They never go anywhere from there! I don’t want that to be you. Whatever you do, don’t be “normal.” Normal home studio people buy a bunch of stuff, read a lot of other people’s opinions on forums (or blogs like this one), play around in their DAWs, are either overly confident in their skill or never feel like their stuff will get any good, and then they plateau. This acts as a barometer for your ever improving skill as a producer. You can look at your history of work and see how you have improved and what specifically has gotten better. And if you ask her, she’ll attest to the fact that I’m always saying that the most current project I’m working is “my best work yet.” This should be the case! It may not always be, but really if you are completing projects and setting them aside, whether it is your own music or a client’s record, you have something to compare it to. My wife is always hearing what ever projects I’m working as I tend to use her for feedback on mixes a lot. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you will somehow improve without it. This process of evaluation is so critical to growth as an audio engineer. You can listen back and highlight what you think you did well (and would like to recreate in future projects) and what you did poorly (and how you would like to do things better the next time). You now have something tangible, that you created, that is complete, which you can evaluate and learn from. However, if you instead force yourself to do your best with what you have and what you know, print a mix or master and call it a day, then you create a unique opportunity for yourself. Sessions become a continuous work in progress. We’ll then come back to the original project and tweak some more. Therefore our tendency is to work on projects, never pronounce them complete, and then fiddle with something else. Because of the freedom of time and money afforded us by powerful computer recording we aren’t ever under any real deadlines.

If you never complete a recording or mixing project it becomes very hard to improve your skill as an engineer. Via Andrew Hurley Flickr Unfinished Business I have a better way for you…finish your projects. The videos hopefully are helping (heck, I hope MY videos are helping you), but the first two are usually a waste of time. So what do we do to accomplish that end? We buy more “professional” gear, join online recording debates, and watch a lot of tutorial videos on YouTube. Most of us truly desire to increase in skill and ability and thereby produce music of high quality. If you’re like me, you want to get better at recording and producing music.

Saffire mixcontrol solo