#078 - Balancing Time and Value: Insights for Music Professionals

Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation as the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we record and produce this podcast. I pay my deepest respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. Production Talk Podcast: This episode of the Production Talk podcast is brought to you by mixartist.com.au. Production Talk Podcast: Whether you are looking for a top-notch recording studio on Australia's east coast, or if you're looking for online music mixing from wherever you are in the world, mixartist.com.au has the experience and expertise to take your audio to the next level. With our high-end recording studio and online mix-down capabilities, you can achieve the sound you've been dreaming of. So head over to mixartist.com.au and let's make some music magic. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Welcome to the Production Talk podcast. Production Talk Podcast: Join us as we explore the creative and technical aspects of music production with expert guests, practical tips, and exclusive insights. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, you'll find something valuable in every episode of the Production Talk podcast. If you love what you're hearing, don't forget to hit that subscribe button, so you'd never miss an episode. Production Talk Podcast: And while you're at it, why not follow mixartist on social media? So grab your headphones, turn up the volume, and let's get started with another episode of the Production Talk podcast with your host Jan Muths. Production Talk Podcast: Roll the tape! Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Hello and welcome back everybody to the next episode of the Production Talk podcast. It is fantastic to have you all on board again. Thank you so much for joining me today. First and foremost, let me explain what's been going on. I've been on a long break, much, much longer than I initially planned, and have a lot to share with you. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And I wanna lay out the reasons and explain what's been happening on my end. But before we get into all of the details, let's start with all the news. So the most important news for me is that the podcast is now available as a video as well, And it's now also going out to YouTube. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So you can follow us on YouTube, you can still listen to the audio podcast in all the normal places like Apple Podcast or Google Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. But of course, the video version is now also online. If you want to see my face, of course it's up to you. So that's one of the biggest news. It's also technically quite challenging for somebody who's not a video specialist, but I think you'll see it will grow as we go. For the next coming episodes, I have a couple of fantastic interviews lined up. Not every single one of them was recorded as video, but still they will be available as video podcasts with still pictures, instead. However, more future episodes will come out as a Jan 'Yarn' Muths: video podcast, which I hope you will enjoy a lot. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Then of course I had to change podcast providers, but that's an Jan 'Yarn' Muths: entirely different story. Your feed work as expected. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Just trust me that it me, countless hours to work out all the details in the background. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But okay, that's all sorted. Everything is working and it shouldn't make a difference for you. That's an internal side note. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Also the show notes have been completely reworked from scratch, which again took Jan 'Yarn' Muths: me, I dunno how many hours countless evenings at night, on the couch with my laptop to figure all this out. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But it's now a design, in newer design, and most importantly, a more consistent design. And, on a side note, also one that is much quicker for me to release, which is a big topic of today's session, I want to talk about time and value. That's the big subject for today. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And then of course the Production Talk podcast has also received a bit of a facelift. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: We have a new opening music, and very importantly, we have fantastic opening lines Jan 'Yarn' Muths: by a professional speaker. . So let me just spend a couple of moments to talk about what's been happening on my end. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I've taken a relatively long break to rethink lots of things in my life, and it all started with me literally running out of time. Time It's a limited resource. And when my business, the studio, started to really pick up, I literally started run out of time to invest Jan 'Yarn' Muths: into podcast and I really had to rethink how things were going. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And, the same time, I also decided to take a break from all my teaching responsibilities. So I'm currently on long service leave so that I can spend my entire time on doing this: the recording studio business and the mixing business. And it's been actually very busy over the last couple of months. And it took me a long time to come up with a solution Jan 'Yarn' Muths: to do both. And I think I had to bite the bullet and ask for some help to figure things out. And in my case, this was the help of a business coach, who was a little scary for me I have to admit. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But I had to put out all my business details in front of a stranger and got some real, real honest feedback from somebody who knows their stuff much better than I do. And I learned a lot from that. I want to call this brutal truth, you know, the things that were pleasant to hear, but very healthy for me to realize, especially about how I manage money and time, which of course are the big two factors that drive a business, but not only business, of course, also our private lives, and to a large degree, your music career. