 So the scenario is this. You've finally recorded that amazing take on your guitar. You played the last chord and waited patiently for it to disappear into silence. Trying not to shuffle around in your chair and ruin that pristine recording. You hit stop and you celebrate. Yes, finally after 24 and a half takes I did it. I captured that amazing performance except you didn't. Because you hadn't hit record you'd only hit play. Sound familiar? Does to me. I've done it a gazillion times. If you watch to the end of this video I'm going to make some suggestions for door manufacturers which could mean that they could help us to avoid this awful situation and stop these amazing performances from being resigned to history. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. This is going to be a Confessions video of sorts because all of the mistakes I'm going to talk about in this video are ones that I've definitely made myself. I'll make suggestions for solutions where I can. Now one time I didn't make a mistake was when I signed up for DistroKid to release my music. If you would like to do that as well follow the VIP link in the description down below and you'll get 7% off of their already incredible price. Now let's dive in to these mistakes. A wise man once said to me if in doubt blame others. Or was that just the voice in my head? I'd love to apply that to microphone manufacturers because there's been a few occasions when I've been singing into a microphone and thinking why can't I get the sound right on this microphone. Sounded fine last week when I used it last but this week it sounds just muffled and muddy and yak. Only to find that I've been singing into the wrong side of the microphone. For those of you who don't know with condenser microphones there is a right and a wrong way to sing into them if they're using something called the cardioid pattern where the microphone just picks up in front. Now some manufacturers like RODE for example with this NT1A will put a marking on their great microphone by the way. This has got a little sort of gold button on the front of it which indicates the front and I don't think I've ever made this mistake with this microphone. Let's move on to the AKG C414 an absolutely legendary microphone. I will put a link for this in the description. This is not a cheap microphone but it is awesome. See that lovely gold front? Completely different to the back. I've never made this mistake with this microphone. Moving on from there if we look at audio technical microphones this one's the AT 2020. It's not such a great scenario. You can see there's some little bits of writing on there and the front is indicated with their company logo but you know look if your eyesight is not great like mine then you could easily miss that. I do think I've made this mistake with this microphone on a couple of occasions and now to the worst case scenario I reviewed this microphone last year. It's an amazing microphone. Sounds wonderful. Now it's from a company called Nude okay and true to their company name there is no marking on this microphone whatsoever. No logo, no model number, no little button or anything like that. This one's really a problem you have to use your ears I guess. So look I'd like to see all microphone manufacturers put at least something on there. If you've ever made that mistake let me know in the comments down below. In a moment I'm going to be discussing what I think is the most embarrassing mistake of all of these and if you've ever committed it like I have it can make you question your whole abilities in terms of mixing music. It's not surprising we do make these mistakes because after all it's kind of a complex process all of this. A bit like sharing all of those links to the various different places you've released your music to. Thankfully the sponsor for this video does have a solution for that. This is the hyperfollow page for one of my EPs Wonderland. When people visit this webpage they can choose for themselves which one of these great platforms they want to listen to my music on but I didn't have to create this page. It was generated automatically for me when I uploaded my EP to DistroKid. If we visit my DistroKid page here and look at this EP and scroll down you can see the section just at the bottom here where they supply the link for me to share. Now I can share that on places like Facebook where they will automatically be generated my album artwork and people can just click on this and go straight to that hyperlink page. Now this is all included with the base price of DistroKid which is just $19.99 per year. If you follow the link in the description you'll get 7% off of that already great price. This mistake is by far the most embarrassing of all and I'm afraid to say I have been guilty of this on several occasions. It happens during the mixing process. You've perhaps got your favorite EQ plugin open. You've been adjusting it tweaking it getting it just right so that that track now finally sounds as it should. Only to find you actually had that plugin bypassed and you haven't been adjusting anything at all. Now this mistake can take other forms. You may have been pushing that fader up and down just so that you can get that guitar to sit just right in the mix and you think yeah finally I nailed it only to find you're actually pushing the wrong fader. I think this mistake speaks to the strong connection between what we're seeing visually and what we think we are hearing and it should tell us to make sure that we do in fact use our ears and not our eyes when we're mixing. Now the most important thing about this mistake above all if you ever commit it don't admit to anyone that you've done it. So before we move on to the final heartbreaking mistake which I have made in the past I want to offer a couple of solutions for the first mistake we talked about. You know the one where you hit record or you thought you hit record but you only hit play. Now these solutions are suggestions for door makers. The likes of Avid, Steinberg, BandLab, Prisonis etc. Sorry if I left your one out. So if you work for one of those companies pay attention. The first suggestion I want to make occurred to me the other day when I was using this my GoPro. GoPro has a feature where if you hit record it