Hey! You ever have life synchronize in ways you really can’t deny? Like, legit magic?
A few weeks ago I heard a self-helpish “start where you are…start with what you have”, and tried it out.
I think it fairly instantly shifted my focus from the swarming huge cloud of “lack”, and “needing to be done” to more concrete attention on the simple next steps to build on my foundation.
First I realized there was way more “done” than I kept in my awareness.
For example, when I sat down at my desk to get back into the “business” of my music I had neglected for far too long, I found an entire project completed that was still on my todo list.
I mean, a nice project - beautiful spreadsheets on my Mac and a 3 ring binder with printed out forms…that I had completely forgotten I already did.
I think there is something about starting with what I have, what is done, and going back to fill in the blanks to make the goals manifest, that makes sense now.
Like instead of mentally starting from a deficit needing to be filled in, I look at the anchors of mastery already holding firm.
That moved me from the overwhelm of “how will I ever get all this done to get there?” to “just take the next right step” on top of a much more clear foundation.
So, the synchronicity….
As I’m dabbling in this new sense of working with the mastery I already have, I came across an opportunity for mastering mastering. Ha!
In music production, the final work is called a “master”, and special engineers do the “mastering” - somehow giving a tune shiny special secret sauce to make it “pro”.
In my years of learning this process, mastering has seemed like this dark arts highly technical aspect I would never even think of trying to “master”. Like the highest end of the engineering spectrum, never attainable.
When I started learning music production, I worked with folks in NYC and Nashville. Super slow going, painfully poor products, and mastery of anything felt out of reach. Early 2020 I jumped into a group based in London with a comprehensive program I thought sure to make me the producer I wanted to be.
The program was intense, and abruptly abandoned after a few months due to the COVID-crazy shift in focus to home, family, community. No regrets.
When I picked up the threads here and there, it was overwhelming to try to reorient…and so the work got dustier until late this Spring.
In chunks, over the last year since the move, I ninja-worked in music, mostly giving effort to performance practice, and live gigs.
I finished 4 of 7 modules in the production program, before the drop…and last month started seeing emails from the group promoting a new approach - completely reversing the way music production flows, by starting with the “finished product”.
Since I was already way behind in the “let’s be a producer” game, learning to master seemed ridiculous.
So initially I deleted those emails…until I didn’t.
On a whim, I listened in on a video describing why a new approach, starting with focus on mastering, then mixing, then recording, etc. would level up a music producer.
Instantly, I got it.
If these guys were legit, and could teach me the magic of mastering, even the rudimentary aspects of the process, I would know what I don’t know.
Literally the biggest stumbling block for me in music production - the second-guessing, self doubt of not knowing what I don’t know.
I think it comes from the whole doctor thing, exhaustively studying to “know” everything I could about the body, disease, conventional medical diagnosis and treatment….
Not going to “school” for music production left me feeling like there were gaps in my knowledge base that I had no way of knowing how to fill, without a “curriculum”.
Mastery of piano and vocals for me started as a similar frustration before I came across Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery approach. Similar in concept, one part of his focus is on the freedom to attempt a “finished” passage of music, and work backwards as needed to get the moves in the fingers until the music plays itself.
So, I started to get excited.
This “reverse engineering” process of music production could take me farther than I had imagined myself capable. If I could master my own music, I could release without relying on outsourcing the work - seriously ramping up my ability to get music out in the world.
Even if not perfect, as an indie musician with a huge backlog of songs waiting for recording and production, I decided this year to take the plunge and start releasing music anyway.
I’ll learn as I go, and get better with time, I told myself.
I don’t think mastery of anything is ever a finished project - medicine has taught me that. Always more to learn, nuance to lean into, intuition that grows with years of repetition with the basic tools.
So, the intuition I now have with piano and my voice, that I wanted with music production, would require practice - time - and I was ready to start mastering mastering.
The funny thing is, when I threw myself into the new program, for the first time I took a different approach to the way in which I did the whole “education” thing.