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So today's episode, would like to dedicate to sharing what I've learned over the last couple of months with you. Talk about what practical implications this has on my recording studio business and how this could also apply to you as a musician. Because , if you want to know about it or not, as a musician, you are pretty much a business. Business is what you are doing. You are not on a salary. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And so therefore there's a lot that can be learned of, of value . So I wanna share everything that I've taken out of it. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So my business coach made me have a very critical look at my profit and loss statements. This is a very boring part of running a business, it's part of the bookkeeping. but in many ways it is actually a very important thing. And I always loved to do all the creative work or the recording, hanging out with musicians here and doing the amazing music that's been coming out of these rooms. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But sitting at home, going through the books, well, hasn't been my favorite part of the business anyway. But nevertheless, it's very important and profit and loss. You can imagine this to be like a bit of a a, a speedometer. It's like a gauge that shows you how you're traveling and it also helps to perform better. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So that's something that I learned when I was a young bloke at school Jan 'Yarn' Muths: doing 800 meter runs for sports. And there was a day when I was just doing the run all by myself, nobody to compete against. And very interestingly, the time Jan 'Yarn' Muths: that I scored was okay, but not fantastic. The week after I was competing against Jan 'Yarn' Muths: somebody else, there were many people running the same time. And interestingly, my time was much better just because I had somebody to compare myself to and see how I was going. And it gave me the drive to try beat the other people. Another example where this happens in my life is with, just a simple thing when I drive. I actually quite enjoy it. However, the one thing I really don't like is to stop at the servo for refueling because I really don't like giving them my money. One of things that I can do in my car is display the current fuel consumption. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So as I drive, it shows me how much I'm currently using and I love this just because it triggers me think about beating the numbers. I shift a gear down when I go downhill to use the compression braking And I immediately noticed reduces my fuel consumption. It is another little example, where having numbers actually helps me drive my behavior in a better direction, for the planet and of course for my wallet. So, that's where the profit and loss statement comes into play for a business. It gives me something look at, how I last month, and it gives me now something to aim for. This month, I try to better that. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: How does this apply to you as a musician? Well Profit and loss is a really dry bookkeeping statement. But you can also rephrase as time and value. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So, in other words, the profit that you generate as a musician can be measured in, in money. It can also be measured in energy. And this is actually something that I personally really like. So let's say if you busk in the streets and you've got a bad place and you busk all by yourself and there's nobody there, that's what I would call a situation where your energy is not giving you any return. In other words, there's no flow of energy. It's not going from you to somebody else. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: However, if you come another day, you get a better sport. There's a crowd gathering. Now, the energy transfers from you to somebody else, and suddenly there's a transfer of energy. That is how we can measure our profits, because without the people receiving the positive energy that your music is, there's simply no transfer of energy. So we can think about your life as a musician and the time you spend effectively transferring positive vibrations, if you want to call it so, positive energy through your music to others. That's when you are most valuable. That's the time when you are very valuable. There are other moments as well. Let's say when you spend three hours cleaning up your rehearsal room and rolling cables. Don't get me wrong, this is necessary every once in a while, but there is actually no transfer of positive energy towards others and therefore there won't be any return for you from this except for having a rehearsal room. So we could say that although both of these things are important, one of them is more valuable than the other, and this is really what profit and loss balance is all about. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: To look at all the things we do on a daily basis. And focus on the things that actually do provide value to others and also the things that don't. And to drive your music business into the right direction you need to do the same thing that my business coach taught me. You need to reduce the amount of time that you spend without transferring positive energy to others and increase the time where you do provide value to other people. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So, that sounds really simple at first, but practically, of course it is not as easy. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And for my business, this has been a painful, long thinking process with several failures along the way and rethinking and redoing it and learning. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But I think I'm heading in a good direction So for example, for me, for my business, if I'm here recording a band, then I'm literally providing a value to somebody else and they walk away with something that they couldn't have done without me. