Great Sounding

1 Easy Way to Stop Spending Thousands on Recording Gear (and make great sounding records!)

Ok, I love toys. Gear of all kinds. From my smart phone to the Mojave Audio tube condenser microphone I use in my project studio. Gear is fun! I love waling into new studios and checking out what gear they have. Pre-amps, compressors, all of it. But, there's a downside too. Keeping up.

One of the most difficult things about having recording equipment these days is the feeling that you must always keep up and keep buying more. Keeping up with software versions, more plug-ins, more outboard gear…… it can get crazy. All we really want to do is make things sound good, right? There have been times when I searched in vain for the one magic plug-in that would make all my tracks sound better. We all know that having good gear helps, and these days you can make some really good low cost buys when it comes to microphones, pre-amps, etc., and so many of us are working entirely "inside the box", that there are plug-ins galore available for all manner of signal processing, but gear isn't everything. If your recordings don't quite sound the way you want them to, it may be time to stop dumping all that money into gear and focus your attention on a tool you already have. One tool that all of us have but many people don't take the time to really learn how to use. Our ears.

Have you ever really thought about training your ears? If you went to music school, you might have taken ear training classes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Formal ear training can be invaluable for musicians, audio engineers and producers alike, but what about training your ears to do the job your using them for? What about spending some time really working to know what you want to hear when you are recording music. Any music. Yours, someone else's. It's funny, I have found in my own experience that it's often more difficult for me to clue into what I want my own music to sound like than when I'm producing another artist. Do you really know what you want to hear when you take on a recording project? Even something as simple as a song demo? More important, do you know how to translate what you want to hear onto the recording itself and recognize when you have it?

These are learnable skills. It takes some time, just like learning the ins and outs of your gear, but it's not rocket surgery. In the world of audio recording and technology, we spend so much time focusing our attention on the gear. Thankfully we have loads of great gear in the world! Even though I love it, all the gear talk can get a bit tedious after awhile. After all, its about music and what we hear and hopefully feel when we listen to it. That's all that matters. So maybe it's time to shift focus. To stop spending so much time and money acquiring toys and the skills to use them and to start more effectively using the tools we already have. Time to  improve our skills with the most important piece of gear that any musician, engineer or producer has.....  our ears.

About the Author

Bill Small is a touring musician, writer, producer and coach based in Austin, TX and the author of "Use Your Ears," "The Essential Guide to the Non-Tech Side of Recording."

www.billsmallmusic.com/useyourears

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