Your Experience Isn't Baggage. It's a Blueprint.

Since getting back into recording, I’ve clashed with a lot of the gear I’ve tried. My first instinct was to blame the tools, then myself. But the truth is that I was fighting more than thirty years of accumulated knowledge, and an invisible workflow and a set of expectations.

I started making music in the 1990s with a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder and an Alesis SR-16 drum machine. I’d find a suitable drum loop to play my super cool guitar riff over and I’d build a song structure around it. From there, I’d overdub vocals, lead guitar and bass.

I carried that same process over to early DAWs like Cakewalk’s Home Studio, Guitar Tracks and SONAR, digital multitrack recorders like the Roland VS880/VS1680, and later at Berklee with more modern tools like Reason, Ableton Live and Pro Tools.

Through the years, the tools have changed, but the process was always the same, use drums to outline the song structure, record rhythm guitars, record a scratch vocal, record, bass, then add lead guitar. Even when I recorded my demo in 2003, I repeated the process, but this time I replaced the drum machine, the drums loops and the drum software with a human drummer.

When I got back into recording last year, more than 20 years had passed. The tools were different this time around, better drum software, better amp sims, and far more DAW choices with far more features. The landscape seemed to have changes so much, that I discounted my previous experience and workflow as irrelevant.

I purchased or tried demos of all the major DAWs and followed their implied workflow. I bought the audio interface that seemed to be the one all the pros on YouTube were using (a Universal Audio Apollo Twin X). I fought with most of the DAWs that YouTube influencers recommended, and fought so much with the Apollo that I almost gave up. I hated the added layer of the Console app (the truth is I didn’t understand it). I invested in plugins (mostly amp sims), but I couldn’t get it to sound good.

Eventually, I reverted to my old (gen 1 or 2) Focusrite Scarlett Solo and while I fought latency, I got better results than with the Apollo. It made no sense that my results were “better” with a $99 dollar interface and GarageBand than an $800 interface and a fancy DAW.

What was actually happening was one set of tools was behaving like I expected it to and the other was not. I was fighting not only my expectations, but decades of experience. I was ignoring all the signals of things that were working for me (Focusrite and GarageBand) and trying to force tools that were not (Apollo and Console). My thought process was since options B is more expensive and used by “professionals”, it must be right, and the option A is cheaper and made for “beginners”, it must be wrong. I failed to follow the most important resource of all, me and my intuition. I already knew what to do and how to do it, I’d done it several times before. The tools never mattered, but my experience did.