Video Tutorials and Such
People ask me, now and then, why I don't make tutorial videos. Tips and tricks. The five things you need to know about mastering your genre. The secret EQ move nobody tells you about. And I want to give them a serious answer, but the honest answer is almost embarrassingly simple: I don't think I'm special enough to stand in front of someone and say do it this way.
Now, this isn't false modesty. False modesty is just pride wearing a disguise, and I have no interest in that game. What I mean is something more like this: I don't experience myself as a teacher of music. I experience myself as a kind of listener who occasionally gets out of the way. There is a difference. A teacher assumes the position of knowing something fixed, something transferable, something you can hand across a table like a set of car keys. But what I work with isn't fixed. It's energy, and energy doesn't hold still long enough to be handed to anyone.
When I'm in a session, working a record through analog gear, hunting for the place where the low end stops being noise and starts being weight, I'm not applying rules. I'm listening for whether the thing in front of me still needs my energy or not. That's the whole method, if you can call it a method. Does this track still need me? Or is my energy now in the way of it becoming what it already wants to become? I don't think I'm right, particularly. I don't think I'm wrong, particularly. I think I'm responding. And responding, by its nature, can't be packaged into a ten-minute video with chapter markers.
I'll admit, I watch tutorials myself sometimes, the way you might glance at a stranger's diary. And almost nothing in them transfers, because the tutorial isn't really about the technique. It's about that person's record, in that person's room, on that person's day. Unless the video is being made about the exact song sitting in front of you, with your monitors, your room, your ears that morning, it isn't information. It's folklore. Interesting, maybe. Useless, mostly.
The hidden business card
Here's the part people don't like to hear: tutorials almost always carry a hidden business card. Somewhere underneath the generosity is a transaction. The content is for the creator far more than it's for the viewer, that's simply how the economics of attention work. And if you look at it from that angle, the tutorial starts to look less like teaching and more like a very clever way of feeding on insecurity. Not maliciously, necessarily. But structurally. Insecurity is baked into making music, everybody who's ever sat in front of a mixing desk has felt it, and dressing that universal insecurity up as a tip is just a smokescreen. A way of converting someone else's uncertainty into your own sense of authority. I don't want to build my self-regard on the back of somebody else's doubt. That's not a trade I'm interested in making.
The genre problem
Then there's the matter of genre, which tutorials almost never respect, because respecting it would mean admitting the advice doesn't generalise. A trick that opens up a rock mix might do almost nothing in deep Dub Techno, might even work against it. The low end behaves differently. The space behaves differently. The silence behaves differently. So when someone hands you a universal EQ move, what they're really handing you is their genre wearing a disguise. Apply it blindly to something it was never built for, and you're not learning a craft. You're importing somebody else's assumptions into your own work without knowing it.
Accelerating the sameness
So here's the real question underneath all of this: if everybody is watching the same handful of tutorials, learning the same handful of moves, in a world where so much already sounds the same, aren't we just accelerating the sameness? Isn't the very idea of teaching, in this form, secretly a machine for producing copies? I'd rather you sit with your own confusion a while longer. Burn an evening getting it wrong on your own terms. Discover the thing nobody could have told you, because nobody else has your ears, your room, your hands on that particular night.
I'm not against learning. I'm against the performance of learning that tutorials have become. What I'd rather offer, if I offer anything, isn't a method. It's permission, to trust the moment when the energy tells you the record is finished, and to stop pretending that moment can be taught.