I have to agree with Mussar a bit. He does surround himself with a ton of talent. John Powell, Steve Jablonsky, Henry Jackman... all of these got where they are thanks to participating in Hans Zimmer scores. I'm not sold on the idea of him having no musical knowledge though. He admitted he has trouble writting notes, he really is more on the producer mindset, but that doesn't make him less of a musician imho.

EDIT: Ha! Found it! These are his exact words:

I never studied music, but I'm basically unemployable in any other field. I've never had a real job. And most days I question if I am a "Real Composer"...

If that ain't a perfect living and breathing example of that impostor syndrome and "lone inventor" myth, I don't know what is.

So then, why do "creative types" have such a fatalistic POV?  What is it that makes us so hard on ourselves?

Yeah, this is the million dollar question. I saw freaking (real) Hans Zimmer posting somewhere that he sometimes has trouble to even indentify himself as a real musician. I mean ... excuse me?
I guess if we had a psychologist here he might spread some light over this. Fear of misunderstanding? Desire to be accepted may be? Who knows.

Yeah. It really depends on what environment you have in mind. But imho it's not alyways "far = narrow reverb".

For some reason, I don't find those "inspirational" books/videos inspirational too much. They're relatable, yes, as we all struggle with stuff they address nicely and neately, but personally few minutes after watching/reading them I go to the same hopeless state i was before. ...overthinking everything over and over.

I feel much more inspiration after reading/watching/doing something totally unrelated to music. When there's a good story to invest yourself in, somewhere positive to run away from all of this for few hours. Whole new world opens when you come back.

I've seen several posts about "what's good and what's bad" while EQing lately. Now I don't consider myself an expert, but I think there's a few historical and practical contexts people don't notice at first.

See, though music today is louder, I think great mixes were done throughout the years for a few decades now. I'm still amazed by clarity of mixdown when any old Michael Jackson track pops out in my headphones.

Funny part is that this:
http://medias.audiofanzine.com/images/normal/ssl-eq-502-197150.jpg
...is an EQ of old SSL console. If you like any music pre 2000 there's big chance this was the EQ they used on each track. 4 fixed type bands. Almost no Q control.

You might say: "Naah, they had outboard chains for processing important tracks like vocals or lead guitars." Yeah. They did. So they can slap a reverb on it and EQ it by something like a world famous Pultec EQ. ...that looked like this: http://www.crossenstreams.com/pultec/front.gif ...again notice the controls.

Then you might say: "Ok, those are old. They were magical. New expansive mixing consoles in big studios are as much magical and have much more controls." Well no. Studios use mostly software solutions already with occasional vintage HW chains. If they don't, they use a modern console. I'm lucky enough to work with few of these (Studer, Lawo, Yamaha) as a TV technician and there's usually standard 4 band parametric EQ on them. Nothing fancier.

Really the possibilities all of us have in damn simple EQ8 in Ableton are miles away from what those massive tracks of past were mixed with. Yes, those vintage consoles and HW EQs had saturations, cross-talk and other "imperfections", but those just added flavor, they didn't help with the actual mixing too much. ...and if you need them, go ahead, there's plenty of emulations.

My point is that in all of those "how to EQ properly" trheads is a lot of over-thinking that can cause bad habbits. And that seems to me wrong.
What do you guys think?

Weeellll. Not exactly. I think it's more complex than that. If it's in a room, you'll hear dispersed sound. Acoustic reflectivity of that room dictates how widely the sound disperses. (thus the width) If it's outside of a room (or in really big perfectly treated room), you don't hear reverb at all and the "dry" signal goes through natural air dampening of low and high frequencies.

"Harmonisation of melody." A lot of tutorials on YouTubezzz.

Oooh, I had this crysis too. ...I'm not sure who's quote it is, but some big musician once said that there's only four original songs in whole music history and all the others are inspired. Obviously this is exaggeration of him, but in a sense he's right.

Everyone had their influences. You need to have them to know what music is at all. Otherwise you could call any noise a "music". Even those most ground breaking artists have them. I heard Skrillexe's Scary Monsters were massively influenced by Noisia. I'm sure guys from Noisia have their inspiration too. And so on... When people say "music evolves", this is what they mean by that. This image of producer sitting in the dark, when out of a sudden big yellow shining lightbulb appears above his head and he spits out next world-famous music genere, that's just plain wrong. It's a sweet image, because we'd all love to be that guy at certain point, but it doesn't work that way at all.

...and it's not just about music. Steve Jobs once said (can't find the video, damn...) that the best innovators always feel a bit shameful when someone praises their work, as they always know they just put different pieces together. It's called "lone inventor" myth. Even people like Einstein, Newton or Edison didn't come up with their work alone. They had coworkers and inspirations too. And that's what I think is important here.

I believe it's vital to listen to at least a bunch of different music styles. Trying to combine your influences makes your style. I don't think there's same in that.