Autodidact.

As a highly trained musician, I am keenly aware of (some, but not all) the ways that training constrains my creativity. When you teach a child the right way to do a thing, and then the “right” way to do a great many other things, that child’s brain changes in response. It’s an adaptation, and there’s no “go-back button,” least none that I’m aware of. This emphatically does not mean I wish I could get rid of the training—in many ways, that training is the foundation of my life. It means that it is not an unvitiated good.

In the realm of recording, I have no idea what I’m doing. Basically entirely self-taught, but like anyone who claims to be “self-taught” at anything, I’m employing a misnomer. What one means when claims to be self-taught is that you learned by watching (or listening in the case of playing an instrument). My student that I’m getting started on the blues asked me about a method book, and I had to admit I don’t know one, because outside of the realm of classical music, I’m mostly self-taught. Listened to the records, taught myself to play what I heard. Then I went back and did some reading on jazz and blues and later went to Berklee (jazz conservatory) to get the book part, which I already intuitively understood to some minimal degree. Anyway, I’ve been in the room while other people are recording enough that I got some minimal understanding from that, and the software is now simple and intuitive enough that basically anyone can do it. But without a doubt, I’m doing all kinds of stuff “wrong.”

Now, there are different kinds of wrong. There’s wrong like you wrong for that, which is wrong that you perfectly well meant to do. Then there’s the wrong you don’t know you’re doing because you’re a duffer. The first kind is the kind you want to keep, and the second kind keeps you from making a good record. But, like Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Today I kind of wish I were the mayor of New York. Now, I’d make a hash of it because I don’t know what I don’t know. But on the other hand, I could do a lot of really amazing wrong—like waking up today and firing hundreds of cops and inquiring into details at a later date.

It’s tough to keep it all straight.