Blog

PHEW! Taking Dec off of audio engineering

Phew, work year for me is now a wrap, and I’m not taking in any more mixes/masters for 2020 – feel free to send in, though, and you’re immediately in the queue.
Returning to action to work on the queue on Jan 4, 2021.

It was a CRAZY workyear. While Corona made some people lose their jobs, my workload increased, as producers spent more time indoors.
I’ve always worked a lot and been a bit of a workaholic, but this year truly takes the cake and smashed all previous records.
By October, I had probably worked as much as I usually do in a year. At times, I felt I needed a helper, and TBH I burnt myself out at one point and had to take a quick break to mellow down and breathe in deep for a week, but I managed to snap back to action quickly, and the rest of the year, while intense as heck and while I often ended up mixing and mastering in the weekends, posed no problems.

No idea how many songs it was, but looking at the number of invoices sent and trying to go for an average number of songs per client, I’d say 500-600 songs might be a realistic number.
Mind you, some of those were large mixes, some stem masters, some masters, and for some mixes, I did videos for the clients (that service was pretty popular this year).

I got lots of new clients, ranging from hobbyists to professional musicians who make and perform music for a living. A quick skim thru annual records says I’ve had clients from 22 countries this year.
Leading countries are UK, US, and Finland.

Top genre is definitely bassy music: house, DNB, trap, etc.
This year definitely saw me get more popular on the house front, not least because of success of John Summit and all the songs I’ve mixed and mastered for him.
A song of his, “Deep End”, a mix+master by yours truly, was seen holding overall #1 for 2-3 weeks. My work in total got millions of streams this year, and one was sent in as a Grammy suggestions by a big record label (fingers crossed for 2021!)

I left zero clients unhappy all year, and this is a fact I’m happy to say.
You definitely develop a hunch for these things, and even some large mix cases where the client kicks off with no refs and no actual sense of how it would sound and gets frustrated in the beginning after v1 that doesn’t sound like he/she’d like I was able to save by trying to understand what the client wants with good discussions about the direction of the music.

I had planned on posting tons of audio engineering content, but, “unfortunately”, was so busy with work, I didn’t get to do much of that.
In a way, though, I’m kind of happy and proud that I’ve been able to establish a solid, worldwide business providing me with a solid living without promoting my work much; I don’t do memes (god no) or funny posts for attention, and haven’t posted that much related content either (while that I did want).
In this field, it’s largely thru word-of-mouth anyways that you get bookings, so as an engineer, the good work you do earns you clients more than anything.

And, oh yeah, sure enough there are around 130 client reviews on the page, but as you can see, only 70-ish are counted. I contacted FB about this 4 times until they actually admitted the counter IS broken.

I’m taking one full month off.
Probably needs no explanation after an exceptional year like this, but sometimes the downside of this job is that after spending a lot of time on others’ music, discussing its nuances, mixing it, talking about every day – it can really make a dent on the hunger and energy for your own music and you’re not feeling it on your freetime. And I really miss making music at this point.
The con this year was that especially in Q4, I got barely any new music of my own made. An analogy (and I’ve actually verified this with two chefs): when you cook full-time as your job, you’re not that stoked to cook on your freetime.
So, I just want to take December to finish some stuff of my own and start some new ones to finish off in 2021.
After all, being a producer made me an audio engineer, and I gotta water that producer plant, too.

Anyways, thanks for everybody for this year, and let’s rock hard in 2021!