No there is no recipe, it is a matter of experience yes. It’s not always a straight forward answer, it will depend on so many things and the situation that it will not be a matter of following something by the book. You just need to study and understand object coordinates, vectors, which node uses which system and as you understand all of that, you adapt the uses to suit your needs. Procedural shading is very powerful and it can be complex, exactly because you have to have an understanding on what’s under the hood for the software. And it’s not always intuitive, you can get some many patters from a noise texture to make so many world like surfaces and it’s all about small tweak in the settings, it’s a very creative endeavor. The headphones is just one example, there is no right or unique approach, JL just found its way around to use it the way he wanted things.