will actually include some material from the time before you hit record yeah which suggests that there is a buffer in here. It's actually always recording yeah so it's even recording when you haven't hit record and that got me thinking could this be used indoors perhaps there could be an option where even if you just have the track armed for recording it's actually recording even when you hit play yeah when you hit stop you do have the option to retrieve that sort of recording okay that's just one suggestion I realized that could be heavy for some people in terms of system resources definitely it would be an option. Now my second suggestion you can let me know in the comments down below folks which one of these you think is best my second solution would just be to have a voice announcement as an option a kind of an Alexa style voice if you like so that when you hit play it says playing and then when you hit record it says record in a better voice than that of course not using my voice as I say an Alexa style voice I think that may just be enough to remind us about what we're actually doing. As I say let me know in the comments down below this next one though is heartbreaking this final mistake is absolutely heartbreaking if it happens to you and it's definitely happened to me in the past but I do have a workflow now to avoid it it comes in many different forms but it generally surrounds the topic of saving or not now it may be in its most simple form that you've been working on a track for several hours you didn't have the autosave feature switched on you have a sudden computer crash and poof all of your work is gone you may find yourself swearing a little bit if this happens now another thing that can happen with saving is you do actually save but you save over a perfectly good version of your file with a not-so-good version perhaps you've done some things which weren't that great yeah and you've just saved to the same file okay not good when that happens because once you switch your door off there's no ability to undo and get back to your old work now as I have mentioned I have been working in a different way for several years now which has actually avoided this and what I do is I do save many different versions of my files now some doors have auto versioning when they have autosaves okay if you want to use those it's fine but I just want to tell you how I go about it I do it manually and it's really helped me to avoid problems so let's say my song is called I'm so dumb yet that's my base file name now what I do is I prefix each version that I save with a number okay typically it'll be like zero one I'm so dumb zero two I'm so dumb zero three I'm so dumb etc why do I use zero one instead of just one yeah that just helps to keep it perfectly in order when you're using either Mac or Windows and you're sorting your folders by file name okay if you just use one it can end up sort of ahead or past say something which is numbered as nine for example so that's why why I do it like that so it's good for a hundred different versions if you want to if you think you're going to go over a hundred different versions then you may want to do zero zero one or zero zero two etc I don't think I've ever had that happen okay so that would be the sort of base file names for my versions now I append each of these file names with something to indicate what I achieved or what I was doing with that version so it may be zero one I'm so dumb setup zero two I'm so dumb guitar zero three I'm so dumb vocal etc etc now I've just got into the habit of doing this okay so so I saved quite often as soon as I've achieved something sort of pretty significant I will sort of save things like that there's two things about that which works really well it can help you as I say to avoid saving over things which were good and with most stores if you open up two projects which most of them you can I think you can actually copy and paste things from you know one to the other so if you kind of feel that there was something or a recording or something which you since recorded over I don't know something like that it can be handy to go back and grab things from old versions sometimes now the other way which this can occur and if it hasn't happened to you it will happen to you and you will wish you had taken my advice is when you have hard drive failures now you may think that you're using SSDs yeah there's nothing mechanical in them they're not going to fail I promise you SSDs do fail I think last year or the year before I had three fail in one year and it would have been really catastrophic for me if I didn't already have a backup routine in place okay now just to give you a brief idea of what happens with my backup routine all of my project files are checked for updates around about three or four times a day yeah and if they have been updated the updated version is then saved to a NAS which is in another room in my house a NAS has got you know some big hard drives in their big capacity okay I think it stands for network network area storage no it's not that somebody let me know in the comments what it actually stands for anyway so that's the first step that automatically happens okay so it's saved off to those nice big hard drives which by the way have redundancy what do I mean by that they have copies of each other so even if one of the hard drives fails in that NAS there's a backup okay and the other one now or if my house burns down please don't touch wood that would be a problem everything would be gone yes so I could give those to you know a relative or something you know do backups that's too much manual intervention for me I will forget to do that so what I have is I also have it automatically backed up once or twice a day to cloud storage okay so I don't have to think about any of this it all happens automatically for me it's not saving everything you know the whole folder every time it's only updating with new things now if you want to watch the video I made about that in a lot more detail including the NAS which I actually use which is just wonderful then watch this video right here I explain the whole process it's just given me so much peace of mind and I have had one hard drive failure on my computer since then and everything was retrievable