Here’s why you need to think of your production as a performance…

Today I’m going to talk about why you should think of your production as a performance, but first I want to give a little background…

I started learning how to produce and record my own music when I was nine or ten years old, shortly after I got my first guitar. My dad bought me a little Tascam Portastudio 414 and a cheap mic (Audix or something) just to get going. At the time we had one of those old iMacs that took twenty minutes just to start up so there was absolutely no chance of getting into digital recording. I absolutely loved that little four track though! It took a minute to figure it out but once I did, there was no stopping me. I’d be up till two or three in the morning just performing and recording silly little ditties or playing around with changing the speed on my voice.

One of my favorite parts of recording on the format was it almost felt like a live show because you couldn’t really fuck up a take, what you played was what you got. And then once you bounced or ping ponged some tracks (ping ponging is the process of summing multiple tracks down to one so you can open up more tracks) then you really couldn’t change anything. The result for me was this beautiful dichotomy where the pressure was on when I had to perform but once it was tracked I gave up the perfectionist attitude and just tried to make everything vibe.

I remember the day my dad and I went to the Apple store to buy the brand new iMac that had just come out. It was the first or second generation of the flat screen all in one designs and I was obsessed with it for weeks before we even got it. I remember being so excited at the idea of being able to add as many tracks as I wanted and more importantly to be able to actually EDIT a track if I messed up! The minute that thing got home it was out of the box and set up. By the end of the day I had figured out 90% of what I needed to in Garageband and was absolutely in heaven. Over the next few years I must have recorded at least three or four albums worth of songs on that thing. Maybe only two or three were any good and I didn’t release any of them, but what a learning experience that was early on.

Sadly, due to an idiotic mishap with a hard drive years later I would unintentionally delete all of those files in one fell swoop, but we’ll save that story for another post.

Anyways, the whole point of this is that when I got into recording digitally, something got lost. I don’t think I noticed it at the time but looking back, I slowly focused less and less on what I was playing and more and more on how I was recording it. What mics I had, how they were placed, what plugins I should buy, all these things became slowly more important to me than the actual playing itself. In one way this was how I got so fluent with the technology and recording side of things, but even still I feel like I lost at least 10% of the magic compared to the Tascam days.

While building my upcoming course, my co-creator and dear friend Andrew Vait mentioned how he likes to think of every part of his production as a performance. In many ways I have been going in that direction but had never really thought about it like that and something immediately clicked! Rather than feeling at odds with this digital age and the battle between option and distraction I felt instantly enabled to bridge the two by simply changing my mindset when going to record.

So here’s how I’ve been to thinking of it lately…

Every little choice we make when we’re writing, recording, and producing a song has an impact on the final product. When we perform live, it’s easy to think of our actions as having a direct result on the product because the time between when we make the choice and when the audience hears it is so small. But often either out of frustration, ignorance, or pure negligence, we let ourselves get away with sub par habits and techniques when we’re recording and producing because it feels like there will be time to fix them. That’s because we think of our production process as a bunch of tasks we must conquer rather than a series of choices we make in the process of a performance. 

This latter approach opens up the doors to a new way of thinking where there are no wrong choices so long as you know what tools you need and how they work. We are going to continue to think of our production process as a performance for this entire course. Every performance is a path between intention and execution and I want you to think of everything from the guitar you play to the plugins you choose as part of your performance. By the end of this course you’ll be as comfortable with the mechanics of these tools as you are with your voice or instrument. In this section we’re going to outline the two fundamental concepts that set the stage for your performance.

This approach has already helped me get back some of that 10% magic I felt I had lost with that old four track both in my recordings and the experience I’m having while recording. The most beautiful part is that I don’t think I’ve really forcibly or dramatically changed the tools I’m using or much of my processes in general, just my attitude and the way I set out to do things from the get go.

I highly recommend giving this way of thinking a try. If it doesn’t work, hell, throw it away. Either way, let me know in the comments, I wanna know what it does for you!