Days of Despondence

近期遇到灵感枯竭，而且打开 DAW 也没有干劲，大概就是所谓的“三月病”吧。闲下来之后就边听着自己做过的曲子，写下这篇日志：主要是关于一些郁闷事。

事情还得从一次接的单子说起，一日有位客户通过我的朋友邮件联系到我，希望我能够完成一份贴唱作品的后期。一般来说，混音师在处理这类作品时是要完全听从客户意见的，而本身没有什么说话权，只能确保以自己的能力和经验将作品处理好。前面进展还算顺利，无外乎她觉得自己录的干音不太合适，重新录制一份让我替换。事情的转折点是她向我表达想把曲子做好，我当时贴出了自己的音乐人页面，后来她认为我不太合适，要求退回定金不让我做下去了。

随后思考了一下，我明白了是什么原因造成了这个问题了：她把我的个人兴趣当作我唯一擅长的领域了。

作为一名业余混音师，平时除了自学混音知识之外，就是捣鼓一些 MIDI 然后换配器，做混音。又因为自己非常喜欢金属乐和配乐，所以个人风格都是往这方面贴近，但并不代表我只会做金属乐或者是配乐。这不禁让我想起在大学那时的事情，因为在系统建模课上我打算写的论文是讨论脚本语言不同循环语句的执行效率差异，之后班上的人差不多全部都认为我擅长编程了，就连我因为喜欢混音打算退学自学而和导师交换意见那时，导师也误以为我是因为执着于编程而打算退学。换言之编程是我的兴趣之一——也仅仅是之一——而不是全部，但是他们把我的一个兴趣当成了我唯一擅长的领域。无论是客户，还是同学们对我产生的偏见，大概都是是因为我们不怎么沟通吧，他们并不完全了解我。

虽然看上去很遗憾，我并不打算去改变什么。贴唱混音只是练练手罢了，更何况我根本不打算在国内发展。

• • • -

Facing my inspiration dried up, even when I open my DAW I have not any desire to work, perhaps that's the so-called 三月病. Listening to songs made by my own, I'm writing this blog and what to tell you something about my despondences.

Once a client contact to me by mail from one of my friends, and said if I can accomplish a post-working project of a remade song with a single instrument track (vocal-off) and her dry-vocal track. Generally when sound mixers dealing with this type of project, they should comply with the purposes by the clients totally. Mixers, however, they should have no any personal opinions about the projects, all they have to be done is to finish the requests by their abilities and experiences. At the beginning of this project almost everything went well -- nothing less than with the process of mixing she thought her current dry-vocal sample didn't suitable for this project. Then she re-recorded another one for me to replace the elder one.
But the turning point was when she expresses her desire to make this song well, and I want to prove there're no any mishaps on the mixing, so I showed my music-posting page to her. She checked my page and thought I'm inappropriatable and claim her front money back...

Then I contemplated a while and finally drew a conclusion. This thing happened because she treats my personal interestings as my only realm to get skilled in.
As one of amateur sound mixers, either I learn the knowledge of mixing and recording by myself in normal times, or picking some MIDI files then changing their's orchestrate, drawing events such as Pitch Bend, MOD, after that I'll start making the mixing. My personal style is Metal and Cinematic because I like them, I was influenced by Nighwish, Nile and Epica a lot. But you shouldn't say Metal or Cinematic is the only styles I can do.

It reminds me of a thing at my college life. At the System Modeling course, my dissertation that I want to write was to discuss the efficiency between different loop statements (loop, for, while...) on RGSS (a Ruby-based scripting language for RPG Maker series game-making softwares by Enterbrain). After that almost all people from my class were considered that I was ONLY good at programming, even when I put my withdrawal application to our tutor, she also thought that I must be obsessed with programming, but the truth is sound mixing. On the other words programming is one of my interesting but not the ONLY thing. Whether the client or my class-mate's prejudice to me, presumably we are not communicating very often so they can't understand me totally.

It's a shame, but I never expected to change anything. This type of mixing is just for practise. I should take more vim in multi-tracks mixing projects. What's more I don't intend to find a job in Chinese domestic.