How to find your sound: Bluey Thomas on finding your vibe without breaking the bank

A lot of producers worry about overspending on tools – how do you decide what’s worth the investment?

Whatever you use frequently is worth it. For example, I use a lot of vocal chains and mixing plugins because I also engineer all of my records myself, so the pro-vocal processing plugins get used on almost everything.

As far as production tools go, if I find that I haven’t used something in a few months, I’ll get rid of it.

Sometimes I do find myself even re-buying plugins when the need arises, but overall, I believe that investing in your craft is a good idea. There are a lot worse things that people spend their money on, so I just remind myself that this is for my career and my success in the future.

Tips from Bluey Thomas: During my first few years, I was creating as much as I could, as often as I could. To be great you need to put in the reps and there’s no shortcut.

Another thing that helped me was soaking in as much information as I could. From podcasts, magazines, interviews, YouTube videos, and production breakdowns, I’m constantly consuming these types of things to keep myself inspired. Just look at it like studying!