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That is providing value. This is something really important, but then also comes the time when I, let's say, go shopping for tea and cookies. I provide tea and cookies for my, for my, uh, for my clients , if I do this on business hours, that is actually not something that provides much value directly. So, I try to no longer do this during the time of work, but I try to do it on the weekend as I do the family shopping as well. I kill two birds with one stone and rather than going to the shops in the morning every day, I just do it once a week when I'm already at the shops, for my family shopping. So, that takes all the extra time out that I usually spend to do simple basic shopping. I never considered this be a big deal but if you sum this up every day, it actually equates to a lot of time. So What I'm trying to do is reduce the time that I spend on things that not providing a direct value to others. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: The important part is to really think about the time that you spend on tasks that don't provide a value to others, and find a quicker way to get better results so that you spent less time on that. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Once you manage cut back , you gain time, which of course now needs to be invested into the other things, the moments when you do provide value. So, for you, this could be to rethink what you do at rehearsals. So, maybe think about how much time you actually spent in rehearsal room, practicing your music. Maybe there is a lot of time when you chatter and nothing wrong with that, you know, there's a value for this as well. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But maybe think about you can cut back a little bit and spend more time actually practicing the one part in the song that is a little bit tricky to play and play this 10 times in a, in a loop instead. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: When you play gigs, this the prime example. Now when you play gigs, then there's a direct transfer of energy from you to others. That's when are most valuable. time you spend at a gig, that's when you are worth a lot of money. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: However, if you, if you spend many hours preparing your merchandising for shipping, fulfilling merchandise orders. Well, this now adds a lot of hours to your job. And whatever income you have needs to be divided those hours. So, that brings your hourly rate down. So, what I'm trying to say is that you may wanna look at options to reduce the time you, spent on fulfilling merchandise. It could also be that you look at getting more work done in less time. It could be that you decide to outsource this to somebody else, maybe there's I don't know, a teenager, the neighbor's kid who knows who would like to work for a relatively low wage or a pocket money and just help you out for a couple of hours, that's where you can free up some time and invest this into other tasks that provide more value. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: There's other moments in your life. Let's say you spend time on the phone calling up all the local venues for gigs to play. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: This is probably a very, very valuable time for you because when you spend, let's say three hours this afternoon calling up 15 different people and then sending follow up emails, that's when you actually spend time that has a direct return for you because now get gigs out of it. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That's time that's really well spent. So, I would like to take this a little bit further and now talk about what this actually meant for my podcast, because this way of thinking, this way of thinking as I learned from my business coach, threw a huge spanner in works for my podcasting. I actually had to write down numbers in front of my business coach and write down the time that I spend on coming up with ideas for the podcast, producing it post-production, publishing and then all the marketing. And I actually had a look at it and I averaged it at 1.5 days of work for every single episode. Let me just, think back for a second. Let just take a deep breath here. Deep down I knew, but seeing these numbers. Black on white, on a sheet of paper in front of me made me think, okay, that's one and a half days that I'm not actually spending in the studio with clients. This is also one and half days that I'm not making an income for my family. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That was confronting for me. It was not the truth that I wanted to hear, but it was healthy to hear it anyway, that's what I needed to hear. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And then the business coach asked me to write down the return I'm getting from this. So I think there is a big return on sending my positive energy your way. That is something that is very valuable and I deeply believe from the bottom of the my heart that this something that in whatever form I want continue, I want be a giver. I want to share knowledge. But looking at the gauge, again at the speedometer of my business, I needed to map the time I spent against the monetary value that I got in return. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And I don't have a business case. That's what my business coach told me, black and white, upfront in my face as, yeah, the brutal truth that I guess I needed to hear. The business coach told me stop podcasting immediately, unless you come with better way. Whew. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And that's what's been on my mind for many, many weeks and months. Production Talk Podcast: Production Talk fans. We know you're loving the show, but are you following us on social media, yet? Our channels are your backstage pass to all things music production. We've got exclusive content, sneak peeks, and occasionally some insider tips from Yarn's Studio. So, hit that subscribe button and follow us on social to join the conversation and stay in the loop. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Head over to speakpipe.com/productiontalk. It's your chance to get your own voice onto the Production Talk podcast. It could be a question, it could be a comment, it could be some feedback or something exciting that you want the podcast community to hear. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Head over to speakpipe.com/productiontalk, I would love to hear from you. You rock. