The Secret To Happier Clients, Fewer Revisions, And Faster Projects

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, Episode 35 You're listening to the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, with my co-host, Mr. Chris Graham. Hey, Chris, how you doing today, buddy?

Chris Graham (0:26)

I'm great, Brian. How are you, sir?

Brian Hood (0:29)

Oh, my God.

Chris Graham (0:30)

How are you, sir?

Brian Hood (0:31)

I'm doing pretty good, man. I'm a little weirded out from the season finale for Westworld, but I'll make it.

Chris Graham (0:41)

Me too. Just pretend you understand, like we're all doing right now.

Brian Hood (0:44)

I'm so smart and I understand everything. No, I didn't get it. Anyways, this episode is all about what is the topic today, Chris? Actually, I always tell it and you can actually probably explain this topic idea better than I can.

Chris Graham (0:55)

Yeah, so Brian and I, we were having a conversation before we recorded this about feedback loops, not audio ones, not like that when you put a microphone close to your studio monitor on accident and they're both on and it sounds like hell. We're talking about feedback loops, as in feedback from your customers, feedback from your customers' fans, stuff that you can use to improve your final product other than just being a genius.

Brian Hood (1:25)

And I think when we start talking about feedback loops and the importance of feedback loops, one of the things that I think is universally understood as a positive is speeding up the feedback loop. So from the time you do the work to the time you get some sort of feedback from someone, including yourself, how fast can you make that loop? And the faster the better. So the example I've used on this podcast before is in the photography world. When digital photography came about, it sped up the feedback loop so much that they had massive improvements in all areas of photography because you could take a photo and then instantly see what you had just done, as opposed to before digital photography, you would have to take a photo on film and then wait days or weeks before you could see what actually happened. So your feedback loop was stretched out a long ways, and that really slows down learning a lot.

So that same thing applies to audio where we're trying to talk about what areas can we improve our feedback loop on? What can we do to speed those areas up?

And specifically, we have some areas that we think need to have the fastest feedback loop possible in order to both have a better product and to have happier clients and three, make your life a lot easier.

Chris Graham (2:34)

Yeah, because the big thing here is that the faster the feedback loop is, the faster you learn.

If you have a really slow feedback loop and it takes a while before you have something the customer can say, I like this or I don't like this, you don't learn as quick, there's less opportunity for improvement. And honestly, that's been a big advantage for myself as a mastering engineer. My feedback loop is really fast because my turnaround is really fast. A mastering project doesn't take that long. But back in the day, when I was the all-singing, all-dancing producer who helped write songs, who recorded everything, who tracked everything, who mixed everything, who edited everything, it took a really, really long time to start to get feedback from the customer. And there's a great story from a friend of mine that I've mentioned in the podcast before that's the perfect example of why you need feedback loops. He got hired by a band. He recorded the band. He tracked all the drums. And then he spent an entire week editing the drums before he showed the band anything, sent the rough mixes, including drum edits to the band. And the band said, we don't like this. Please put the drums back to the way they were when we tracked them. He just tanked a week.

And that is an example of a long feedback loop. There are feedback loop issues there.

And while it might seem efficient to work in that way, to batch, sometimes it's extremely inefficient because if you f up, you're stuck with it. You lost a bunch of time.

Brian Hood (4:03)

Absolutely. And every single niche or every single service that we provide in the audio industry has natural feedback loops that are some are longer, some are shorter. So my world of mixing, it's a lot longer than your world of mastering inherently. And for production, tracking, editing, mixing and mastering is way longer than even mixing and probably 10x longer than even mastering, if not more. So obviously, some areas are going to be faster feedback loops than others, but that does not mean that there are not ways you can speed up the feedback loop in all of these areas. So today we're going to discuss a lot of these different areas and ways to speed the feedback loop up in your area, whatever service you're providing.