Now you play a pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the Devil his due
Just heard a great story from a friend of mine last Friday.
He’s kind of goofy and does random things for no reason, but this one thing was particularly funny.
So he was walking around downtown and was feeling especially bored. He’s studying for the bar exam to be a lawyer but last week he was just fed up with studying.
He comes across this instrument store, sees a fiddle in the window, shrugs his shoulders and buys it.
I asked him, “do you play the fiddle?”
“No, not at all. I’ve never touched a fiddle before but I liked the look of it and thought…how hard can it really be.”
He continues, “so I go home and start playing it and I’m absolutely horrible!”
No shocker there I thought. I bet you’re probably thinking the same thing. Did he really expect to be a virtuoso out of the box?
No. No, he didn’t.
He told me, “well you know, with guitar it’s a little easier. You can kind of get away with a few strums here and there with the right chords and call yourself a guitar player. But with a fiddle I guess you actually have to know what you’re doing.”
I was laughing pretty hard at this point because the situation sounded so surreal.
“But you know…” he continued, “I’m into the sound so I’m just gonna get lessons or something.”
And that was the part that kind of inspired me. Here was this guy who saw something he liked and decided to take a plunge. He figured out he needed to do the work to actually learn how to play and that was fine with him.
That’s the type of mentality that’s sometimes missing from people that want to improve their production skills.
They just want the gear to take care of that if they get the expensive microphone with the expensive pre-amp then they’ll get a good sound.
Sure, they probably will. But the real reason something sounds good is because the engineer or producer has recorded a great performance from a great musician. And if there are any issues along the way he or she will know how to deal with them because they’ve taken the time to focus on all the skills they need to be a better engineer.
The microphone and pre-amp will sit there silently when you run into trouble in the studio. They’re not gonna help you with microphone positioning or offer you advice on the best compression settings to use during recording.
Your hard work learning all the skills needed for proper engineering is what’s gonna help you out in those situations.
To learn more skills to really get those recording sessions rocking, go here next:
Image by: grepsy
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