Brief Summary

At the beginning of an Audio Engineer’s journey it’s natural to want to fill your experience with more and more ‘stuff’. The more experienced might tell you it’s a distraction from what’s really important but however right they might be, you’re going to do it anyway. Julian thinks it’s part of the journey. Do it but recognise it for what it is…

Going Deeper

I suspect we all go through an acquisitive phase early in our journeys through the world of audio and production. I think it's inevitable and healthy, but with experience and perspective I also realise that it can be something of a waste of time. If you don't recognise what I mean by an acquisitive phase I’ll explain.

What I mean is that period at the beginning of your involvement in audio where everything is new, everything is exciting and you’re hoovering up new knowledge so quickly that you perhaps aren't spending as much time as you might evaluating that knowledge before moving on to the next new thing to learn about. It is acquisitive because you are more focused on getting more and more new knowledge, experience and stuff than you are on establishing the value of the new stuff you are acquiring.

I’ve been absolutely as guilty of this as anybody. However my first steps in audio were strictly pre-internet and while I devoured information as quickly as I could find it, there wasn’t the infinite amount of information available that there is today courtesy of the web. It also should be said that a great deal of my knowledge was gained either by word-of-mouth or through print publications. I knew something about the credibility of who was sharing the information I encountered. All opinions online can appear to carry similar weight, something which wasn't really the case years ago.

The other way in which an acquisitive phase can manifest itself is in accumulating gear. In my case there was a definite limiting factor on the gear I could acquire. I was young and penniless and gear was strictly hardware-based. Contrasting that with the situation today, software and particularly plug-ins are freely available, often for free. And of course when talking about people in this acquisitive phase we have to at least reference the fact that software piracy exists. My time teaching music technology students has led to many conversations about why installing cracks isn’t just the wrong thing to do in terms of theft of intellectual property and the security of your own system, but also a bit of a waste of time. Unfortunately I know most of these conversations were also a waste of time…

The desire to acquire (nice rhyme) is strong and for somebody who has been through that stage and come out the other side to tell somebody to resist the desire to learn and try everything as fast as possible is rather futile. With the exception of software piracy, there's nothing actually wrong with giving in to these acquisitive urges. Just because something might be missing the point doesn't mean that it’s harmful.

More Gear

I’m sure all of us have more plugins than we need. Many of us have more gear than we need. As long as we’re not being financially irresponsible the only real issue is that we might be mistaking activity for achievement. A day spent checking out a new bundle of plugins or wiring in a new piece of hardware can only really be described as useful if that new acquisition solves a problem we have and enables us to do more or better work. Ironically for most of us a day spent removing gear or plugins would probably achieve these benefits faster!

However telling a person who has never used a bundle of premium plugins that they don’t need premium plugins is pointless. You have to try these things to get it out of your system. Luckily demos and even subscriptions exist and you don’t have to drop a load of money to find out.

More Knowledge

But this acquisitive phase doesn't only manifest itself in our gear choices. Learning and trying new techniques is something which is just as attractive and also something which the perspective of experience often changes our opinions of. For example consider the more exciting processing techniques and mix ‘tricks’ which receive so much attention online. Because they are more attractive to potential audiences than the day-to-day ‘boring’ techniques which are actually the ones we spend the majority of our time using, somebody with less experience may well interpret their prominence as meaning that they are in someway better or more important. Somebody with experience will recognise them as being interesting problem solvers that get used in those exceptional circumstances when the conventional ‘boring’ techniques don't provide a solution.

The kinds of techniques I'm referring to include things like sidechain compression, mid side EQ, parallel compression, multiband compression, dynamic equalisation, I could go on. While these are all useful techniques and in the right application can achieve things which can't be done in other ways, most of the time the ‘secret’ to getting a professional sounding mix are rather more mundane solutions like good room acoustics and monitoring, careful management and automation of levels and correctly identifying issues in a mix and fixing them using standard tools like utility EQ, filters and restrained use of compression. None of these are exciting or in anyway secret. But their value becomes apparent once you stop acquiring and concentrate on working.

Unrealistic Expectations

A good example comes to mind about how gear choices can be misinterpreted. In my teaching days I remember showing a video in which a Nashville recording engineer recorded a track twice. The first time using various ‘first call’ microphones. Very nice gear including the usual suspects you’d see used in a commercial studio. Many thousands of dollars with of mics. He then recorded it again using nothing but SM57s. The video made its point perfectly in that while the mixes didn't sound the same, they were both good sounding recordings. The difference between the mix using first call mics and the 57s was strikingly small.

The point the video was trying to illustrate was that the important thing in making a recording is having a good band playing well and making appropriate mix decisions to help represent the performance as well as possible. And that using expensive microphones helps but doesn't help as much as you might imagine.

The interesting part about this experience was the conclusion that the room full of students all drew seeing this comparison. What they took from it was about how magical a microphone the SM57 is and that they should all buy SM57s immediately because that was the thing that would elevate their recordings to this next level. This rather missed the point of the video but does illustrate how natural it is to ascribe unrealistic expectations to gear or techniques that you have heard about but haven't experienced.

The Experienced Need To Stay Curious

We all have to go through the acquisitive stage to understand why it’s not the same thing as deeper, useful knowledge, but at the same time the more experienced amongst us shouldn’t let the wisdom that a longer perspective can bring dull our curiosity. Like so many things the truth lies somewhere between the extremes.