Brief Summary

Experience is the best investment you can make in your chosen profession, however the experience has to be of good quality. A year of doing the same repetitive work in the same way every time doesn’t carry the same benefit as a single project with a great mentor. Julian is joined by three other contributors to examine the benefits of good quality experience.

Going Deeper

Experience, by its nature is cumulative. The more you do something the more experienced you become but unlike other resources, when you use it it isn’t gone. Unlike money you can ‘spend’ your experience over and over. But it gets better. When you use your experience to do work, you get even more experience. I really wish money worked the same way…

So looking at the return available we should all be chasing experience as hard as we can. However experience, while being necessary isn’t sufficient if you’re looking to get better at what you do. You need to learn from that experience. Just doing something a lot doesn’t necessarily mean you’re learning. There’s an old joke about a teacher who is looking for a new job. His potential employer asks him if he has any experience. He replies that he’s a teacher with 20 years experience. The interviewer replies that he actually has 1 year’s experience 20 times…

That’s the thing about experience, Some of it is just repetition but some of it changes your technique, your practise or even your outlook. Not every minute counts in the same way. What I mean by that is that experience creates learning but not in a linear way. It happens in lumps and bumps and often in an unexpected and unpredictable way.

Unknown Unknowns

A well known quotation from Donald Rumsfeld is pertinent here. Back in 2002 he was widely ridiculed for his ‘unknown unknowns’ speech. What he was trying to communicate was something I know from the ‘Johari Window’, a technique from psychology which draws a useful distinction between the things we know, the things we don’t know and the things we don’t know we don’t know. The language can start to sound comical but it’s an inescapable fact that while we can google the things we are aware of but don’t yet know, occasionally we read something, or speak to someone who makes us aware of things we weren’t aware of at all - the ‘unknown unknowns’.

So how do we put ourselves in the best position to encounter these ‘unknown unknowns’ and broaden our knowledge? An excellent way is through structured learning. While there is an endless amount of free information available online, there is still a great deal to be said for a longer, structured programme of learning. Buy a book or a course online and you’ll be guided through all of a particular process, product or workflow. Importantly, even the dull bits! Most of the information you find online has to attract attention in a very competitive space and as a result many areas or techniques get over-represented because they attract attention, which isn’t quite the same thing as being the most important. Good structured learning will cover an entire subject, not just the crowd-pleasing parts.

Reading Manuals

In the same way, do you read manuals cover to cover or do you use them as reference books? You do read manuals don’t you? Of course a manual is a reference book and there’s nothing wrong with using it like that but if you read the whole thing you’ll encounter things you probably wouldn’t ever look up - ‘Unknown, unknowns’.

I’ve read the Pro Tools Reference Guide cover to cover. Only once but I did it and while there are whole sections which aren’t very relevant to me I’m glad I read them because I have ‘known unknowns’ about Field Recorder Workflows and Video Satellite setups I don’t use, but at least I know they are there.

The best way to get experience and to find out exactly how much you don’t know is to shadow or assist another engineer. We’ve spoken about the importance of the Assistant Engineer role a few times recently on the blog, including Karen Down’s excellent article and the subsequent podcast with some current assistant engineers. Ideally a less experienced engineer assists a veteran but just helping someone else from whom you think you can learn is still valuable. The important thing is to assist. Regardless of what you might do in a given situation, watch and listen as someone else does what they do.

Break Out From Your Peer Group

This process of breaking out from your usual peer group, whether on or offline, is healthy and if you don’t have access to people you can shadow, why not try one the mix breakdowns or start to finish series from providers such as PureMix or Mix With The Masters. You might be surprised at just how much of a top class mix is pretty pedestrian, with just a bit of EQ or compression on most of the mix but really detailed work happening on just a handful of tracks. This is how mixes really are. When I’m in the studio with someone else I’m often struck by just how uneventful it can be, something we should keep in mind for clients… If you were to infer from what get’s posted online you might think that every track in a mix has side-chained dynamic EQ and parallel compression on it. Experience tells us that isn’t the case. 

However, this is experience by proxy. It’s not a substitute for actual physical experience, doing the job while keeping an eye out for opportunities to broaden your experience and you knowledge.

Bringing In The Experience Of Others…

In the spirit of learning from others I asked some contributors to the blog to share their thoughts on the value of experience. First here’s Steve DeMott:

There’s an old saying: “Experience is a poor teacher because it gives the final exam before presenting the lesson material”. It’s funny, but in some ways we all know exactly what that means. We’ve all muddled through some task only to realize, after the fact, there was a better, easier way to do it. We did it the hard way & learned valuable lessons. There is also another quote I often cite: “anyone can learn from their mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others”.

If there is anything I’ve learned that is universally true it’s: Always & Never are lies! Every situation requires a unique approach. And, while that approach may be similar, there is always something different. This is why I balk at the endless stream of “cheat sheets” and tutorial videos. They, invariably, are passing along a one time solution as a universal truth.

