Is Mix Tip YouTube Sabotaging Your Potential?

I'm just going to say it. You don't need any more mixtapes. Nobody needs any

more mixtapes. Don't. Cl. Don't. Hey, do not click that mixtape.

What's up, y'all? Welcome back to Progressions. My name is Travis Farance. I'm an engineer

and mixer based here in Los angeles with nearly 20 years of experience. Got

some Grammy noms and number ones and all that accolade bs. But what's important to

know for this video is I'm kind of old, like almost pre

Internet old. And why that's important is that I learned to

do this job before mixtape, YouTube and before social

media. The access to information that is available today is

amazing and should be empowering to all of us to learn

basically everything. But there's one problem, actually,

let's not call it a problem, let's call it a feature. There's one feature of

this current era and I think we all need to be aware of so that

it doesn't hold us back. So when I came to LA, it was 2006. I

still bought CDs. The Internet was for shreds videos and

social media was in its infancy. I think you still needed a college email to

be on Facebook. So if you wanted to be a recording engineer, you basically had

two choices. Go get a job in a studio or go to an audio

school and then go get a job in a studio where you relearn everything you

just paid to learn. So outside of some industry magazines like Sound

on Sound, Mix or Tape, up there just wasn't a lot of access

to knowledge about the craft without working in a studio and learning it from a

person who learned it from another person who learned it from another person. I was

fortunate in that I started my career at the legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood. The

people that I was learning from were some of the best that ever sat behind

a recording console. I'll never forget the first time I walked into Studio A while

a session was going. It blew my mind what it sounded like. It

sounded like what I thought was a final mix, but it was just the

band live off the floor during tracking and watching those

guys and listening to what they were doing. Those were my mix tips.

It's not actually that different from watching some tutorials on YouTube. I would just be

off in the corner watching how the session went down, the same way that you're

watching a video right now. The difference was that there was no voiceover describing

the process or, you know, zoom ins on the computer screen or anything like that.

But in some ways it was better, right, because you had to listen to try

to understand why people were making the choices that they were making. Then after

the session, if it felt appropriate, you could ask a few questions to the engineer,

producer, look at the racks to see what kind of compression was going on, check

out the EQ on the console, go in the live room, see where the mics

ended up, and then you go home. And it's what happened when you got

home. That's the big difference between when I started and today.

Once I got home, there was no content to watch. Sure,

there were some blogs and books, but really what you did when you went home

was you opened up whatever daw you had and you just messed

around, which wasn't always that exciting if you didn't have anything fun

to play with, right? So we just never went home. We'd stay at the

studio and play with gear all night. Everybody I knew

in town who worked at a studio was always at that studio, whether

you were getting paid or not. Because if you weren't at the studio,

you probably weren't learning anything new. So you'd just

always be there because you knew one day you would get thrown

into the hot seat and have to put into practice everything that you'd just been

watching up until that point. There's a great story about Jimmy Iovine, who is probably

best known at this point as the Interscope Records label head who started

Beats with Dr. Dre, which they ultimately sold to Apple

for $3 billion. But in the 1970s, he was just a young

assistant engineer at Record Plant in New York, and he got a huge

break when he was called in last minute on Easter Sunday to

engineer because nobody else was available. He showed up at

the studio to find out that the artist he was recording was John Lennon.

And successfully making it through that session while also leaving an impression on

John, would set him on the course to work with everybody from Springsteen to

U2. And that's a super common story on how so many engineers and

producers got their start. They were suddenly thrust into a

situation that mattered and had to go from observing and

learning to doing. And usually at a very

high level. Studio managers generally have a great read on who's

ready and who isn't. And the good ones, they'll push

those into a situation where they know that they can grow. So if you're asking

yourself what this has to do with mixtapes, that's fair.

There's been a lot of setup here. The point I'm getting to is that

today there is so much information that it's actually

overwhelming how much you can learn. You can go deep down the

rabbit hole and learn about how this person mixes vocals versus how that person

mixes vocals. How this plugin compares to that plugin compares

to the analog version. You can go on and on

constantly learning, but never doing. And that's the

stark difference between the pre Internet era and today.

Twenty plus years ago, there was a ceiling to how much you could learn

without doing it. Now you can learn

infinitely. But learning is not the same as doing.

Earlier, I made a subtle comment about going to audio school and then

relearning everything when you started in the studio. I believe that

education, formal or not, is teaching you the foundational

skills you need to go out into the real world and follow what

is being done. You learn the basics so you can see a session in

real life or on a video and digest why people are

making choices. Not ask what are they doing?

Mixtape. YouTube is giving you the what and the how, which

is important. But the why is going to be

unique to each of us. And the only way to really learn that

is to do it yourself. Example, slamming the input to a piece

of equipment to distort it. That's the what you're doing and how

you're doing it. But why you're doing it is your choice. Maybe

it's because you like the tone of it. Maybe it's because it brings out an

emotion in the part. Now let's go back to that assistant thrown into a

session situation. There's an important thing that happens when you're pushed beyond

your comfort zone and you pass the test. Confidence.

And this is something that the Internet cannot give you. In fact, this is where

the access to information actually works against us. Think about this.

How many times have you been working on music and thought, I wonder how

insert hit producer name here does this? And don't

say that you haven't. I have. I've been doing this for 20 years and I

will stop mid mix to check out how some great engineer does the same thing

that I'm doing. And it's because knowing that we can makes us want

to validate what we're doing. We don't always have total confidence in the things that

we're doing inside our vacuum. Most of us are working alone.

This wasn't the case 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Engineers did things and everybody

in the room liked it or they didn't. There was immediate

feedback to whether you were on the right path. And the more positive feedback you

got, the more Confident you became in your skills. A lot of us don't have

that anymore. So many people are writing, recording and mixing their own music, which

is amazing. But the more isolated you are in that

process, the more likely you are to turn to the Internet to see

whether you're doing the right thing, completely ignoring the fact that there

is no right thing. This is why it's important to find your version of assistant

thrown into a session. Right? You have got to balance the ability to constantly learn

and better yourself with taking action. Nothing will make you

better than doing the thing. So to go all the way

back to the beginning, this feature of mixtape YouTube that I

mentioned earlier that we need to be aware of so that it doesn't hold us

back. It's the same feature that makes it amazing,

the free and essentially unlimited amount of it. Now, it's

hard to think that learning as much as you can about something isn't a

good idea. But if you are using that learning to avoid doing because

of a fear of failure or a lack of confidence, then in

fact learning is actually holding you back. No amount of

learning will take away your fear. The only way to do that is to dive

in and put yourself in situations to test yourself. This is a

disadvantage of the Internet information age. It doesn't force you to test

yourself the way that that older apprenticeship or mentorship model

would. Which is why it's super important to recognize when you are

avoiding taking a step outside your comfort zone. And I tell you this because

I am fully guilty of this myself. I am no better than anyone else at

these things. I may not do this in my audio career anymore. When it comes

to the podcast or YouTube, the creator side of my life, I have done

this way too many times. The things I am doing right now are the things

I should have done three years ago. So I encourage you

to take a look at your life and see if there is anywhere that you

are using learning to avoid doing. So if I've convinced

you to step away from Mixtape YouTube for a bit and you want some rapid

fire non technical advice, check out this episode where

I share everything I've learned over the last 18 years about how to build a

successful career in the recording industry.