What prod. techniques (that you do, or have done) just suck?

[mertmo]

Overcompressing.

Then I overcompressed some shit again.

Oh, and then I forgot to show restraint and I kind of overcompressed some stuff...

AAAAHHHH! I'm just now getting it right, and i'm in my 12th year of making recordings. I guess I'm kinda slow...

[mjau]

using waaaay too many synths

No such thing

OK, how about spending hours tweaking synths, completely forgetting the world and everyone around me?

That would then be a subjective decision... some people would classify that as geek heaven - others would call it MIDI hell...

I'll opt for Heaven.

[joelpatterson]

It is SO IMPORTANT to just listen to how things are coming out--there's this illusion that since you understand all kind of theoretics and gadgetry, you think you know how to handle things, you can kind of leap ahead of the curve and solve problems before they happen. And it gets too abstract, because sometimes the WRONG thing sounds better than any of the right things.

Not that this ever happens to me, you know, but just in general, eh?

[marcusb]

Not trusting my intution/ears ... has bit me in the ass more times than I care to count.

It's one of those legacy things when you start out working in REALLLY crappy studios as a young AE .. you think your mix is rockin' but it's sucking so you start to lose faith. Then you move up to bigger and better studios where you can actually trust the monitoring environment more but you still fear the worst from those scarring early days.

I'm a lot better at it now .. i'll even EQ to tape with confidence

These days, i'll throw up a few CD's when I first walk into the control room and walk around the room a bit, even leave them up while I do some basic setting up and patching just to get a feel for the room. Then if it sounds right DON'T F#CK WITH IT!

Cheers,
Marcus