Tuesday Tech Tip: Before the Spotlight

I’ve been working my way through a podcast dedicated to telling a history of rock music in 500 songs. It’s intriguing when significant figures in popular music first appear in the narrative as unknowns. In numerous stories, immediately recognizable names bounce around the edge of various scenes for a long time before actually finding anything approaching success. They pop up and disappear. Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie… all of them had less than successful moments while navigating their pre-stardom years.

It’s amazing to hear how stars appear within the scene but nothing works out quite right for them. Maybe the musicians don’t quite click together. Perhaps they maintained a too-strong allegiance with friends toiling away in some eventually forgotten group, or just didn’t make the cut during tryouts for a band on the way up. Hearing how groups took a pass on, or simply fired, certain individuals who later became famous staggers the mind. The missteps just seem so obvious in hindsight.

But, there are always the variables of skills and timing. Perhaps the opportunity appeared before the needed skills had quite developed. Or the performer couldn’t quite control the techniques they had assembled and lacked any kind of precision. Maybe they had harnessed the skills, but found it didn’t quite complement the current trends.

We know how the stories played out for particular stars. The key part is how they moved beyond difficult moments. Those who came out the other end kept learning, trying things, remained open to what was occurring around them, and adapted to the new landscape.

Often, we only consider the current state of someone’s talent. It’s easy to view a performer at the top of their game as falling fully formed from the sky, rather than being the result of trial and error, refinement and repetition, iterative improvement and continual development. As many have observed, we are usually seeing the “highlight” reel of someone’s life while skipping over the boring bits. Failures get pushed from the spotlight and it’s easy to lose sight of the full path a person travelled.

The only way to avoid failures, diversions and dead ends is to not begin. Certainly that approach won’t get us anywhere.

Improving our home studio can become a framework for the entire process. We get things sounding better through careful listening and iterative refinement. We identify issues and look for steady improvement. It becomes clear that the more we work with our instrument – our space plus our microphone plus our recording setup – the better it will perform. We learn the quirks of our system and build a set of skills which will serve as a solid foundation when the right opportunities land before us.

Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

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