Great thread. Some random thoughts:
I love music. I think of myself as a songwriter and a guitar player. I can't sing, I can't engineer, I can't produce. I can't play bass, drums or keyboards. I can't tap dance, either.
What do I want? To create recorded music that is good enough (in every respect) that other folk can get an impression of what I hear in my head. I'd much rather have access to great musicians with great instruments, professional engineers and producers and studios, but I don't. So I need to do a bit of engineering, a bit of production, a bit of mixing. I need to use sampled drums, sampled pianos, autotune, too much compression, hundreds of takes, etc.
I've learned a huge amount about recording and mixing and performing and writing and being a human being from the folk on this board. I do my best to try and help other folk when I have the time (which isn't often enough) and the knowledge (which is hardly ever).
What do I want from the clinic? Initially it was amazingly encouraging to get a bit of back-slapping. I'd never really let other folk hear my music, and a lot of folk said a lot of kind things about my music. This directly lead to my continuing making music and keeping posting stuff for comments. Brutally honest opinions at that stage would have been enough to make me quit. I'm happy to accept that that's *my* failing, not anyone else's, but it's true nonetheless.
Increasingly, I want (not so brutal) honesty. I've even directly asked a few folk for criticism because I value their opinions and know they'll be honest in a way that helps me learn.
So I suppose what I want from critiques has changed over time, and will probably keep changing. I think the fact that so many folk are prepared to give their time and effort to helping each other out is just amazing.
Finally, sonusman's comments:
So I make these comments because I like to remind you guys that it IS that obvious, and most of you are a far cry from engineering something worthwhile.
and:
you start to appreciate just how far away from that "pro sound" you really are. I see post after post of how crap sounds "pro"
I think the key thing here is that sonusman is talking about the *engineering*, not the music. It's certainly true that from an engineering perspective, a lot of clinic stuff is far from "pro" sounding. And that's important.
But much more important, to me anyway, is the music, the art. I can honestly say that there are many tracks I've heard on the clinic that I prefer to the vast majority of stuff on sale. And more importantly, a lot of it means as much to me as my own CD collection. I could name folk, but they know who they are. I even asked a couple of folk if I could buy their stuff on CD - I liked it enough to pay for it.
A lot of the stuff I listen to and buy doesn't sound "pro" from an engineering perspective, although strictly speaking it *is* pro (i.e. the engineer was paid). For me that doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the music itself, the writing, the performance, the feeling it gets across.
The main point is that "pro" and "worthwhile" aren't the same thing. Is clinic stuff "pro" quality? Mainly no. Is it worthwhile? Mainly yes.
Cheers
AB
