Spotify really got on my nerves on my road trip last week.

You see, I play this game whenever I go on trips. I like playing songs for people they might not know but I don't want to hog the music like a snobby DJ that only plays their own favorite music.

So instead I go around the car and everyone picks a song they want to hear. I then add it to the queue on Spotify so that it plays next. Once you go around the car a few times you end up with an eclectic playlist made up of varying tastes and preferences. 

Of course, people run out of ideas fairly quickly when you put them on the spot. So it still opens up a selfish opportunity to play weird Icelandic rock music for everyone!

However, the idiot engineers at Spotify seem to overlook basic functionality when it comes to the queue. It's like the most fragile thing you've ever seen in the digital realm.

If you try to screw with the order of the queue and accidentally hit a song, guess what? It erases the rest of the songs!

Oh, and say you want to skip a song? Goodbye queue! 

Goodbye hours of carefully curated music...

Kind of a stupid system.

It's like if you had spent 10 minutes getting the perfect kick drum EQ curve that adds weight to your low-end while punching through your mix and then every time you reopen the EQ plug-in it would erase all your previous work and you'd have to start over.

Pretty ridiculous analogy I know but just imagine how frustrating that would feel. That's how I felt working with the Spotify queue and in the end I just started adding everything to a Playlist instead. A much more permanent Road Trip playlist that will grow in "eclecticism" throughout the random road trips.

Thankfully, EQ doesn't work that way. However, if you don't really know what you're doing when you're EQ'ing it might be just as bad. Especially if every time you open up the EQ you start tweaking and erasing your work.

Instead, you need to start understanding and trusting your EQ skills, something Brad Hoese accomplished after going through my EQ Strategies - Ultimate Guide to EQ training:

"I have been volunteering at my church (always a live environment with limited time to get things "right" during rehearsal before the actual services begin) and found myself wanting to learn more so I could do better/more efficient work there.  I found your 1 hour mix walk through to be well worth the price I paid for the course.  It was helpful to see how you eq'd instruments/vocals 1 at a time all the while paying close attention to how each of them fit into the mix.  I had learned how to eq things in isolation and was taught to use the same methodology as you to find offensive/resonant frequencies and cut them.  Where you helped me was in the idea of not so much how does it sound on its own, but how does it sound/sit in the mix.  Using kick/bass as an example, I could get each of them to sound great on their own but always thought they sounded kind of muddy together.  Last week I went in to practice mixing using recorded multi tracks and tried eq'ing space for each of them and then they seemed to fit together so much better in the mix.  And yes, I even used a very low frequency low cut on both (which I had been taught not to do) and thought it cleaned up the sound even further while still retaining nice hit/punch/clarity."

If you want to see results like this for yourself, EQ Strategies is only a click away:

www.EQStrategies.net