I studied Music Production & Engineering at Berklee College of Music and benefitted from the mistakes of those who taught me. Sure, I came in with my own misconceptions based on partial knowledge, and as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I think we can all see that. And that brings me to my point.

We have a generation of engineers who are existing outside the traditional studio mentor/assistant paradigm. They are forced to reinvent the wheel over & over again, simply because they don’t have the benefit of an experienced mentor pointing them in the right direction & calling out pitfalls. Don’t get me wrong. I was trying to figure it out on my own before I headed off to college. I was trying to imitate the sounds around me that inspired me. And I even learned a few things. But, if I encapsulated that knowledge, remove the knowledge based on partial understanding and compared to what I learned at the side of teachers, mentors & more experienced colleagues, that self taught knowledge was very hard fought & not even fully complete. Had I continued on that road, it would have taken me 20 years to learn everything I learned in college.

I’m not saying everyone need to go to college to learn to be an engineer, but you will progress much faster with the help of an experienced teacher. There are still many “trained” engineers in the business & there has never been a better time to access them & their knowledge. The internet has made people more accessible than ever and tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and FaceTime make it so easy to connect over long distances.

Next up is Nathan Cable, an assistant engineer at Strongroom Studios and someone who is lucky enough to be benefitting from assisting experienced engineers:

Like many young producers and engineers I’m very much self taught, so the first time I stepped into a professional studio environment to assist on a big record I used to think I had to know it all. Turns out that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Now I’m the assistant for a seasoned record producer and one of the most valuable things I’ve learnt from them is: when you don’t know how to do something, ask. And that goes both ways. It may sound surprising but the pro’s can end up scratching their heads too. I’ve worked with people I greatly admire, and when they have asked me how to do something - whether in a DAW, piece of hardware or new fandangled plugin - it’s a reminder that humility and curiosity is a big part of growth, and mastering our craft. There’s always something new to learn, and the best in the game - in my opinion - are always learning and asking questions. 

I still read manuals, watch tutorials etc. but without the panic that I need to digest an entire Neve VR manual the night before a recording session as problems always arise, and who’s to say who can fix it - sometimes it’s the pro, and sometimes it's the intern. From my mentors I’ve learnt to be more open and curious and ultimately be less embarrassed about what I don’t know because I’ve seen the big time record producers be stumped too.

Lastly here are some thoughts from London based songwriter, producer & engineer Ashea.

I'm a big believer in structured learning, and although not a huge cover-to-cover manual reader myself, I value the importance of that habit.

I've always needed to know why I'm doing something, so I tend to want to either start at the very beginning, or more often than not, work backwards from where the potential challenge arises.

My journey into the more technical world of audio (perhaps like many producers) began with an artistic desire to get the best sounding record possible, and the trial and error that came with it.

In order to get a great master, you need the mix to be on point, for a pro-sounding mix, the production and sound choices need to be perfectly selected, so, despite being fortunate enough to have soaked in knowledge from many a long studio session with some really talented engineers and producers, I decided to formally study sound engineering and it was one of the best decisions I've made, but of course, experience showed me, there was so much more to continue learning!

Producers who also know about mixing, mastering and proper recording techniques benefit massively because that knowledge helps influence the decisions we make,  e.g designing the sounds that sonically work well together, capturing the best possible vocal takes, mic choice, pre-amp settings etc. Each link in the chain, if not done correctly can cause issues in the mixing stage, but we can only identify those issues if we know what we're listening for. 

I was fortunate enough to learn the art of mixing under Jan Stan Kybert who has an impressive 20 year long career in music, and mastering, from the equally talented Lee Devlin, the knowledge I learned from them has greatly improved my productions over the years. I discovered how mastering (provisionally and to the desired loudness) massively improved my mixing, and also my production choices, because the limiting and compression in mastering can really highlight and change a mix, so it's important to be hearing the most 'final' sound possible. I now provisionally master my tracks as early as possible.

There are also more conceptual reasons to learn outside of your field of expertise. For me, delving into the world of room acoustics helped give me a different perspective on mixing, because I began to visualise, in much more detail, the space I wanted my instruments to occupy, (for example, when choosing  reverb), even down to the type of material on the walls. Where possible, ask to sit in on mixing sessions, watch other producers work, ask the mastering engineer if there is anything that can be improved in the mix, most pros are more than willing to offer up some valuable advice.

Conclusion

Admitting to ourselves, and to others that we don’t know it all is liberating and positive and learning and growth last a lifetime, we never stop. I’m reminded of a great anecdote about Spanish Cellist Pablo Casals who at the age of 95 was still practicing 6 hours a day. When someone asked him why he continued to do it at his great age he responded “Because I think I’m making progress”. I think we can all take something from that.

Photo by Michele Raffoni