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So I looked at it from both angles, again. I looked at the value that I'm providing. So when I'm right here in the moment, making a podcast episode, sending something out to you, I still believe that there's a certain value to it. As an energy transferring for me to you, and I love doing it, but I also need to come up with a way to reduce my time. So that is something that I spent again, a lot of time on researching. So, I came up with methods to edit my podcast differently. And that actually means I'm stepping away from editing in Pro Tools. That's what I used to do. I had to face the brutal truth that there is another way that ends being faster, but first I had to learn it. So I'm now using a different editor that actually saves me time on the long run. But the learning curve of actually getting to point of being so fast to actually justify this new workflow, that took me a while. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I was actually really fast in Pro Tools, but I now needed to step out of it, learn a new piece of software, And I was really bad at it at first, so I spent a lot of time researching and so on and so on. And I was very ineffective at first. It took me much longer produce an episode , so I had to learn this first, and now I'm at a point where yes I can beat my Pro Tools time, so I'm now better and faster in another piece of software, then I am in Pro Tools. So in other words, I've now learned to produce an episode in less time, and my goal is to spend not more than three hours per episode. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That is a huge amount of time saving, from about a day and a half. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: For that I also had to learn how to handle my website much better. Because, before that, the publishing process through the aggregators, through my website was a lot, a lot, a lot of manual labor. And that means, again, I had to learn a lot about web development. In this case I'm using Wix for my website. I had to learn how to program databases and feed them into dynamic pages. It gets really technical and for somebody got no background in in web design, this was a major catastrophe at first. I pulled my hair out. But I got through it eventually, I'm starting to wrap my head around it, and I can now publish episodes through my website through a new aggregator or publisher much faster than I could before. And interestingly, that aggregator is costing me less than my past publishing tool. So I'm now saving money and time, which gets me into the good books with my business coach. That's exactly how it should be. Good. So yeah. long story short: does all of this mean for my podcast? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I managed to produce it in less time at a better quality. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And I still found a way to get past my business coach and manage to have the podcast transfer knowledge, valuable wisdom nuggets, whatever energy you want to call it from me to you .But there's one more aspect that um, that we also need to look at Jan 'Yarn' Muths: here. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I would you to tell me what type of a podcast listener you are. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: It could be that you are the active type. It might be that you are sitting right next to a sheet of paper and a sharpie and every knowledgeable or every every new piece information you write down immediately, by the end of today, it's implemented and you got a value out of it for you. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That will be great, because there's another energy transfer from what you hear through your podcast player to you, into something actionable that actually makes your music career better. I hope that's you. I hope that's you. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Then you might be more of a casual listener, and you might be listening in. You like the entertainment. Maybe you while you drive, and every once while a little piece of information comes along. And on the long run, maybe from a collection of 10 great things that you learn, you might implement one or two. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Hmm. Okay? Still there's something there, but I think we could all agree that, again, looking at the time you spend listening and the outcome in this scenario, that could be better. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And then of course there is the third example. The binge listener who listens to every single episode and never implements anything. Well, I still hope you have a great time listening to this podcast, but that's really not what I'm here for. If you never put any of the things that I share with you into action, then I'm either providing good value, or maybe you know it all already, or maybe you're just not transferring the energy because what's the point of it? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: If you don't ever turn it into something valuable for you, then you're better off not listening to this podcast, but doing something else. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Maybe you should practice your instrument or maybe work a couple of extra hours in your job, or maybe spend more time with your family than to to this podcast. So where am I going with all of this? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Podcasts won't the only offering. That's my point here. I would like to offer something to you that is actionable, that comes with practical implementations, and therefore I'm very proud to announce that we are are now offering workshops at this studio. In studio workshops. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So the first that I started is a recording engineer workshop. It's workshop that is aiming towards other professional producers, freelance engineers the kind of people who record their clients sometimes here, sometimes there. Freelance engineers who sometimes just work from home, sometimes need a bigger studio. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And this workshop is designed to take the scary part out of operating all the gears. It explains every single thing that I do start to finish. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: This workshop is offered in person, So you can hang out with me, and team. