Metal Detecting 'Frame Of Reference"

I've spoken about what I call the "frame of reference" before in both blogs and videos, it's a starting point or a foundation that you base a lot of your views and opinions from, your "frame of reference" can either expand with experience of it stays exactly the same. Let's equate this to drumming, if you grew up reading drum music and spent years playing from a visual reference. You're going to have a completely different "frame of reference" on drum playing compared to someone who grew up teaching themselves by ear and improvising. From my experience the guys that read music have a tendency to find writing their own drum parts a tricky business. 

Through the years I've come across great players who can sight read to such a high level but can't come up with an original drum part to save their lives. This was never a surprise to me because their "frame of reference" was based on a totally different style of playing. They were coming from a more theory based way of playing, I was coming from an emotional, nonthinking state, kind of like channeling something I didn't need to know about. The music, chords and melodies that were presented to me would spark an emotional response and a drum part would be constructed from that point. 

You can teach almost any musical person how to read music and the theory behind it but you can't teach everyone how to turn an emotional response into something both meaningful and musical. This is a gift you're born with, it's a natural "frame of reference" that you instinctively refer to without even knowing it, it's a feeling that comes from the gut. In Buddhism the gut is looked upon as the second brain, that's why you must always trust your gut feeling. My gut feeling comes into play a lot when I metal detect, mastering audio only machines is a mind - gut connection for me. Over time you just start to know exactly what you're hearing.

This is where the "frame of reference" works its way into metal detecting, those that started the hobby using digital machines have a totally different "frame of reference" to those that started way earlier on analog detectors. Both of these reference points couldn't be further away from each other because the language between digital and analog are worlds apart. The problems tend to occur when those with a digital frame of mind who feel they're experts on the subject apply that exact same approach when/if they try to use an analog machine. Newcomers to the hobby, those that have got into it in the last 8 years or so seem to go straight to digital. They then seek out the supposed experts on these machines online, listen to their bullshit and then they adopt the same way of thinking as 'said expert'. 

But What Happens If The Apparent Experts Are Talking Utter Shit?

It means the gullible listen to these people and then take on their viewpoints as their own, a good example to use is iron discrimination. The new breed of expert seems to think that if a machine makes any noise in iron then that specific machine is falsing or unstable. Then everyone that believes this walks around parroting the same thing, it's basically the blind leading the blind. But the newcomers who listen to these self-proclaimed enigmas then adopt the same "frame of reference". All of a sudden nearly everyone is under the same opinion that a detector should be totally silent in iron. This view is of course bullshit

Now let's say that these amazing experts decide to try using an analog detector, obviously they're going to be an expert on that in the same way they are with their automated digital machines .. right?. Wrong, these platforms are totally different and you can't be setting analog detectors up the same way you do digital ones, if you're going to do this then you might as well throw it in the bin. Once again, it all boils down to your "frame of reference" and where you started in all of this. Using a detector with a screen is nothing like hunting by audio only, the point I want to make here is, a large subscriber count on YouTube and a test garden doesn't make you an expert on metal detectors, but what this does do is give some egotistical fool a platform to pass on his ill-informed opinions about machines he doesn't know how to use.

To close, I'd like to state that there is no blog or video that I've produced where I claim I'm an expert, actually I've claimed the complete opposite a number of times. All I do is share and demonstrate how I approach my own metal detecting with all the machines that I love to use. The word 'expert' is a term that's thrown around way too much nowadays, one things for sure, if you walk around claiming that you are one. It's pretty obvious to me that you aren't. Depending on what way you look at something, we're all constantly learning, if you think you know it all you've usually been standing still for years. Why Is This? because you know it all and there's simply nothing left for you to learn.