Why "just use your ears" is toxic advice for newbies
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- Picture this: you're looking for production advice online, and you post a question. People respond with "just use your ears". As a newbie, you feel helpless. They act as if the necessary information is right in front of you, but the problem is you haven't learned to identify it yet. Let's talk about that!
TL;DR:
- Get a mentor who can help identify problems
- Expand your vocabulary to put names to different problems
- Get your music into new contexts to get perspective on how your decisions impacted the result
- Don't give up, good enough is good enough, have fun
Contents:
0:00 Just use your ears!
3:16 How to you solve the problem?
6:10 Fresh perspective and testing your assumptions
8:43 Wrapping up and admitting it's true
9:35 Recap and summary
At Underdog Electronic Music School we run online classrooms for all levels of music producers. We do "bootcamps" for beginners (no prior knowledge required!) and "deep dives" for intermediate producers. We are also available for private coaching and advice.
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Website: underdogmusicschool.com/
Contact: oscar@underdogmusicschool.com
Instagram: @underdogmusicschool
Find Oscar's video courses here: courses.underdog.brussels 🖤🖤🖤
Join the Underdog Discord channel: discord.gg/z5N9CTA 👾👾👾
Sign up to the mailing list here: tinyurl.com/yy92sx5u 💌💌💌
Pledge to the Patreon: www.patreon.com/underdogmusicschool 🌱🌱🌱
"The moment you don't know what you're doing, just stop" spot on take away for me.
absolutely right...somebody said the same to me, and with all the confidence i uploaded the tracks in SoundCloud, a toxic eco chamber where everybody says how good my tracks sounded... and nobody says that my crap sound like crap (the truth), at first was ok ...then i just stopped triing to get feedback from that community, because sometimes newbies need that slap in the face of reality from a negative criticism. So a combination of just "use your ears" and the false positive confidence that SoundCloud gives is (in my opinion) not good.
Have bought 3 of Oscar's Underdog courses and honestly feel I learned more from them than any other tutorials I've purchased. His advice is generally always right, and I can't think of one instance in which something I learned from one of his courses or UA-cam videos was later proven incorrect. It's like that line from "Zoolander" - "Listen to your friend Billy Zane - he's trying to help you."
Love hearing this ☺️❤️
these topics are so essential and no one cover these . thank you for making these videos. really helpful
Haha thanks! This was one of my first videos - just switch on the webcam and "go" :D I might make a remake of it at some point. Maybe for the 1 year anniversary of the channel!
@@OscarUnderdog I hope you do. and find all the success with these. Topics like perfectionism, fear of failure(ik you recently made a vids on this), how to, how to find inspiration, how to stay consistent etc would be interesting, Thanks for everything. All the best
I started using ableton just as a tool to have a timeline to jam to and then slowly started adding and adding tracks and effects and just like that got into producing. That way I know almost all the basics but some I just don’t know and I still struggle with the 20% that sound bad but I can’t Identify what it is exactly.
This video spoke to my soul. Thank you
You are the best ❤ You talking from your soul right into mine
Thanks Oscar!
Extraordinary value in this video !!!
This channel is pure genius!
I 100% agree!
The worse thing is that for newbies bad thing sound not even 100% bad, or 20% bad.
Often bad things sound for them as "unusual". And they even have no idea whether it's good or bad...
And even worse - they think that "unusual" means "extraordinary", "cool" and "inventive".
i.e. bad is good!
Thanks for putting into words what has always bugged me about answers like that!
Finding a dance floor might be a bit harder right now than it already usually is 😋I got lots of good feedback from places like the KVR forums, Reddit, and Discord channels, that helped me suck slightly less with often rather specific advice. Finding such feedback is hard. But that is because giving such feedback is also hard, and requires both experience and time.
(You should do something about the focus of your camera though - the leaves behind you are perfectly in focus, your face isn't.)
Hahaha you're so right about the camera focus! First thing I did after making these first videos is upgrade to a DSLR camera where I can control the zoom properly, but even then I'm still on the steep learning curve :D Every week incremental improvement, that's the motto ;)
Discord seems like a great idea, we just started an Underdog channel too, feel free to join it here: discord.gg/yP4W92 !
thank you so much for the honest words.
One of the first videos I made :) thanks for watching!
thanks bro, you are cool!
Thanks. That was great 👍🏻.
Spot on!!!
I wanted to disagree with the notion that having a vocabulary to describe sound/music should be the first requirement before trial and error (practice), but you provided a great argument. However, there is no standardized metric for what makes a sound "brighter" or "warmer". So many things ARE strictly felt by listening. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you know the buzzwords that everyone uses to describe sound, rhythm or harmony. If you've built your own unique musical vocabulary, your understanding is just as valid.
