Brandon Drury quit counting at 1,200 recorded songs in his busy home recording studio. He is the creator of RecordingReview.com and is the author of the Killer Home Recording series. I had some guy griping that his username was already taken here at the RecordingReview.com forum. I deal with this sort of thing daily, but this time the guy actually claimed to have the name trademarked. I thought, “Hmmm. This is interesting”.
The username in question was “Mixerman”. A quick search in Google pointed me to a certain book called The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, which promised to be a true insiders look of the day-to-day goings on in the major label big boy land. It seems our Mixerman was a real engineer doing the kind of records that people used to pay for.
Mixerman and I shot the shit a bit through emails, he gave some advice on consoles (coming soon), and he helped me out considerably. In return, I snagged a copy of his book from Amazon and off we went on our separate paths.
I generally try to read a book a week, but I usually have 4-5 books I'm reading at any one time. It took a while for my queue to make it to the Mixerman book.
Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned.
You see, I'm a very busy dude. I always seem to attempt to squeeze more than is physically possible into any given 24-hour period. The end result is I end up getting mad and demoralized when I feel the rippage from the overstuffing. If you've got some dirty ideas in your head, you are not too far off track.
As I turned from page 1 to page 2, I find myself being reminded of that chapter in Mind Of The Market (Michael Shermer) where he explains how the brain's pleasure center juice causes us to not want to stop certain behavior. In short, this damn book turned me into a temporary crack addict. I simply could not rationalize putting it down. I felt I was committing treason every time I stopped reading it. My only savior was the finite number of pages. I don't find many books that keep me THIS hooked....and I read a lot of freakin' books.
The Daily Adventures of Mixerman is a daily journal of everything that happened on a major label gig from an audio engineer's perspective. No, he didn't document compression ratios and attack times, unfortunately, but he certainly painted a vivid account in a non-holds-barred fashion as to what it's really like being a “big boy”.
I think, deep down, all of us home recorders who've been beat up and down by our local clientele have always wanted to sneak a peak at what the big guys are really up to. All the sessions I've attended didn't get much done. Now I know why.
I came very close to seriously “going for it” in big boy studio land (another story for another time) and always wondered what it would have been like if I had chosen that path. The are certain delusions of grandeur that the greener grass of big boy land intoxicates as we struggle with often closet-sized room, micron-sized budgets, and even smaller-sized talents.
I can't think of a way to get any closer view of the engineer's perspective in big-boy land than The Daily Adventures of Mixerman.
Mixerman is a certain breed of human......a hair cynical, highly intolerant of bullshit, even less tolerant of idiocy, quite intelligent, and maybe even a bit smug. To put it frankly, he's an asshole. At the risk of insulting Mixerman, I've got to call a spade a spade. Mixerman is honest. He says what he thinks and I laughed HARD dozens of times.
It's no wonder he had people flipping over his once-publicly viewable journals. Honesty is about as welcome as birth control in a Catholic orgy these days with the one exception (which just happens to be this book's core demographic): other assholes. (It taking one to know one may apply.)
The Daily Adventures of Mixerman is a MUST READ for anyone who owns a microphone. The humor is on the crude side (which MAY offer some explanation as to why I enjoyed it so much) and the old Make Twain quote about the difference between fiction and non-fiction being fiction has to actually be believable may apply here. In short, this story is INSANE.....therefor proving it's validity.
Just one note: Because this is a journal, don't expect a giant Lord Of The Rings battle at the end with the good guy coming out on top. The ending isn't a bad one, it's just of a Sony Picture Classics-style ending as opposed to however Bruckheimer ended his last “movie”.
Just a second note: I did attempt to contact Mixerman again before posting my review, but either he didn't get it or he doesn't respond to private messages with the subject consisting of a 4-letter explicative followed by “you”. I'm not sure why my tact didn't warrant a response. Oh well.
Tags: book review, Mixerman, The Daily Adventures Of Mixerman
This entry was posted on Monday, October 25th, 2010 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Audio Engineering Principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
No comments:
Post a Comment