At 6/1/11 09:56 AM, DonCarrera wrote:
Pretty much what Sequenced said, but work on music theory and all that jazz before progressing to the intricacies of mastering. Good/clever/mood-setting songwriting >>>> than production value and can never really be skipped without consequences - so brush up on that first.
Speaking as a person who F-ed it up and went mixing first composition second I can say this speaks truth. Don't even give two seconds of time to "mastering" until you write a good song first. Mixing turns a good song into a great song, or even a mediocre song into a good song, but if you can't even make a mediocre song to begin with, mixing will do nothing for you, and mastering can only turn a great song into a REALLY EXTRA SPECIAL great song. There's not much to gain by learning how to master things for a medium or monitor, but there's a lot to gain from music theory, practice, and mixing.
At 6/1/11 06:18 PM, WizMystery wrote:
There is a reason for this. People are more intelligent than you give them credit for most of the time. They were actually interested in my intent, as it proved that the idea was mine and mine alone. It didn't change the monotony. It didn't make my piece more emotional. It did, however, allow a criterion for objective evaluation to appear where subjective evaluation originally reigned.
I would also like to take this time to point out that for every person who is more intelligent than you give them credit for, there is a person who is so much more stupid than you could ever imagine. This is why you don't give the intelligent people the credit. People voting 0 instantly and without remorse is just something people will do because they want to trash your day and feel better (or even simply because they're sociopathic and don't know "right" from "wrong", who knows). So for every good review you get, expect a dozen votes of 0 or an abusive review in return.
Along that same vein it is also important to separate "abusive" reviews from "brutally honest" reviews. The latter is EXACTLY what you want (because it tells you what went wrong and why), whether you know it or not, while the former is just a put down like "sounds bad yo".
TL;DR -
Music theory, mixing, practicing, and listening to critical reviews while not getting bummed out about the people who are just out to ruin your day is how you progress.
Also important is learning about the workflow of your music-making setup, whatever it may be, so you're time-efficient. 3500 hours makes you an expert, but if half of that time is just trying to find how to link a channel to the mixer you're not getting to be an expert in much of anything important.