I agree with this 👍
You get me
Such a spot on video! When I see these comments on social media I'm like "wtf, if you don't want to help just stfu" why these continuous toxic, cynical comments?
Yeah it's so double sided, right 😄 happy you notice the same thing!
great vid. by the way, your english is very, very good.
so help me understand
Get fresh ears, learn, train them, experiment, rely on visuals for help, then trust your ears. Nice video, and once again good philosophy. You remind me in a certain way Tim Penner when he teaches fundamentals. Hope to see more and more underdog's vids. 🙏👏☕
ur my teacher now
Man. I just want to treat music as a hobby. then I see that vast, chaotic, background of a trillion things that can go wrong and I am back to never saving any of my beats because of disappointment.
Just keep it up man. Music is a hobby for me and I released music last year when I was a noob. Hearing it now makes me cringe, but I have 700 monthly listeners on Spotify which means someone deep down enjoys it and that is wholesome for me.
The reminds me on a video of Dan Worral helping a guy with „week“ drum sounds. The novice tried everything by the book and was conservative with his use of compressing. Meaning he did everything in order to not over compress and kill the dynamics of his beat.
Dan noted “I assume you actually don’t compress enough”. And the reason for this is, that you are warned about over usage of compressors all the time. It is one of these sentences you hear constantly as a producer exactly like the phrase “just use your ears”. But how are you supposed to know when you compress too much if you never really reached into your toolbox and compressed the shit out of your sounds? You have to do it wrong in order to learn what wrong sounds like.
I can agree with that to be somehow true, but I'm involved in many technology related fields and a common thing is to parrot some kind of mantra. This is good. That is not good. Do this, do that. Use your ears. My guess would be it comes from experienced people who could not explain precisely how to do things. So they try their best (which is not too much, because they must be introverts who are annoyed to do long explanations to begin with and have an instinctive understanding of things). Theycome up with some mystical cool phrase which end up resonating wider and wider in their respective communities cause it's cool to be associated with an idea some skillful folk gave. Often times many of the parrots cannot explain any more. It's a bit like tweaking a virtual instrument knobs like 1 pixel and stating "hey ! Listen the huge difference."
And because parrots are so cool, should you not join the farandole, they vent it on you without having even truly thought about it.
Eventually, you may think it's not for you or even maybe make you feel dumb cause in the situation you perceive something you seem to have no grasp about is obvious...
They don't want the truth. They want to believe.
As a novice, don't let this kind of behaviour make you fall apart.
Good points 👆
Instead of "use your ears" I usually ask the begginer person what medium they used for mixing, i.e. headphones, desktop speakers, monitor speakers, stereo system, car stereo etc etc, then based on results from listening to it on my own mediums I tell them what they could fix in their mix.
There is a use for it tho. Not every question in music has a technical answer
I agree, near the end of the video I talk a bit about that too :) At the end of the day it is true, it's just often not the advice that will actually help someone unblock their frustration if they're feeling stuck :)
I always root for underdog
The Underdog's rooting for you too honey 😘
Yeah...ears... as beginner...a really tricky advice :D Some have the ability of realizing that it doesn't sound right, others first have to get to this point. But even if you hear somethings wrong, congratulations, you identified a problem, but in so many cases the ears won't be able to figure out what you should do to get it right. Reminds me of my first expierience in 2018, right after I had bought and installed logic, starting from absolutely 0 knowledge, ready to jump into this music making thing...yes lets try to make full on psytrance... just pick a kick, 3 basses, some percussion and then try the tricky melody thing, something like that have been my thoughts. 10 or twelve hours later, after I was turning knobs all the time, I was totally confused why kick and basses still sound crappier than I ever thought they could :))) Btw. during this time it totally lost any confidence into my ears :))))
Ears 2.0 experience is then, when you've been mixing way tooooo long, because you've been sure its your best creation ever, and you are working on finishing it until you're eyes won't stay open any longer... you're going to bed, feeling great because it sounds great... The next day you are on the hunt for the person who destroyed your track while you were sleeping, because this is definitely not what you have been listening to hours and hours.....:))))) ! Ears, yes, never thought before, that their performance can be different as night and day :D
I had these experiences way too many times myself, its a hard road to learn 😭
but there are different ways of learning, just like 'hands-on-learning"?
Hi. Beginner here. I recently joined a Discord server from a producer named "ARTFX". And basically the first answer I got from him was "just use your ears". Just because he was too lazy to look it up.
So what's the whole point of providing a Discord server where people can ask questions? Anyway.
The Underdog Discord server is really great. Nice people, friendly environment.
Glad to hear it 🤗🙏