[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/J5hBAx_CSY0″][vc_column_text]Justin McDonough is a Music Studio owner and YouTube creator. His up and coming channel [ youtube.com/dunnadidit ] has a distinct style, and he offers content that is consistently interesting and polished. This episode of Mtek Learning interviews, we see what makes ‘Dunna do it!
Transcript:
My name is Justin McDonough but pretty much everybody calls me Dunna. I run the studio at Resonate Music School and Studio and I make content on YouTube. Technology for me is, it's interesting because I am, like a teach-geared nerd kind of thing. Like, I like to get into specs and I like to find out what every, you know, let's say for example, let's say what every camera in the Sony line, like what they're all capable of. But at the same time I'm also like super budget, like I wanna find out what the best camera is for the lowest price, like where that price point is. And same thing with like the recording studio, it's like I don't necessarily have the fanciest gear but I've got lots of really cool clones of gear. I think that gear and technology is kind of important to me but at the same time, I'm also trying to find the way to kinda game the system so that I'm not, you know, going outta house and home, acquiring all these gear that, most of the time, there's like diminishing returns if you start spending too much on it kinda thing. So that's the way that I like approach technology and gear. I love my cameras and I love all my gear at the studio and there's, there's definitely a threshold where if you go below that it starts to, you start to see it not being good enough quality. But it's about finding that kind of sweet spot. The YouTube channel is something that I started just over a year, maybe a year and a half now, ago and it was... I did it as a creative outlet. So I, when I was a teenager, I got really into music and then after high school I went into recording school and then I went to music school so I have a bunch of really fancy pieces of paper that tell me I'm a musician. And so then I started this recording studio and what happens when you take your creative outlet and make it your career is some of the creativity gets pulled back from that 'cause you're working for clients and that kind of stuff. I guess if you were specifically only making the stuff for yourself, maybe it's not quite like that, but in my case, I'm running a studio, I'm making music for other people. So after five years of that or four years of that, I felt like I was being drawn to find something where I could be creative for myself. And every time that I tried to do my own music, it felt a little bit like work, you know? It felt like I was just extending my workday. So I got really interested in like iPhone photography and started doing more editing on my phone and got a pile 'o apps and probably spent money on them too which was probably a bad idea. But I got into this whole idea of like, you know, photography and visuals and then of course after that videography came and then I found the whole YouTube thing. And the rest is pretty much history. It's funny, I like to tell this story where when I started getting into the YouTube community it was because I was trying to learn how to shave with a safety razor, it's like an old school kind of razor, and I just found this one guy who would just shave for 10, 15 minutes, and he would just talk at the camera or like while he was doing it, he's looking in the mirror and he's, you know, he's talking while he's doing it. And he's really funny, and he's, I think he was a voice actor or something so he's like personable and that kinda thing. And that was like what drew me to the YouTube community. And it just happened to be at the same time that I was also starting to get obsessed with photography and videography and so then the two just came together. And I started to find other channels that were based around YouTube as well as like photography and videography, and that's kind of where my channel has ended up. I definitely live in Adobe mostly because I use it for work. We have the Adobe Creative Suite at work and so I just kinda have, I learned that and that's what I continue to use now with its pros and cons of course. I'm a Sony user, I use a Sony a6500 as kinda my main camera and the a6000 is my, is my b-cam. I rocked the a6000s, I had two of them for probably the first year that I was on YouTube and then finally picked up the 6500. I'm a Lightroom mobile user as well when I'm, for my photography stuff, I like to... If I wanna get it up quick I'll do it in that. And then I love the Google suite. I know this is...It's not really related to what everything else is, I use an iPhone but I use all the Google apps. I feel like Google has a really strong set of apps that they all connect nicely and even though I'm not on an Android phone they still, like, they just work better to me than the built-in iOS stuff. I mean, one of my favorite things that I've heard said and that I try and hold on to as much as possible is the idea of done not perfect. And when I first started my YouTube channel, I made, I think I made two videos that I didn't post first, they're just... And I knew, and before I even started them, I knew that it was like, hey, these are to learn. The first couple of videos are just so that I can learn what I'm doing, see what happens, like get through that process. If they're good enough I'll post them and I think I went through two before I decided that, okay, the third one was like good enough to post. But there's definitely this idea of, like, deciding when it's good enough. And my third one, by no means, I went back and watched it recently and it wasn't anything incredible but it was good enough that I felt comfortable posting it. And so there's finding that line where you're, where you feel like, okay, this is good enough to put out there and then I'll improve from there. And getting content out there, I think, is really important, and a lotta people are either too perfectionistic or not at all. And I think everyone could use some help trying to find that balance. And it took me some time too to try and figure out where that was and luckily I had the music stuff behind me that could feed into that. I learned so much from music that, going into the YouTube thing it's like I had so many tools already in place. Other than that, just create lots. Create as much as you can, whether you post it or not, I think that you should just be like creating and being creative all the time if you can. And when you walk down the street be seeing as if you're creating something. Even if you don't have a camera or a microphone on, you just, like, constantly be doing it. Yeah, I mean if anyone wants to find me, they can go to youtube.com/dunnadidit, D-U-N-N-A did it. The idea was that it's every thing that I do. And all my social media is that, if they wanna find Resonate it's just resonatemusic.ca.
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