Stop Copying Your Idols!!!
Stop Copying Your Idols!!!
I understand the desire to be able to Write, Produce or even Mix like your heroes, but I can promise, it doesn’t serve you. Especially NOT in the long run!!
During the learning phase, it can be helpful to study how others work. How they accomplish their sound. And it’s good to have these tools in your toolbox. But if your goal is to be “Great” at what you do, then mimicking other’s work will never get you there.
Let’s take Mixing for example. Let’s say that there’s a big name mixer who goes by the name BFD. So you love his mixes, maybe you buy his drum samples, and try to make mixes that sound like his. But in the end, what have you become? Does the music industry need you? They already have the real BFD and he has proven to sell records.
You will never become a legend by sounding like other legends. You must create your own path and more importantly, you must understand why these other people have become successful.
In my BFD example, he is NOT successful because his records sound great. Or radio friendly. Whatever that means. He’s successful because he “sells” records. Period. When he stops, people will stop hiring him. They’ll say his sound is old or dated.
So what do you need to do? You need to figure out what sound you like and how to achieve that sound. It needs to be original (but not too original) and it needs to be yours while also connecting with an audience.
When you can do that, you will always get work. People will always hire someone who gets results. And nailing that CRACK on the snare is NOT how you get work. It’s creating what people enjoy. Work with great people, with great songs and create great productions with great mixes that people enjoy. It’s really that simple.
And then, people will be pulling their hair out trying to figure out how YOU got that great vocal sound. I promise.
Good luck. Kenny
Spot on Kenny. I was listening to Pete Thorn talking about his good old fashioned guitar album. He said it may not be cool, but it’s what he likes. You’ll never be happy with your music if you are trying to be someone else.
If we were in church we’d hear, AMEN :p
I’ve encountered this to a point were its deceptive, we often start making music to do what we like and find ourselves in thedeceptive trap of copying others.
Ive heard someone say, you cannot fail at self expression therefore lets express ourselves and be unique, someone will then want to copy us but if we’d meet these persons we’d tell em to do their own thing and be unique too. Thats what we love in artists, their uniqueness
” Make sure you sound original, but not too original ”, so i have to blend in my sound with my idols?
So true… I’ve had a few artists come to me and demand that I mix their songs like ‘so and so’… I politely say Im not ‘so and so’ and if you want your mix to sound that way then maybe you should hire ‘so and so’ to mix your song…