It’s About the Talent, Not the Tools
Posted by Anthony
Back in my high school and college days, I was big into playing guitar and singing. And I was also fascinated by the idea of recording music. Especially for fairly competent yet entirely mediocre artists like myself, recording offered the opportunity to take the songs that were impossible to play live and bring them to life. Countless hours were spent tweaking and futzing trying to get small pieces of songs to sound just right. It was a very long, unnatural process, all in the name of trying to create something that sounded great.
Fast forward a few years and I've lost touch with music and recording. While I still dabble in it from time to time, it's been a while since I've recorded a serious track. So when I saw Groupon offering a one-day music recording crash course in Philadelphia, I jumped at the opportunity. After becoming a bit of a self-proclaimed recording pro a few years back, I figured it'd be nice to approach everything I thought I knew with a fresh mind.
After attending the course today, something funny happened. I re-discovered a fact I'd known all along, deep down, but managed to remain in denial about for years; I realized that no amount of tools can trump great talent - that despite this studio's insanely expensive production equipment, the best recordings were made by the best artists, not the best sound editing software. Who would have thought?
For years, I thought I could "trick" reality - that maybe if I edited my music enough, it'd magically go from "just OK" to "brilliant". To be fair, I was mimicking most modern artists who try to compensate for a complete lack of natural brilliance by overusing and abusing production tools. But I was ignoring the fact that the audience knows the difference between something naturally great and something that's gimmicky and forced.
The best artists understand this fact. And they understand that the studio is a place to trap natural brilliance in time, and not a place to manipulate mediocrity into something better. The Beatles understood this better than most. Their songs were simple yet profound. At their core, they were brilliant. And The Beatles used the studio to enhance these already outstanding songs, not create them.
The moral of the story is that talent can't be manufactured with tools, and true brilliance is impossible to fake. Whether you are recording music, developing a web application or starting a business - you need to feel it, you need to believe in it and you need to have the raw talent to execute on it. Meeting these prerequisites is the only chance you have of winning over your audience and making a long-lasting impression. The tools you use to help you get there should be fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
