In a Reddit post titled “Last Words of Reddit Advice from a Retiring Engineer,” u/spencer_martin shared some parting thoughts after more than fifteen years of working on other people’s music.
There was advice about monitoring, arrangement, production, and making more music instead of endlessly collecting information about it. There was also a lot of frustration with online audio education.
But the idea that stuck with me was about where we look for solutions.
His argument was that engineers can spend enormous amounts of time trying to fix something in the mix that began much earlier in the process. The arrangement is overcrowded. The production hasn’t established a direction. The parts aren’t working together. Yet the search continues for a mixing technique that will make everything click.
The same pattern shows up in the business of mixing.
Getting better can hide the real problem
You can spend years improving your mixes while barely addressing the reasons your business isn’t working.
And because improving your mixes is useful, it can be difficult to recognize when it has become a way of avoiding something else.
You’re learning. You’re practicing. You care about the work. None of that is fake.
But what problem are you actually solving?
If people hire you and keep telling you they’re disappointed with the sound, your mixing deserves attention.
If hardly anyone knows you exist, there’s a different question to investigate.
If people inquire but disappear after receiving a quote, you need to understand what happened in that conversation.
If your calendar is full and you still can’t cover your expenses, you need to examine what you charge, what you include, and how much work each project requires.
Those situations can all feel like “my business isn’t doing well.” They require different responses.
A tutorial can’t make that diagnosis for you.
Good advice, wrong afternoon
This is where consuming educational content gets complicated. The next topic arrives already chosen. You open a platform and someone is explaining a technique, demonstrating a tool, or identifying a mistake you might be making.
You can follow that sequence indefinitely without ever asking whether it corresponds to your actual circumstances.
In the thread’s comments, moderator u/atopix offered a useful response to the original post’s frustration: being self-taught requires learning how to evaluate information. There is good material online. Finding it and deciding whether it applies are part of the work.
I’d extend that further.
Before deciding whether advice is good, ask whether it addresses a problem you have.
Excellent advice can still be the wrong use of your afternoon.
Here are six questions I’d want an engineer to work through before deciding that more technical education is the next business investment.
1. Where does work actually come from?
Look back through your paid projects. Trace each one to the person, introduction, relationship, or activity that brought it to you.
If you don’t know how work reaches you, you’re making decisions about getting more of it without understanding what has already worked.
You might discover that a handful of relationships have done more for your business than years of posting.
2. Where are potential clients dropping out?
Separate having few inquiries from having inquiries that don’t become projects.
Then look at the actual conversations. Did the artist have a project ready? Was the budget discussed? Did they understand your offer? Was there a clear next step? Did either of you follow up?
Calling all of this “I need more clients” hides the information you need to act.
3. What does someone understand about hiring you?
Read your website and messages from the perspective of an artist making a decision.
Can they understand what you do, whether you’re relevant to their music, what the process involves, and how to begin?
Your ability may exceed what your presentation makes visible. That gap deserves attention.
4. What does a project really pay you?
Consider the full workload: preparation, messages, editing, mixing, revisions, delivery, and administration.
A fee that initially looks reasonable can become difficult to sustain when the work expands.
Before deciding you need more bookings, establish whether more of the same bookings would produce the business you want.
5. What happens after delivery?
Look at your completed projects. Who returned? Who referred someone? Who released more music without contacting you again?
You won’t know every reason. But you can examine whether you stayed in touch, made the experience worth repeating, and understood what the client was doing next.
Finishing the files is one part of maintaining a working relationship.
6. What work do you actually want more of?
The original poster was stepping back from pursuing services to focus on his own creative work. That matters.
A career can change because someone’s priorities change. Leaving a particular kind of work doesn’t, by itself, tell us that they failed at it.
Before optimizing your business, ask what you want it to support. More mixing? More production? Fewer projects? Time for your own music? A steadier income with less availability?
Those answers should influence what you build.
Before the next tutorial
Working through these questions might lead you back to technical development. Good. Now there’s a reason for it.
It might also lead you to rewrite an offer, clarify your process, reconnect with a collaborator, or change how you handle revisions.
The point is to choose your next action based on evidence from your business.
I teach and publish content, so this standard applies to my work too. Something being interesting, persuasive, or useful to another engineer doesn’t automatically make it your next priority.
Before opening another tutorial, finish this sentence:
“The problem I’m trying to solve is ______, and I have reason to believe this will help because ______.”
If you can answer it, go learn.
If you can’t, spend some time understanding the problem. That is part of building a mixing business, too.
Not sure which of those six is the actual problem? The Business Reality Check grades twelve systems in your business and shows you where the real bottleneck is sitting.
If you’d rather work through it with someone, the Mentorship Intensive is sixty minutes on your specific situation, mapping out what to do next.
