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@dooks
Primarily a musician who has been forced to engage with the nuts and bolts of hands on engineering myself after years of lo-fi home recording backseat driving in the studio.
Learned jazz guitar and some piano at school, formed rock bands and started playing in London aged 15 and never really stopped. I went to Uni in 2005 but my bandmates went to The School of Audio Engineering so I've always been around studios and music production. I'm self taught in music theory and although like to test myself on it, I never really got up to speed with reading or writing the dots and always played by ear.
After years on the toilet circuit i eventually signed a record deal with one of my bands in my early 30s but label admin nonsense and personal crises in the band torpedoed the whole enterprise just as the first album came out in 2006.
Done some live and studio session stuff for other people and produced various things for TV and film in the last few years while spending the bulk of my free time from the day job putting together the band for my "solo" project. This has included finally biting the bullet, buying the hard and software and spending some time teaching myself to drive a DAW. It was actually a fairly painless process as knew the basics of signal path and gain structure etc. I've read plenty around production, hoover up any documentary or new book on famous producers and engineers. I subscribe to Tape Op and read Sound on Sound most months. I know what works and what doesn't (although not always why!). So really it was just a case of learning the how to work a project, learning ketboard shortcuts to make it happen.
Obviously the "making it sound objectively good" bit is ummm... well subjective. I've got a long way to go before I'll be able to unveil something that I can say I'm proud of from a sonic perspective. I'm working hard at it though.
At the moment i'm stuck flip flopping between the Tape Op-esque mantra of "work with what you have, be creative and don't be dogmatic about how things should be done" and the slightly painful realisation that I won't be producing anything that sounds even close to how I want it to unless I spend several thousand pounds on better quality kit.
But yeah, muso trying to self-produce here.