Just before Christmas last year, for a treat my wife and I took our 5-year-old daughter to the McDonalds Drive Thru for lunch. We were in the middle of the COVID pandemic and all the restaurants were closed, so the queue for the Drive Thru was long.

As we sat waiting in the car, the song Last Christmas by Wham came on the radio. My wife was singing along to it, but my mind was somewhere else. I’d started to wonder if the snare drum on the track was a Linn Drum or a Drumulator – both iconic drum machines used on many records in the 1980s. The question was answered later when I got home, it is a Linn Drum.

Meanwhile, back in the car, my wife asked me what I was thinking about, so I told her. She looked at me as if I was mad.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” I said.

“It’s just a great tune that I love,” came the reply.

Do Other Professionals Do This Too?

The music and post-production industry spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the gear it uses. It talks about the best products and how to use them. There are pages and pages of forum discussions about the very question I was considering. Discussions there often descend into all-out warfare as the keyboard warriors flame one another. It can get very nasty during a discussion about a drum machine or a microphone!

I’ve started to wonder recently if painters do the same thing, or car mechanics, or surgeons? Do they discuss, or worse, argue about the tools they use?

A Question I’ve Never Been Asked

Our agency has made perhaps 500 product promotional videos for clients over the last few years. Clients have loved our work and we are proud of the creativity each one contains. However, I can’t recall a single occasion when a client has asked me what gear we used to produce it.

Most of them don’t know which cameras and lenses we’ve shot the video with. They don’t know if the computer is a Mac or a Windows PC. They don’t know what software we’ve edited it with, or the plugins we’ve used. To be frank, I don’t think they care.

What’s more, the people watching the videos have no idea what gear was used and, again, 99% of them don’t care.

No one buys a single because it has a great snare sound. No one watches a movie because it was shot with a Red Camera. No one hires a painter because of the paint brushes they use, or a mechanic for the toolset they have.

People just want us to fix their problems!

Let’s Remember Why We Do This

Too often, we are so obsessed with how we do our work that we forget why we do it.

I’m convinced that most of the people who spend their day talking shop in these forums can’t be the ones making the money. The people making money are far too busy to spend all day discussing the tools of their trade.

Of course it’s nice to spend time discussing gear, but let’s not forget they are tools to do a job and if we’re not doing the job, then we are wasting both our time and money.

Our job as producers is to help people tell their stories, to give them a voice, to bring their creations to life. Frankly, what we use to do that is of little concern to them - we just need to make the magic happen! In many cases there are thousands of permutations of gear that could be used… it really doesn’t matter.

If you think of the amazing tracks produced in the last 50 years of recording, even the most basic gear offers more quality and features. If it’s a great song, then even the most basic of gear is going to capture it, because, as has been said on numerous occasions, it’s NOT ABOUT THE GEAR STUPID! It’s about the talent and imagination of the person using it.

This article is based on an extract from Russ Hughes’ new book ‘The Book Dad Told Me Not To Write.’ Kindly reproduced with permission.