It happens a lot. I go to YouTube after clicking on a video link and before I know it I’ve gone down the rabbit hole as I click on another link with a title that looks interesting. Perhaps you do the same.

On this occasion it was “5 Pro Secrets For Studio One Users.” Interesting, I thought. I know Studio One really well, but only the fool stops learning, I thought, so I clicked.

What I found in the video were neither pro or secret but things anyone can learn by reading the manual. Really? I thought, how in any world could this video tutorial creator describe the contents as either ‘pro’ or ‘secret’. Of course he did avoid the somewhat ubiquitous term hack!

If someone tells me that in order to use a microwave I need to plug it into a power outlet first, that’s not a hack, that’s simply telling how the thing is supposed to work. If they showed me how to use the microwave without plugging it in, then that would be a hack, and a pro one at that.

It seems in a desire to get our attention, a number of terms have been misappropriated, here’s two.

Hacks

Hack is a term that was derived from the world of computer coding. First attributed to Jackson W. Granholm in 1962. According to wikipedia “The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989), cites Jackson W. Granholm's 1962 "How to Design a Kludge" article in the American computer magazine Datamation.[1]”

Yes, the term was first coined as a ‘kludge’ and described how certain problems, or bugs, could have a workaround to deal with them.

Of course, in modern language the term hack seems to loosely apply to anything that might be a tip or trick. However, if you are telling someone to do something in a DAW, with a plugin, or indeed with any piece of studio hardware that it was designed to do then that’s not a hack, that’s simply a tutorial.

A better example of a hack, if you want to use that term, is when Easter Eggs are discovered in software and hardware. For example the Hidden Asteroids Game In Pro Tools Ultimate? Did You Know It Was There?

Hacks, can also apply to hardware, but in most cases are often modifications of a unit to get it to either perform better or to do something it wasn’t designed to do.

Tricks

Another term that is thrown around loosely is the term ‘trick.’ You’ll see videos and posts offering recording, mixing or mastering tricks. Often they are none of the sort.

In his article “Are We Being Conned By Mixing Tricks? We Look At The Most Popular Ones” Julian Rodgers said;

“Some people refer to “mixing tricks” but are they really tricks? When is a technique just a technique? Julian looks at some common examples and decides. Some people are going to disagree, that’s fine. Some people are going to think I’m being pedantic or splitting hairs, again totally fine with that, but for me some of the things being enthusiastically described as “tricks” are nothing of the sort. They are simply using equipment for its intended purpose. For something to be a trick, for me it has to involve using a tool in a new way, other than that intended by the designer.

Here are six production “tricks”, along with my thoughts on whether or not they deserve that name. Some do but not all of them. One thing I definitely think is that they are all great techniques, but tricks?… check out his list.

The Most Important Pro Audio Tip Worth Knowing

So given that there’s so many people claiming to offer hacks and tricks, what is the most important pro audio tip worth knowing? It’s simple… READ THE F*CKING MANUAL.

It often seems in life that people end up doing a job for no other reason than there the only person in the room able to do it. I got into this industry in the early 80s as a synth, MIDI, and sampler programmer. My only qualification was that I read user manuals, in fact it would be more accurate to say I devoured user manuals. I’d read them on the bus, on the toilet, I’d stay up late at night reading them instead of novels.

That often meant that when it came to knowing how all the stuff worked, I was the person in the room that had figured it out. I hadn’t gone to a better school, college or got a qualification that put a bunch of letters after my name, I was just often the only person who had read the user manual.

For example, in the early days of MIDI hardware, to do some clever connectivity between MIDI devices was hard. Yamaha came up with a box called the MEP4 MIDI Processor. It did things that you can do in a DAW in seconds now. However, this box was a rabbit hole, it did MIDI mapping but required some coding to figure it out. Here’s the user manual to show just how hard it was compared to modern MIDI.

However, even though I’d left school with almost zero qualifications, which was more to do with me not liking school than my aptitude, I read the manual from cover to cover then sat down and figured it out.

A little later we got a call from the band T Pau, who were charting at the time with songs like ‘China In Your Hand.’ They needed some help with using tech on their tour. The next thing I knew I was sat in a rehearsal room using an MEP4 to convert the triggers from Simmons drum pads to an Akai S900 to trigger backing vocals. This kind of work became regular for me and soon I was working with all sorts of chart acts helping them to deal with technical issues, or programming patches in their synths to match the album they had recorded in the studio.

I wasn’t anyone special, I was just the guy who read the manual.

What I did wasn’t a hack or a trick, it was the outcome of doing what so many of us avoid, reading the manual. I suppose in one sense I should be thankful, people not reading the manual meant I was kept in work programming and offering technical support.

40 Years Later

40 years later and not a lot has changed. There’s still plenty of us only scratching the surface of the gear we own because we fail to read the manual. I’m convinced that people would spend far less money buying more gear if they understood the full potential of things they already have. I recall buying a special brush to clean up the dog hairs from our lounge rug, a brush I’d discovered on a pet site, described as a hack. Then I realised that if I used the correct vacuum cleaner attachment then I’d not have needed to buy it in the first place.

This is not a new problem and we’re all prone, or too busy to step back and really learn our stuff. Funnily enough, whoever wrote the Ensoniq Mirage manual in 1984 knew that, it opens with; “If you're like most of us, you've probably already hooked up your Mirage and reached some level of limited success in making it work. This manual is a simple and straightforward presentation of the Mirage that will take you to an intermediate level of sophistication.”

How did I even know that first paragraph existed? I read the manual!

BTW, the image used for this article was a little bit of fun. After all, it seems to get attention these days I need to create an image that looks like I’ve got a hot poker shoved up my ass, along with some garish text displaying the claim of a hack or a trick… I hope it worked. 😉