Have you ever struggled to practice your Pro Tools shortcuts and brush up on your music theory? We've all been there! In this clip Paul explains how he balances the two while building up his music city credits.

I personally feel like we're at a weird time where... I've got friends that... I've got a friend that it's the most incredible drummer who's being forced to have a studio because that's what you do now... like to have a drum room. And he does not, I mean he doesn't have one ounce of brainpower to work Pro Tools but he has to. You know it's like you gotta engineer, you got to play drums. That's, like, the thing that we're in is everybody has to be a guitar player, engineer, producer, barista, photographer, you know the whole deal. 

Mine was not realizing that and the necessity of it. It was just that continual learning, and mine was like playing guitar till it wasn't what was fascinating to me at that point and then engineering for a long time and then production and then writing. And now I'm coming to phase where it's like, alright, I want to get better at all of these all the time.

But for me it definitely was focusing on one thing until you could focus on something else and still do that, if that makes sense. Like because the whole time I was engineering because I had a place kind of like this where no one would hire me to produce yet but they would come track you know at my place I would engineer and play guitar all the time. And I didn't have to really, I mean I would focus on the guitar but it wasn't I was able to do it in addition to the engineering which is what I was freaked out about, and then you know production after that. 

But I mean I wish we could go back to a time where you could just be a drummer and that's all you cared about and that's what you lived for. And I did a record not too long ago with a drummer that he played on “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” when he was like 16… old-school drummer, he's in his 60s now and he's never cared about anything but drums and have a pretty amazing career. And he was on a record that I was producing and in between takes even if it was just on his leg he would just stay in the groove we'd be having conversations and you know making jokes or whatever and you could just tell he was just like my job is to keep this groove alive and when we go in to do the next take it was like he was right there. And you couldn't get that guy to even power up a laptop if you put a gun to his head. 

You know and there's something about that that I wish we still had, but it's just we live in a different time period now you know. So I would just pick one. I don't know man that's a tough question. If it were me and I had to start all over now, I would just do what I'm passionate about and convince people to pay me to do it… that's what I've done my whole career.