Skills First. Equipment Second.

Namm was this past weekend.

Lots of gear. But for some reason I wish I would have more to report.

You see, it’s just becoming more and more of the same thing.

Yay, here’s another entry-level interface that’s comparable to all the other entry-level interfaces out there.

PreSonus came out with monitors, which sounds weird to me as a business person because I think they should focus on making their other product lines better.

If you make everything, you specialize in nothing. The exception in this case might be Neumann, who have designed some really great monitors, even though they were a microphone company.

But if you spread yourself thin over every single audio product, chances are they’re not going to excel.

You see, I’m not a big fan of being a slave to gear. I don’t care what microphone you’re using. I don’t judge your mixing room, and I sure as hell don’t care what software you’re running.

If you want to spend money on better equipment, or on improving the acoustics in your mixing room, all the power to you. But I don’t really care about more gear purchases just for the sake of buying more gear.

What I do care about is how you use your gear.

I care about how you improve your skills to improve the sound of your gear. A microphone is just a microphone. the person manipulating it to get the sound he or she wants is the real success factor.

I’m not advocating crappy gear, or that you never need to buy expensive audio equipment. I’m just saying that gear won’t make it sound better if you don’t know what to do with it in the first place.

Skills first. Equipment second.

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The results are in from our Twitter #NAMM competition from this weekend. The winner of Recording & Mixing Strategies is @codeofanand.

For those of you who didn’t win, check out the Strategies bundle right here:

www.audio-issues.com/strategies

Image by: leo.prie.to

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