When I was a kid I thought there were only two kinds of music jobs. You were either a music teacher or a rock star. As I got into high school I became a liner note nerd and would read every CD insert like a novel. I started to recognize names, eventually even circles of friends, and there were just so many different kind of roles.
Over the years now I’ve been able to play most of those roles, either as a musician on various instruments, a songwriter or artist, one of the label people or one of the recording engineers.
Being a recording engineer is a thing I don’t talk about publicly very much, but it’s actually a thing I’ve spent a lot of time studying and working on over my career.
For a few years, when I was first married, I got to work directly under a legendary, Grammy-winning engineer named Vance Powell, who made huge records with Chris Stapleton and Jack White. For many years, I worked in studios down the hall from two other award-winning legends, Shane Wilson and Mitch Dane, and all three of these guys took me under their wing and taught me all sorts of nerdy, wizard-like things about gear and records and how to make things sound amazing.
While I’m nowhere near the greatness of those guys, being trained by some of the best in the world has come in handy more than a few times. It’s quite nice to be able to record and mix my own music, or help friends on theirs, and be confident that I can do a good job.
Which is a funny way to say that my goal for the rest of the year is to write on substack once a week.
We all have things we’d like to do, but it’s hard to find the time.
Most recording studios are centered around these big consoles. You’ve seen them in movies and photos. Sometimes people ask “what do all those knobs and buttons do?”
It’s deceptively simple, really. Each instrument has a bunch of frequencies, and you can turn the volume up or down for the whole instrument or just those individual frequencies.
Let’s say there’s a song playing and the piano player did something cool and we want to hear it better, so the first instinct would be to turn up fader that turns up the piano.
But, that piano is a huge instrument. It’s a giant wooden box with hundreds of strings. That cool part is being played on a few of those strings, but all the other strings are resonating a little bit, too, and so when you turn up the piano, you’re turning up the part you want to hear AND all those other frequencies, which kind of just makes the song sound muddy and worse.
The first thing all my engineer friends told me when I started to work with them was “Cut before you add, Andy! Cut before you add!”
It’s a motto for audio engineers. It turns out, if you cut away all the other frequencies of that piano, you don’t have to turn it up at all. The part you want to hear will almost magically sound louder and better on its own. You’ve just gotten rid of what you didn’t need.
A lot of what a great mix engineer does to make music sound good is get rid of stuff you didn’t need, and didn’t even realize was there in the first place.
This happens in my life all the time.
I add a lot of things. I love new ideas. “I should start a new band!” “I should plant a bunch of new trees!” “I should launch a new company!” “I should restart my podcast!” “I should…” the list goes on and on…
My mind, my heart, my GARAGE… they are all littered with projects and dreams and things that I want to start and create and do.
Sometimes I’ll get hired to mix a band and, one at a time, every band member will sneak over and ask me to turn up their instrument. It’s hilarious.
But turning up every instrument is called the volume knob. You simply can’t turn up everything at once. It will sound terrible. It’s the mixer’s job to trim and twist all the pieces until the fit together into one beautiful, cohesive whole.
Yet, again and again in my life I keep turning up the faders of my work and ideas and commitments and making it all muddy and worse for me and everyone around me.
Cut before you add, Andy! Cut before you add!
Why is this advice so much harder in life than it is in the studio?
This past week I have finally finished a number of musical projects, for myself and for others, that have been hanging over my head for a long time. It has been a huge relief. All of a sudden, there is margin. There is space. There is room for the notes to ring out and the melody to cut through.
Because I can cut out the frequencies of those deadlines I can turn up the fader of writing in a way that makes sense. It’s why I can start to think about committing to Substack in a way I knew I couldn’t before.
I imagine you don’t have to be an audio engineer to know this feeling.
What is this for you? What are those frequencies you could cut? The ones that add nothing, but take up so much space, whether with your time or your money or your thoughts?
With my work it’s been those projects, with my thoughts it’s so often the news or daydreams or worries. There’s so much time that can get sucked up by the TV or instagram.
Just think what I could do if I cut that time out and spent it on something else. Just think what God could do if I laid that time down at His feet and asked what He would have me do with it.
This post is also a strange way to tell you that one of the things I’ve just finally finished is a new personal instrumental side project. It started while my wife’s cancer treatment was getting really challenging and I needed some kind of safety valve.
I didn’t have the emotional energy to write songs or lyrics, but I had this need to create. Some nights, the house would be quiet, the kids would be asleep, and I would go down to my little basement studio and sit at the piano or plug in the guitar and just make something for an hour and then go to bed.
I ended up creating quite a lot of music. It’s meditative piano and dreamy guitar stuff and I’m calling it “the quiet hours”.
I’m going to release a song a week for the rest of the year, and I’ll be sharing each song on the substack each week, sometimes with a question to think about as you listen, if you’d like.
Each month, the four songs will be compiled into an EP, and the titles of those four songs will compose a poem. It’s nerdy, I loved making it, I loved mixing it, and I hope you enjoy it.
Here’s the first song for you to check out, if you would like to, and if you do, feel free to ponder this question: is there something you could or should cut out of your life to make room for something better?
Thank you for reading, for listening, and for following along with me on all these creative projects. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.
This is spurring some meaningful reflection, so thank you for these words!
This is solid wisdom for so many areas of life. Thank you! And I look forward to the songs. Keeping you and your family in my prayers🙏🏼