Hey guys,

Pretty philosophical post here but I’m wondering how do y’all go about finding a balance between continuing to learn more about mixing and mastering and applying your knowledge through experience?

I’m a bedroom producer. Turned my place into a home studio. I consider myself to be a step above amateur and a step below pro when it comes to audio engineering but as I’ve come to understand, the learning never stops in this profession.

I do what I can to deepen my understanding of audio engineering and mixing but I find myself sometimes stuck in cycles of doing project after project to apply my current knowledge and widen my skillset and efficiency but wondering what else I could be missing to get to that next level. But as y’all know, each project is a time consuming process and when I get in this cycle it can be hard to put things on pause to take a week and do another deep dive into the aspects of music and mixing that I don’t completely understand or grasp, especially with the clients I work with that have time-based expectations.

I believe there’s a difference between learning in the sense of listening to a podcast casually while I’m on a drive/critically listening to different genres of music vs sitting down and actively taking notes on things like A/V routing in music, or studying and memorizing my DAW’s hotkeys, for example.

How do y’all juggle this cycle between gaining experience or applying your skills and actively seeking out knowledge on what you don’t know or desire a better understanding of? Thanks.

EDIT: I’m not sure if I accidentally mentioned it somewhere in this post but I don’t have an issue with songwriting. That, luckily, comes more naturally to me. I’m talking mainly about mixing and production.