A lot of my recordings end up with… ok, ALL of my recordings
end up with certain characteristics that I've come to identify as my own “sound." I call it my audible signature. It is a somewhat subtle/nuanced thing and passive listeners probably wouldn’t even hear it, but I’m talking about all those little nitpicky things I notice that add up to the response I have every time I finish a project and listen back. Not saying it is negative or positive, for better or for worse… Hard to explain but I think you guys know what I am saying: recurring characteristics of any/one/all of my recordings that I can readily identify.
For a long time I tried to fight against these characteristics, for example a certain snare sound I cannot seem to escape no matter the room it is recorded, the drum itself, the mics I use, or the way it’s mixed! Or particular bass guitar frequencies I always seem to mix a certain way. Early on, I would compare my recordings to “real recordings,” and for a while I changed my process quite a bit to try to sound like stuff I listened to or heard in other people’s collections. However, as time went on, I started to realize that some of the steps I took to go against these sonic characteristics yielded less-preferred results than those very elements I was trying to erase from my audible signature. So while continuing to try to learn all I could about “why” these things were happening in my mix, and to still look at ways to counteract, I had to consider also looking at how to exploit these characteristics. Try to use these elements toward my advantage, develop my “sound” rather than try to change it to sound like someone else (what did Ozone call it, my contemporaries?).
It is one thing for me to want to continuously improve, but I also find (for me) there is some legitimacy in accepting, embracing actually, the idea that I sound like what I sound like. Hell, some folks are lucky enough to have made lucrative careers from delivering time-and-time-again on their individual sonic aesthetic. This is the long way of saying my answer to the original question is, yeah I am pretty sure back in the day I tried to sound like something else, but now I am pretty happy with how I sound so I don’t really get too excited about products that promise to make me sound like something else with the push of a button.
I think it has been covered already in this thread though; the idea is to sound the best I can. And there is a big difference between that concept and what I think Ozone is really selling if you read between the lines.
