The greatest athletes and minds all share one thing in common. They have had personal coaching. Someone has stood in their corner correcting their weakness and perfecting their strengths. While we can learn an exceptional amount from tutorials there is truly nothing better than having an experienced mentor who can assess where you are at, what your goals are, and how to achieve them.
Individual attention is the crux of Weiss Advice coaching. My understanding of what individual attention requires is what makes me a better coach than the rest. I will give you some examples.
I will teach you how to glean the perspective of your end listener. I will bridge the gap between the technical way we effect sound to the creative way we hear music. Technique and fundamental understanding is crucial to growing as a producer; but technique does not explain why sometimes a lo-fi record can elicit a more powerful response than a polished one. Technical understanding does not show you how to poetically un-balance a record and live in the world of perfect imperfections. Anyone can show you how an EQ works (and that is important). But not everyone can show you why an EQ choice can evoke an emotion, and how that emotion fits into the picture of the song, and how that song can fit into the picture of who the artist is. I can.
My goal is to uncover a student’s intrinsic greatness. What makes them unique? What makes their music enjoyable? And what’s getting in the way of that greatness? Once I understand the student and their music, I set up demonstrations and scenarios that are designed to elicit tacit understanding. I work with the student through their own music so that they can discover their own music come to fruition through their own actions.
This entire approach is underpinned by a single key philosophy that I feel makes Weiss Advice better than any other learning resource. Most educators teach what they do and how they work. Weiss Advice’s primary goal is to make you successful with what you do and how you work. I am not interested in teaching a student to be more like me. I am interested in teaching a student to be better at being themselves.
Let us say that two people come to Weiss Advice for coaching with the same exact record. This record has generally strong musicianship and performance value, but the actual sound quality of the raw recordings is not particularly good. Now, depending on each person’s goals, the coaching session will look fundamentally different, even though the record we are discussing is exactly the same. Why? Well, let’s imagine the first person is an aspiring mixing engineer, and the second person is the producer of the record. For the mix engineer, our focus will be on building techniques on dealing with low fidelity recordings. For the producer, our focus will be developing better recording techniques. These are entirely different skills for entirely different goals!