Left Brain vs Right Brain in Learning Digital Audio

At the risk of sounding preachy I think this topic is worth addressing. It’s obvious to say everyone approaches working in digital audio in a completely different way. Everyone’s skills and abilities are all over the place and everyone has a different need from their software. There are those that really just want the DAW to track their performance and use it to mixdown and tweak the sounds . There are those that want to create everything from the ground up inside the box, utilizing all of their sound libraries and virtual instruments for the sound sources. Everyone has a different idea of what they can get from their DAW depending on the time they’ve invested getting familiar with their program of choice.

There is so much you can do with these programs that it can be overwhelming. And with all the sexy ( or not so ) updates coming out every year or so it can be a lot to keep up with. So I developed this philosophy that I tried to apply when I was teaching college students as well as for myself and anyone I happen to offer advice to. Divide your learning time between Left Brain and Right Brain use. So what does that mean? Well I’ll explain through my experience as musician and bring it back around to our topic here.

When I first started taking classical bass lessons around age 16 I encountered this concept that I had not really been familiar with up until that point – disciplined/goal oriented practicing. Before studying classically I played some guitar and electric bass primarily by ear and just played things I could pick up, or was at least familiar enough with. I was always pretty fast technically on most instruments I would pick up but didn’t really have the knowledge of how to advance my skills beyond a certain plateau. Then came along the Upright Bass. Being one of the most physically demanding instruments, and most difficult to play in tune, you need to spend a lot of very meditative time on shifting exercises and bowing skills ( not to mention all of the other musically related stuff like theory and sight reading etc…. ) . This means you have to spend a good period of time repeating the shifting of difficult intervals up and down the neck, sometimes traveling distances of 3 feet and more in a very short period of time. Through this process of examining what is difficult and preventing the progression forward you learn how to teach yourself.

You see it takes an extreme degree of patience and discipline to practice for at least 4 hours a day, but it takes even more disciplined focus to make that practice session productive as well. The tendency of most younger musicians is to want to play fast ASAP, run before you can walk type of thing. So you know you should be practicing very slowly and with great focus, but the desire is to want to just play and be creative and enjoy the practice time by glorifying what you know you do well.  Definitely not all the stuff that you know you actually need to work on that mabye isn’t so happening, right? We’re all guilty of this to some degree and I know this was a huge revelation and readjustment for me when this started to set itself into my daily routine.

So now we come back to the topic at hand. To learn these programs well there are basic concepts you need to learn that apply to all DAW’S, and then there are advanced concepts that apply to very specific things. When I first started learning Logic 5 I thought “this program is a nightmare”. I was such a Pro Tools guy that I was completely programmed to approach everything in that way. It was my comfort zone for sure. So I used Pro Tools as my main axe for years and occasionally used Logic 6 and 7 for things where I needed bigger track counts but still used it with a Pro Tools type of an approach, missing a lot of the best stuff that it does. Then Logic 8 came out and I saw what it could do and I lusted. So I finally sat myself down and I said to myself, “ Self, you betta learn dis here program for real.” This is where the old Left Brain has to come to the front. My temptation was to want to just write stuff and create with it but then I just fall into the same patterns and what I needed to do was explore the inner workings of the program itself. Which meant getting deep inside the manual, tutorials, orienting myself with the features of the editors, etc……… I needed to take the time and focus on just learning the program itself and learn to think the way it does. So basically I took a week and just decided I would go through the manual and tutorials and not try to do anything Right Brain-ish. I just wanted to collect skills so that they would be at my disposal later when I really had a concept for something specific. What I mean by this is: When you teach yourself the deeper techniques in these programs such as how to use Beat Detective, or how to print Automation data to a region, or how to create a grid based on a constantly shifting human tempo, you can conceive of more creative ways to utilize the software to serve the musical/audio goals. The Left Brain learning really allows the Right Brain to do it’s thing with much greater capacity.

So spend a week just “woodshedding” the program your diggin the most and when you come out of it your creative abilities will be that much greater. I will also leave you with this little thought. The great pianist Bill Evans said to get good at improvisation you should learn one tune really well so that it becomes second nature, instead of barely learning a million tunes. The same thing applies here, learn one program really well as opposed to trying to learn a little of many, until you understand the fundamental concepts that exist in all of them.

Enough preaching. Back to the woodshed.

Thanks for tuning in as always.

Malcolm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 8:52 pm. It is filed under Logic Pro 9, Misc Software, Pro Tools 8, blog and tagged with Music Theory, Pro Tools 8. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.