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And if that's not for you, you can also participate online and complete it all in your own pace. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So this is something where I try to transfer knowledge In a way that it can be applied straight away. There is of course, the risk that people participate and never do anything with the knowledge they gained. That's why I decided to add a price tag to it. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: However, it also comes with a reward, and the reward is very simple. People who participate in this course will then get $50 off for every studio booking. In other words, after a couple of studio bookings, they've made the money worth and then they actually make a benefit or have a better deal every day on. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: This is to encourage action. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Then of course, the courses available online as well. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: However, It's really only beneficial for people who either want to know about how I engineer or who want to come in and operate this studio by themselves, which is, I believe, a very small niche a very small percentage of our listeners here. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But I've also made another course online that is probably beneficial for pretty much everybody. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: It's called Monetize Your music in Six Simple Steps and this is free for every listener and will keep it free, I promise. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: It is available now now on my website and it is explaining the most basic steps. So if you are a super advanced musician who's really good at monetizing music, you may not get too much out of it, but you can still do it just to double check if you actually covered all the grounds, maybe there's something you missed. But most importantly, this online course is aiming at people who are at the beginning of their music career and who want to check if they have set themselves up the right way. With actionable steps. So that's something that I would like to share with the public today. It's all on my website, and of course I'm going to put the link into the show notes. But the starting point is to go to Jan 'Yarn' Muths: mixartist.com.au, scroll down to the online courses. This is just a starter. A lot of the things that I believe needs action on your end will become online courses. So I'm already working on the next one. I want to set up a course on setting up the digital infrastructure for a band or an artist. I would like to talk about social media and marketing and promotion. And there's other things that I also want to offer. In addition to the podcast, of course. So this now goes hand in hand. This is me offering something that will hopefully transfer my knowledge, my energy across to you, and comes out the other end in actionable steps in a measurable difference for you. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: That's the goal. And I hope that you all enjoy what I have to, offer there. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Let's just sum it up one more time. So what can you take out of today's episode? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Time and money. Those are values that you can easily measure. I often talk about the energy that I like to transfer, which is maybe a little bit of a gray area and not easily measured, but time and money definitely is. And I think most us, we all agree that we would like to have a bit more money, and spend a little less time working for it. So that's generally the direction that we need to aim for. Reducing the time and effort we put into it and get a better value out of it. This is something that is very dear to my heart, and I'd like to invite you to really think about all the steps that you go through and ask yourself, how much time did you spend on it, and was it worth it? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So let's come up with a couple of examples. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: As a musician, chances are you are the composer, songwriter, arranger of your own art. This is something that you could outsource if you like. So a lot of high-end musicians hire external songwriters, but you might decide that this is really your superpower and you wanna keep doing it for the love of it. That's a very fair point. So maybe this is not what you want to outsource. Good point. Very good point. At some stage you want to take your songs once they're written and release them, so therefore, you now need to go through the production steps. That's recording, mixing, mastering, that's what I would call production. So, when it comes to recording, you can probably do a lot of things at home equally well. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: If you record electric guitars into, let's say a DI box or into the instrument input of your interface and use re-amps, don't book a studio that's not the right thing to do. It's too expensive for the outcome. You can do this just as well at home. MIDI keyboard, same thing. You can record the performance perfectly fine at home. No need to go to a studio. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Drums, Hmm, that's another story. I think that if you try to record drums at home, usually a studio can get a better outcome here. And I think the same applies for vocals. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Good. Let's talk about mixing for a moment. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Mixing is something that a lot of people do themselves and there's wrong with that. But let's also add the factor time in. So if you mixed own music, think about how much time did it take. There's a very good chance that if you hired somebody else who mixes on a regular basis and does it for a living, we can get a really, really good outcome in a lot less time. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: If it takes you 20 hours to mix one song, think about it. You know, you could hire, let's talk about me. let's talk about somebody else we had in our podcast. Let's say Kamal Engels. You can hire Kamal to mix your song for X amount of dollars. Divide the money spent for Kamal over 20 hours that now gives you your hourly rate. There's a very good chance that if you calculate this number and honestly look at the numbers, you realize that you are working for a very low hourly wage. