Weekly Public Journal

(This journal may contain Amazon affiliate links)

Jan. 24th - 28th

This week I journaled a lot less, but I spent a ton of time reading.

Reading about what? Music.

On Tuesday I started reading a book by Bobby Owsinski called The Mixing Engineer's Handbook which is essentially a college textbook. And the week feels like it flew by.😭

I finished the book! (Or at least, I made it through part 1, which was 266 pages of dense information.)

I probably averaged 5 hours of reading per day over the last 5 days, including this morning! I've been reading since 9:30am and just finished (it's 1:34pm).

I bought this little journal, which I hope will help me document and solidify everything I learn from books like this and from other areas online. It's time to take this dream of mine seriously, and that dream is to release my own albums of music (and for those albums to represent the best that I have to offer musically).

It's not just fun, it's a need for expression. It's a side of myself no one could possibly see without hearing my music... but I haven't MADE any music for anyone to hear so I'm slowly going crazy.🤪

So I feel I need to release music, but how do I do that?

I've come to understand that there are four steps in the process of being an artist that releases my own music.

Here are the four steps:

• Songwriting

This is what I've been doing since I was 10 or 11. It involves creating melodies and lyrics. I'm happy to say that I've written or co-written roughly 70 songs, but I'm really anxious to move on to the next step.

• Producing

First, this would be recording those songs. So, the production process involves a recording engineer. Then you do two other things: clean up those recordings and lay out / organize all the individual parts to form the song in your software. Those last two steps require a producer.

• Mixing

This gets into some real techie stuff, as if producing wasn't technical enough.🙄

You'd need to read a book like the one I listed at the top of this post to really understand it. But basically the job of the mixing engineer is to take what the producer has and then make it bigger, clearer, and better than it is. They make it sound professional. And they use A LOT of digital tools to do that job. It's not magic, it can be understood, and luckily it's cheaper and more accessible now than ever before.

• Mastering

A mastering engineer in 2023 is basically someone with all the knowledge that a mixing engineer has, but has chosen to specialize in one thing: listening. They listen to your songs alongside your other songs. They listen to your song alongside other peoples songs. They ensure that your songs will sound as good as your competition's (this largely has to do with how loud it is). They ensure consistency in levels and feel. The tools they use would be some of the same tools a good mixing engineer should know all about.

I'm just trying to be a one-man songwriter, recording engineer, producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer. Lord help me.

This is where my head was this week! I hope to release music like little 12 year old me used to dream of doing! I've already got a lot of gear, it's time to do some work!

Is there anything you've wanted to do for awhile now, but need to just dive into or else it will never happen?

Tough question. But much love.

Cam

📢Stuff I Want To Tell You About

Not much this week! Just a new game that was shared with me that I've been enjoying:

🎮 Video Game – Outer Wilds This game won a lot of awards, made by students. Here's the thing to know: you can't be in a rush. Take it slow and take it all in. You fly a spaceship around and explore different planets and try to piece together the secrets of your little universe. The music in this game plus the visuals is an experience to fall in love with.

Please check out my YouTube channel!

Thank you for reading this far! If you are at all interested in supporting me, go subscribe to my YouTube channel, watch a video and let me know any thoughts you have. I'm learning how to be a YouTuber and I could use all the feedback that I can get! I try to post once every two weeks.