We have a dog Buddy, he’s a mixed breed. We got Buddy from a dog rescue centre. The story is that his Mum is a show winning black Labrador and his Dad is the farmer’s Border Collie who escaped, got into the garden and did his magic with Buddy’s mum! The rest, as they say, is history. When I was a kid, dogs like Buddy were called mongrels; Buddy is now known as a Borador. To me, it sounds like a place in Middle Earth.
Perhaps it’s a facet of the breed, but Buddy moults his hair. To one extent or another, most dog breeds lose hair at certain times of the year. Buddy is different; he does it all the time.
As you can imagine keeping the house from becoming a huge fur ball takes a lot of effort. We have not one, two but three vacuum cleaners. A handheld Dyson that we use for spot cleaning. A Robotic vacuum cleaner that zips around the hardwood floors in the house to stay on top of hair spillage. The boss of the cleaning trinity is a Miele cleaner with special pet filters built it.
The Miele was not cheap, but it’s a monster, built like a tank and comes with a ton of attachments. It’s powerful enough to lift the carpets as you run across them. However, the dog hair was so bad on many carpets that the cleaner was simply running over it and missing quite a lot.
I started to get really annoyed about this, so I began to Google. It was at this point I found a really simple and clever brush made from rubber. When you sweep carpets with it within minutes, you have a pile of hair the size of a football that the vacuum cleaner missed.
Great, I thought; I now have my solution. Before using the Miele powerhouse, I spend ten minutes sweeping the carpet with the wonder brush before vacuuming. The carpets suddenly looked amazing.
Then something happened that sobered me up. Remember the bit where I said the Miele cleaner came with a ton of attachments? It has at least three different head attachments. Last week and by mistake, I put the wrong head attachment on the cleaner instead of the one I’ve been using for SEVERAL YEARS (caps for a reason.)
As I started to run the cleaner across the carpets, I found it was picking up all the hairs. In fact, the carpets looked better than ever, no brushing required. I felt like an idiot; why had I not read the manual and figured out the right tool for the job? Instead, I’d opened the box, thrown the manual away, struggled for YEARS, spent money on a brush I don’t need until eventually and by mistake, may I add, found the solution.
How much of the audio production world is like this?
We buy some hardware, a plugin or a DAW, and within minutes we’re using it. Many of us ignore the manuals and the tutorial videos produced by the vendor. Within hours, days, weeks or months, we are frustrated because it doesn’t do what we hoped.
At this point, we resort to buying something else and worse, we complain about the product online, trashing the product and the creator’s reputation to boot. We claim it doesn’t do what was promised. The truth is, we don’t know how it works because we’ve not read the manual.
I work with a lot of software developers. On one recent plugin launch, they spent 6 weeks, thousands of pounds on an experienced user manual writer and on creating tutorial videos for all the leading DAWs. I know many people who have bought that plugin will never read the manual or watch the videos. They might resort, like me, to Googling. They might go on social media or forums seeking help; if they are lucky, they might find the answer. If not, then some will claim it doesn’t work, no one will win, not them or the brand.
I wonder how much time and money we all waste by not reading the manual or watching the tutorials? Most manuals are searchable PDFs and the video are instant and free… we don’t really have an excuse.
Perhaps if we spent more time reading manuals instead of on social media or watching boxed sets, then we’d get far more from the audio hardware and plugins we’ve spent our money on. Just imagine what an hour reading a manual before we start using a product could achieve? We might become experts!
Perhaps the problem with a lot of modern audio gear isn’t the gear but the users? We’re all too willing to moan and move on. In doing so, it’s costing many of us time and money. It’s costing manufacturers and developers money in support calls and emails they shouldn’t have to deal with.
I could kick myself for not reading the manual to my expensive vacuum cleaner. It does an amazing job, but not if I don’t read the manual.
The whole episode has got me asking, what other things do I need to learn properly? I think it’s more haste, less speed. What about you?