I joined Taxi back in February and finally got my first forward this week. I am ecstatic. To be honest, for the first few months of Taxi I was getting returns because I made the typical noob mistakes of submitting tracks that were sorta in the ballpark for the listings-- and often in genres that weren't quite my strongest in terms of production techniques. Also, I think every listing I submitted to was what we call the "ultra-high-bar" stuff with the big $$$ in the first line of the listing. Foolish maybe, but these were the listings that got my butt off the couch in the beginning.
Kind of like a noob playing Texas Hold 'Em, I went full "donkey" playing every hand and watching my pile of chips (enthusiasm, hope, optimism) grow smaller and smaller. But at the same time, I also forced myself to make deadlines which is something I struggled to hold myself to before. I also began to write lyrics again and completed songs with lyrics for the first time in years. This in itself was a major breakthrough. I watched a lot of videos on production and lurked here on the forums. I found the forwards blog and started to see what the differences were between the forwards and the returns.
I was getting closer and closer to a forward. They say it's always darkest before dawn and it's true. A few of the submissions I made in the past couple of months-- I was certain they were going to be forwards-- and when they got returned I felt worse than I did getting returns at the beginning.
But anyway, last week I submitted a track to listing Y190726RM "High Energy Rock/Metal Instrumental Cues"-- a music library pitching for a wide range of sports shows. I grabbed my Kiesel Vader, submitted a track and got my forward!
This time I KNEW I was going to finally get a forward. However, the night before I got the results I had a nightmare where I got a critique that said something like " we almost gave you a forward, but your compressor threshold was set wrong" or something like that. In my dream it was almost like Joe Pesci walking in to "get made" at the end of Goodfellas. I woke up in a cold sweat.
I know it's just ONE forward, but if you guys knew how much I stressed out thinking this day would never come...
Thanks to Danny Weber for giving me some mix advice on the forum. I still have a lot to learn about production but I'm working on it. Also, Congrats to Danny on his getting TWO forwards on this same listing. Great job!
Here's my track:https://soundcloud.com/ted-w/all-in-the ... 4-taxi-mix
Ted
