April 1, 2017 editorial: comments

April Fools, Moi?

I write this column once a month, and it just so happens that this one falls on April Fools Day. I must admit, I was tempted to put in some crazy fake story about some insane piece of gear or something. Maybe a new plug-in that not only is an awesome vintage compressor with LA-2A, 1176 and Fairchild modes, but also gives you stock tips and suggests Netflix shows to binge on. “Hey Mike, have you watched Bloodline yet?”

But the problem with April Fools Day is that it’s long past the point where it has much credibility. You all know it’s April Fools Day, and are expecting crazy stuff, so pretty much anything I say you won’t believe. In fact, I bet I could talk about a real product that's coming out soon, and I’d get comments in the forum like, “What’s with the fake news, Mike?” 

So, I decided, to heck with April Fools, I'll do a normal editorial today, and hope that people believe it's real. I’m going to talk about an article that’s linked in this very newsletter. It’d be hard to fake that, right? The article is my interview with engineer Ryan West. I hope you read it, because not only does he talk a lot about mixing techniques (particularly interesting to me was how much high-pass filtering he does, on virtually every track), but he also tells the story of how he built his career, starting out as a music store clerk with no formal training in audio engineering.

It was not an overnight success, by any means. Even when West was getting steady work as a tracking engineer, he was having a lot of trouble breaking in as a mixer. He even had a well-known producer tell him he just wasn’t ready. But he kept working on his craft, and eventually, broke through. One look at his client list shows you how successful he's become.

My next column will be on May 6th, and will be free of the specter of April Fools Day. Well, I gotta run, my compressor plug-in just texted me about a great new British detective series on Netflix, so I’ll be binging until then.