Like the “done is better than perfect” mentality that led to my releasing music (What A Wonderful World and Desperado covers sat on the shelf for over a year waiting for me to fix them…they weren’t “perfect” yet), I jumped in to the program and did the work without agonizing over perfection.
Actually had little clue what I was doing mastering my first few songs, but kept on track, doing the work.
And saw immediately the beautiful logic of “reverse engineering” the process, because I now understood what the final goal of “mixing” production was “supposed” to be.
There are no words for how I feel about the enormous energy wasted in the process of production before now.
Except to say that the contrast in how effective I can be in arranging, recording, mixing and mastering music blows my mind now.
I’ll give you an example:
As a songwriter, usually the lyrics come first to me, with a sense of rhythm and start of a melody. I’ll sit at the piano to flesh out the chords, and over time - coming back to the piano and the song over and over again - the shape of the “arrangement” comes to solid form.
That means how I want to start the song - the intro - and move through the music in a way that tells a story, with an arc of emotion.
Then, to make the song a recorded and produced work to release, requires playing the piano part on a keyboard attached to my computer, and capturing it in my DAW (digital audio workstation). Recording vocals. Adding the instrument sounds electronically to “arrange” the music into a full piece of music - drums, bass, strings, whatever I want the song to sound like…what I’m hearing in my head.
Once the arrangement and “recording” is complete, the next step is cleaning everything up to fit together perfectly, which entails using processing to shape the sounds to not overlap in frequency, or spatially (panning more left or right). Balancing the volume, using compression to control the volume even more.
This “mixing” of the music often includes special tools to affect the tone of a sound, or the “space” around the sound, or the timing - repeats, delays.
When I get to a final mix, I can send it to a mastering engineer to finish.
Here’s the thing though: if the mix has problems, it is too late to fix in mastering.
And since I didn’t know what “mastering” voodoo did to the music, previous mixes sent to master were a hit or miss.
If there was too much of one frequency of sound, for example, there was nothing mastering could do to make the mix viable.
For me to choose the right timing and tone of instruments to make an arrangement, I have to know what fits together on a frequency, spatial, and depth spectrum.
In the past I would figure out well into the process that the “recording” I did early on wouldn’t work at all, and had to completely redo the work. Over. and over. again.
Duh.
One thing the process of mastering mastering is showing me is what work is worthwhile, and what is not. What I already have down, and already done.
Surprisingly, more than I realized.
Tonight, I zoomed with one of my new mastering mentors - had the group review the master I posted in the last podcast. Funny, because I didn’t even think of submitting work for review, considering it not finished, not “perfect” yet.
I thought it was pretty good overall, but there were a few aspects I wasn’t sure about, and since I’m getting ready to re-evaluate my studio’s set up and fix any acoustic imbalance in the room, I figured I would wait to rework the track.
Watching the group review others’ work, on a whim I submitted my newest material.
What I had “mastered” on my own, with the skills I have now.
A track that started as a spark when I heard “God Bless the Child” in a new way, in the setting of what my own child is going through right now. Grew with my working out chords at my piano with vocals I loved. Turned into a full arrangement with drums, bass, swells that I programmed, vocals and piano I recorded, and a saxophone session recording from a musician-friend. Sounds carved out into a mix with all the skills I’ve honed, and mastered with the newest tools I’m practicing with now.
In addition to super laser sharp technical feedback, which from a mastering level filters down through production and arrangement, I got the best validation of the course I’m on right now…this group of top engineers was impressed at the work.
Huh.
The uber-long road through horrifying valleys of self-doubt and naysayers echoing the imposter syndrome voices in my head, has lead to a plateau of validation.
From the beginning of this journey, the magic of the music has led me, even when I was kicking and screaming because it seemed so hard to change my life and start where I was, with what little I had then.
So many tiny steps, and awful falls…heart-filling successes and abysmal failures…and now I am here. Savoring this magic.
Starting where I am, with what I have.
I think I’ll keep going…
…one day I might be a master.
photo credit University of Waterloo