The Studio Notes #2 Finding Your People
Lift your friends up, and sometimes they need to lift you up. Simple right?
Straight away - a massive thank you to everyone who got in touch/emailed/messaged about TSN #1. The size of response was not expected, so the pressure is on for the follow up! Thank you all for the ideas, kind words and the encouragement!
I mentioned in TSN #1 about the ‘crew’, and this was the subject of a few of those responses. So I thought it would be good to dig into what it is, what it means to me, and how its impacted myself and the success, see below, that I’ve felt in this industry.
“Success is not something you get, you just allow yourself to feel it.” Someone once said this to me ages ago. There is no measure, other than your own. The ones you’re probably thinking of now, money/numbers are all fleeting - trust me! Just wanted to drop that in here.
Anyway! - Mastering (my day job) is predominantly a solitary business, you work on your own and often are a team of one. When I had to make a choice or a decision, I had to mull it over myself, often without voicing it out loud at all. But that hasn’t actually been the case for a number of years now.
Over the past decade, I’ve been lucky enough to build friendships and communities of like minded engineers/artists/producers and business owners that form - this ‘crew’.
The ‘crew’, isn’t just one group, or a person/persons. It’s the phrase I have for these different people in my life who navigate this business alongside me. If you work in any role like mine, you need these people in your life. But remember, do not be selfish, you will also need to be that same person back. You should then be apart of someone else’s ‘crew’. Because for these communities and relationships to thrive and survive, it cannot be a one way street to those that help support you.
One example that most embodies this:
A shout-out right away to my ‘mastering group crew’. A classy bunch of people who all practice the ancient art of making things loud. I joke, but they truly are a classy bunch of friendly, open and engaged masters (pun massively intended) of their craft. We all speak regularly, and it can be about anything and everything. From the technical process of mastering, to what is the earliest date to respectfully buy mince pies (October Stephen?). And cat photos, a lot of cat photos.
We joke, we laugh, we break the rules, and we laugh at the people who try and make them. (I think there will be a TSN post coming about rule breaking soon!).
It has been a significantly informative part of my professional career, and I really cannot state that enough. It has helped me firm up the confidence I have in my skills, expanded my knowledge, and thus allowed me to help and share that knowledge.
Along those lines of knowledge and experience, there is no gatekeeping between us. We just help each other however we can. If someone is struggling with a difficult client, or encountering a troublesome project, there is always someone who’s encountered it, or has been through something similar before.
So why is it so important to me? It keeps me sane. Honestly, having that specific space to confidently nerd out on a new plugin, or lend/receive advice, is just fantastic. It’s a place of fun and laughs mostly, but we do get serious (on occasion), and I’m there for all of it.
Find your people, build a group.
The hard part is reaching out, and I do know that’s hard for a lot of people. But start by just supporting the people around you first, as you must not go in asking straight away. You need to offer first. Our group didn’t start over night, and we do not add 100’s of people to it every day. (It is most certainly not a social media group!) We all met at different times, and slowly over a number of years we built connections and importantly - that trust. Then only after that we started to gather together. That’s how it’s got to be for your crews. It has to be curated, it has to be proactively kept together, and you must put in more than you take out.
It will take some time, but if you want it to be good it will have to.
Good. Go build your ‘crew’ :)
Message back! Always up for a reply or a question, so do reach out!