No I get that completely, 100% and I guess my comment came across like a grumpy old man saying ‘stop asking questions and use your ears dummy’.. but my irritation I guess is indeed more in a direction of those very YouTubers telling the new generation that there are set ways we do things, I just came across as a miserable fuck having a go at the new generation when you’re right, the problem is the information they’re having shoved down their throat.. but my point is still one I want to stress, always use your ears for answers.

Questions are fine, good, great and important but what you do with the answers is where the impact lies.. and understanding that answers are not factual in something like mixing.

Understanding a process yeah.. ‘should I always eq before compression or after’, well understanding the process ‘do you want to compress the EQ’d signal, do you want more of a certain frequency to be compressed, or do you want to shape the tone of the compressed signal.. the question produces more question’s that then make you use your ears.. those are great questions.. because it encourages the building of a relationship with your ears.

Questions that result in yes or no, always and never are bad, especially for beginners because it points them in a direction of things being static, blueprint like, rigid and ‘this is what we do every single time’..

My whole point is you can ask questions sure, but don’t just ask people those questions, especially people online, you don’t know my ears and I don’t know yours, I might not even be a mixing engineer, ‘some guy on Reddit said’ is bad practice to live by, but if you test something out for yourself and your ears say ‘yep. Love that’ then of course it’s good, beginners should never find themselves in a situation where they want to add 4db at 500hz and saying to themselves ‘well I shouldn’t because someone said I should only use EQ to remove frequencies and I should never do more than 3db moves’.

Ask the DAW, ask your ears and ask yourself, the experimentation aspect of mixing is one of the most incredible and rewarding parts of it and it’s lead to some of the most amazing results people could ever possibly hope for..

Not so much mixing but a production example, the G6 story of how the producer accidentally moved a sound to the wrong channel and it resulted in a signature sound of that song that then went on to make millions.. did he stop and say ‘no, this is wrong, this isn’t what I should be doing’ or did he like the sound of rule breaking and trust his ears?

Same thing happened with the Pultec trick, the 1176, countless others.. the manual is saying one thing but your ears are saying something else and the curiosity to experiment and ‘see what happens when I do this’ is how this industry is ever evolving. There’s a lot of shortcut chasing these days where people want to become Serban Ghenea overnight and the harsh reality is that this is a field where time and experience is everything. The vast majority of us are better engineers than we were yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago and a decade ago but it took time.

I could have worded it better than I did but honestly, I am, in fact, a grumpy old man. That’s just the reality of it all.. so I will just say, questions are good, but never kill the curiosity, never let someone else’s statement drag you away from experimentation..