Just watched Pensado's Place with Bob Clearmountain

Not sure why I watch those Youtubes....but this one with Bob was truly something, if he didn't actually make Dave Pensado seem kinda like a noob...or a boob...or whatever.    Of course very friendly all around, but I got the impression Bob wasn't going to get all technical and just is a knob twister until is sounds good, and Dave didn't seem to understand that.  Herb did.

That was pretty good. It drives home the point that you can't acquire another person's skills by copying what he does. BC does something different on every song.
 
To emulate a master such as BC, you'd have to get into his head, and I'm not sure that's even possible. Just try to describe your own mental images that you visualize when you listen to music. It's nearly impossible, even though everybody knows what you're talking about.
 
Last night I fell asleep with headphones on, as I often do. I woke up as a dream was underway in which every sound was a physical thing floating around me. Some were jagged and made me want to avoid touching them, some were like a sticky substance on the floor that rooted me to a spot. All were unpleasant in some regard. 
 
It was my own mix, and my last thought as I drifted back to sleep was I'm going to toss that mix out the window in the morning and start over. Of course, by this morning I'd forgotten the specifics. But what remains is a feeling that if I could just get back into that weird syneasthesiatic frame of mind again I'd know what to do next. That, I suspect, is where Mr. Clearmountain lives all the time.
 
 

Pensado almost wanted to approach it as a math problem and I have found that sometimes that has a certain amount of merit.  But when you rely on formulas there is a point where you come in contact with variables that a stock formula does not take into consideration.  Pensado has said many times that he messes with things until it sounds good and it's pretty evident that Clearmountain does the same thing.

One thing that BC said that gave me a certain amount of relief was that you just have to work with what you've got.
 
How many times have we proven that over and over again but always in the back of our mind thought if I only had a rack of 16 Neves, a dozen 1176s, a half dozen L2as and a EMT plate verb, I could get this tune finished and sounding much better.

MakeShift
I have always found it interesting that a lot of the great ones come across as to not knowing a lot technically about their gear or their engineering approach. You expect them to give out a lot of engineering type details....and they will commonly say....I rotated the knobs until it sounded good.

I'm a big fan of the Norwegian electro producer Lindstrom and I've always been impressed with the technical brilliance of some of his music. I was delighted to watch a Future Music "In The Studio" video with him in which he basically came across as someone who is by no means an expert on the gear or software he uses, but instead twiddles with things until they sound good. Things like that give me hope. I'm sure a lot of the pros work like this.