Well, going back to when I was still a teen, that would be dumping my two top-loading Akai cassette decks with simulated wood panels and my Radio Shack mixer for my first multitrack, TEAC 144.
Mic technique and Tracking came pretty easy in the beginning, but I had apprenticed in a TV studio, so I had learned the ins and outs of AV by age 18.
The biggest early technical breakthroughs that I would say gave me “That sound” came a couple years later working in a commercial recording studio. Those had to do with the composite mix; learning to use EQ, compression, and reverb/delay to create a sense of space that would convince the listener they were somewhere else. At that point I was starting to grasp how to give instruments their own space with panning and EQ, while at the same time creating a blend with reverb/delay and compression.
I was obsessed with the stereo image, particularly blending everything to sound that it was in the same time and place (same room).
My fevered brain began viewing everything around me in terms of mixing and blending. I can remember one day standing at the kitchen sink washing my hands and the hot and cold handles suddenly became level controls for two different signals… one hot and one cold, with the spout being the output (ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa). I stood there for a long time (much too long really for someone that didn’t do drugs). I kept mixing the two temperatures, thinking, “That’s a bit too warm” or “that’s a bit cold.”
Then… eureka! Probably the biggest “Hello!” moment was when I extended this line of thinking to draw from our other senses to understand what makes music pleasing to the listener. I thought about all the ingredients in a recipe as being individual tracks blending into a delicious dinner. I looked at individual flowers in a vase and thought of each as a track or instrument and how they blended into one bouquet, taking note of how the arrangement resembled the panorama of the stereo spectrum. And of course, I thought about the female form most of all… how it wasn’t just one thing, but a combination of the hair, the eyes, the lips, and the curves that blended into one walking, talking hit record for the eyes.
I know this is all abstract and won’t help sell any products, but my greatest leaps in creating professional recordings were conceptual… changes in the way I thought about what I was doing and how each of our senses has a similar way of interpreting beauty and pleasure. I was only about 20 or 21, yet nothing since has come close to these “revelations” in impacting my approach to the recording and reproduction of music.
