Are You Being Too Technical!?

With so many production tutorials covering things like sound design, advanced processing, mixing and mastering, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-processing everything. You can feel like you have to. Don’t get me wrong, you can get as technical as you like, but it can stifle your productivity.

Have you ever spent hours processing a snare only to have it sounding worse than when you started? I think we’ve all been there. If you’re anything like me there’s a chance you could find yourself over-processing (and overthinking), and have your output suffer as a result.

Over the past year I personally found myself being more and more critical, to the point where nothing was good enough. I was finishing nothing. I was over-producing, over-processing and overthinking every song I started, and I really needed to work to become an imperfectionist. No art can ever be perfect, and until you truly adopt that mindset, your productivity (and personal fulfillment) won’t reach its true potential.

This is one of the reasons I wanted to start making these videos – to cover more holistic topics and discuss issues I had found in my own approach and how I fixed them to boost my productivity. There are millions of sound design tutorials, but not many discussing the different obstacles you might encounter along the way.

How many times have you seen someone arguing in Facebook groups about which plugins you should or shouldn’t use, how you should and shouldn’t use them? Tech snobs trying to flex and correct everyone, and a lot of the time they don’t even have any music out? Something seems a little off here.. Take their comments with a pinch of salt.

You can be as technical as you like. There are producers making amazing music at both ends of the tech spectrum and none of them are right or wrong. They’ve found what works for them, and it IS working, because they’re finishing music.

If you ever find yourself stuck, feeling unproductive or unfulfilled, it might be worth asking yourself – am I being too technical?

LOLO BX <3