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So one thing you could consider is to spend the 20 hours doing daytime job or playing gigs, and think about how much money you make this way. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: This might pay for Kamal to do it the proper way. You see where I'm coming from? I don't wanna say this is exactly how it needs to be for you. Maybe you want to continue to mix at home by yourselves, but look at the time and money value. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Let's take it the next step. Mastering Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Compared to mixing, mastering is a relatively affordable process, so you can get one of the best mastering engineers in the country for approximately 150 song. You can get some really good quality mastering from engineers locally in the area, I would say it starts under a hundred, maybe just over a a hundred, in that general pocket, per song, you can get fantastic sounding masters. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Okay, let's do the time and value check again. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: You could go to an online service and do it, for a couple of dollars or sometimes for free. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Well, how can you beat that, from a time value perspective? That's super fast and it costs just a couple of dollars. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: What about quality is my question. And that's the big catch 22. The quality of online mastering, in my personal opinion, is not up for it. It's not good enough. Every single e mastering, or whatever they're called I've tested. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And, although I'm not calling myself a mastering engineer, I don't do this professionally, Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I still can out master each of 'em easily. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Every single time I take a mix and upload it to those services and compare to a quick and dirty master that do: mine is better. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: It's very simple. So quality is the problem here. But, uh, for a demo recording, if just release a demo for the purpose of a, you know, getting gigs, then this is probably exactly what you must do. It would be a waste hire the most expensive mastering engineer in the country. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But if you release your music the general public, I would recommend to rethink this a little. Quality is something that well, You need to get good value here, a good value to quality ratio, but you don't want to go for the cheapest. Trust me, you will regret that. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So you could now look at mastering Jan 'Yarn' Muths: and look at, let's say, let's pick a mastering engineer who offers a single, for let's say a hundred dollars. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: And now you could try to master the song yourself. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Okay. For that, you, Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I assume you're not a mastering engineer yet. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: you might need to do some research. You need to spend time online. You probably want to watch a couple of videos. You might find that you now need to download software and you put it through the processes. Okay. How long is this gonna take you? I would say that there's a very good that the day after you wanna listen to it one more time and realize, oh, oh that wasn't right, and want to go back and fix it. Very quickly, we're at a place where, you spend so much time on trying to get it to an acceptable level that it, brought your hourly rate down ridiculously. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: You could have done it for a hundred dollars with a professional, and now you spend, I dunno, 10 hours researching and trying. That means your hourly rate is now $10. Is that worth it? Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Hmm. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Recording and mixing is very debatable, but when it comes to professional mastering, Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I end up saying that it's very difficult to get a better value than hiring a professional in all honesty. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: But okay. This is just one example where measuring the time you invest, the quality you get and also the monetary value might help you to make better decisions. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: So moving forward in your music business doesn't mean that must outsource every single task you do. But it's all about identifying the time wasters. It's about identifying the things that you're not really good at and put a monetary value to the time that you try. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: This might help you to make the right decisions and get your productions better and quicker, with less effort. I hope this all made sense to you. Lemme just go over my notes. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I think I'm pretty much done for the day. This episode will be out very soon. I'm very excited to be back. Thank you for listening . I hope you got something out for yourselves. We'll be back next week with. a big interview with Cass Eager about her music career. Jan 'Yarn' Muths: I your music, Cass. Can't wait! And see you next week. Bye for now. Production Talk Podcast: That's a wrap for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Production Talk podcast. Thanks to our expert host, Jan Muths and our sponsor, mixartist.com.au for making this show possible. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and follow mixartist on social media to stay up to date on all things music production. Production Talk Podcast: And, if you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you, just drop us a line at mixartist.com.au/contact. Until next time, keep creating and producing great music.