two ways. First, we invest in equipment and activities that expose our shortcomings; it means being open, as my Facebook friend. To admitting your previous work may not have been as good as you thought it was. Education is also another good place to try. A course like the Mix with the Masters retreats put you in a room with some of the best mixers on the planet, as well as a group of your peers. Going on a course like this takes humility and bravery. You are saying you still have stuff to learn, and there are plenty of other people in the room you can learn from.

We Don’t Need No Education

However, it doesn't necessarily have to be formal education. This leads me to my second point. Learning is an attitude as much as it is a destination or a book. It's a willingness to treat every interaction as a learning experience. It often takes humility. It might mean offering to intern or sit alongside a more experienced person to learn how and why they do the things that have given them a successful career. Not everyone is a Grammy or Emmy winning artist. It might mean spending time with your local studio owner who has built a successful business over many years. Immersing yourself in the culture to see how they managed to do that in what is a hugely unstable business.

When I took up running, I was hugely proud to eventually be able to run 5K. I'd gone from sitting on a sofa and sounding like an asthma patient to losing weight and being able to clock in a sub 25 minute 5K run. I felt like an Olympian.

Then I entered a local Park Run. It's where people meet on a Saturday morning to run 5K together. It's meant to be fun and not competitive. However, get a pile of people in one place to run the same 5K, and the idea of it being non-competitive is a joke. Especially when you all clock your times, and there's a leaderboard posted online.

Suffice to say, what Park Run taught me was that I wasn't the Olympic distance runner I believed myself to be. I think I just managed to make the top 100 of a local race.

Comparisons can be bad, but on the other hand, they can be good. Since running a few Park Runs, I've worked even harder. I'll never beat some of the top athletes, but there is one person I can beat… that's me!

The Right Stuff

Returning to gear. It may not be a pair of studio monitors that make improvement. Conversely, it may be at the other end of the chain. I recall investing in a new microphone, the Sontronics Aria. After plugging it in with the same artist, I could hear the character in the voice I hadn't heard before. It was another moment of considering re-recording older tracks.

There is some truth in the mantra, 'it's not the gear; it's the ears.' I've witnessed this myself when handing one of my Fender Telecasters to guitarist Paul Drew. After listening to what he can do with them then I consider giving up guitar altogether.

However, try reading a book with steamed up glasses. Even a person with excellent eyesight is going to struggle to do that. Or try running 5K in a pair of wellington boots. Both are possible, neither is optimal.

Having the right tools for the job ensure you have a greater chance of doing your best. This is why post houses invest in colour grading monitors. It gives them a greater chance of accurate colour reference.

Invest In Being The Best

Buying gear for the sake of spending money is foolish, but investing in quality equipment, particularly microphones and monitors, is a wise investment. It gives us a fighting chance of getting closer to excellence as it reveals things we couldn't previously hear.

This is why I’m so convinced in the need for mastering engineers. I was impressed by what a top mastering engineer can do to one of my tracks it was just like the restaurant experience. Once I had used one I couldn’t go back.

It would be easy to read this article and think it’s about buying the most expensive thing, it’s not. What I’m saying is expand your horizon, experience a world that is bigger than your current one and then dare to believe you can live in that world.

Exposing ourselves to excellence is dangerous. It challenges our preconceived notions of quality, be that food or sound, it raises the bar for us.

It often means we can’t go back.

It pushes us to do better, which means humbling ourselves to admit that we may not have been as good as we thought we were.

There's no shame in that; only a fool thinks they have nothing left to learn.

Listening to a mix and realising you could have done it better isn't the end; it's the start on the road to becoming even better at your craft.