Listening is the most important skill we use when working on music. Being able to hear what's happening to all of the instruments and sounds in our mixes, as well as being able to hear the mix in it's entirety, is essential in order to create songs which sound excellent. Good technology will help (high quality speakers, headphones, a high quality sound card), but the most important element is experience – with practice, your ears will develop and you'll be able to make many more fine distinctions than you were able to when you started out. Through experience, you'll sense when a bass or pad is boomy, when a hihat needs to have it's high end pulled back slightly with a shelving EQ, when the kick drum needs to be pulled down just a fraction to sit better in the mix.
There are good listening programs around. I've seen a few book/CD combinations, which take you through a variety of exercises, training you to recognize certain frequency bands, types of distortion and so on. These can be very helpful for some people. I went through one and perhaps I got something out of it – it's hard to separate all the different lessons I've learned through the years and quantify how much each contributed to my understanding. However, my feeling is that the many years of actually mixing audio is by far the biggest factor in my improved sound. I've mixed an enormous number of kick drums in my time, in a wide variety of contexts, and have made an enormous number of mistakes. By now I know a lot about what not to do! These days, experience saves me a lot of time, because I don't stumble down as many dark alleys as I used to.
Having established that the best way to get better at listening is through a lot of experience, how do I make this article at all useful to newcomers to mixing? Well, there are a number of ways you can catch imbalances or bad sound combinations in your songs via creative listening techniques.
A really good technique is listening very quietly, in mono. I use a stereo imager plugin on the master channel for this. It allows me to set a stereo width of zero, so the signal is straight up the centre, and also has a level control, which I turn way down. Most of the time this plugin is bypassed, but it's very easy to do a quick mix check by turning it on. This combination is helpful for two reasons – in well mixed songs, the sounds come through clearly even at very low levels. When you're working at high levels, it's easy to think the bass is prominent enough. But often the bass can disappear entirely at low levels, since it doesn't have enough midrange content. The same is true for other instruments – a mix that is well balanced at low levels will sound even better when you turn the volume up. So turn it right down, listen and take notes – do any instruments get lost in the mix? Then listen out for instruments which seem to be sticking out more than they should – maybe you'll notice a bright hihat that's cutting through rather harshly, that will still come through fine if you drop it a couple of dBs. The other reason the quiet mono combination is helpful is that by listening in mono you'll firstly be able to tell whether any instruments disappear or drop considerably in volume due to phase cancellation (because inappropriate stereo treatments have been applied to the instruments) and secondly you'll get a better feel for the relative volumes, without the distraction of having some sounds out at the sides, some in the centre, some narrow, some wide. A lot of venues play music in mono, so it's good to have some idea how your song will play under these conditions (unless you're adamant your music will never be played in venues).
Another technique which is along the lines of the “listening quietly” technique is to use high and low pass filters to cut out low and high frequencies, leaving just the midrange. The midrange is the key to a great sounding mix. Some systems won't reproduce a range as wide as you're working with. The reason this technique is similar to listening quietly is that both techniques bring the midrange to greater prominence. Human hearing isn't linear, certain frequencies are perceived as louder than others when played at the same volume (the human ear can hear very well at the frequencies associated with human speech). At low levels, the low and high end of the frequency spectrum drop off considerably. The louder the volume is pushed up, the more linear our response to sounds becomes.
A technique I've found useful is the “morning after” listening test. I usually combine this with listening quietly (though not necessarily in mono). This just involves playing the song after not having heard it for a good chunk of time, and noting which instruments are the most noticeable. I've often pulled a few faders back a touch the next morning after this listening test, or removed some frequency content from a sound which was sticking out where it shouldn't.
A technique I used to use more often a while back is listening to a song in a variety of spaces – in the car, on the hi-fi, at friend's houses, at venues when I got the chance. Each time I made mental notes of things that sounded odd and tackled these when I got back to my studio. In time, though, I got to know my listening environment in my studio and these days I rarely get surprised by anything when I hear one of my songs in an unfamiliar environment. For me, the “listening in a variety of places” technique served to teach me more about the sound of my studio – once I could hear the imbalance in my studio, I could hear it the next time it occurred, and fix it before I played the track elsewhere. Techniques such as stepping out of the studio and listening from various places outside the room are similar to this – again, I find myself doing this less and less because I don't seem to get surprised any more.
Having said that, I do check my songs both on my headphones and speakers. I do the vast majority of my mixing through headphones at low levels, but I do send the sound out through my speakers, primarily to check out the low end. Through headphones, it may sound like my low end is very decent, but sending it out to the speakers can sometimes disappoint! In trance, the bass has to hit me in the chest in a certain way. There's no way to hit my chest through headphones. I have a certain spot in the corner of my room where I stand and feel the chest-thumpiness of my song. I'll play a variety of reference songs interspersed with my song so I can tell if it's hitting my chest in a satisfying way.
Speaking of reference songs, these are absolutely vital. If you don't yet have a collection of great sounding songs in the style you're producing/ mixing, I can't recommend enough that you build one up. I have a whole bunch of short snippets from the middles of great sounding trance songs, so I can quickly flip from one to the next, then to my song, and compare like with like. This will quickly let you know if there are any areas that are lacking or overly prominent.
Well, there are some brief thoughts about listening. You'll be amazed at how much more you're able to hear as you build mixing experience. You'll be able to tell much more quickly if a kick drum/ bass combination just isn't working, if a lead is too washed out, if percussive elements have particularly shrill high end frequencies. At this point I'll briefly mention frequency analyzers – as with some of the other techniques detailed above, analyzers can help you to train your ears to hear problem areas in your mix. By comparing a frequency chart of your song to frequency charts of reference songs you may see that your song has a big dip at 300 Hz compared to all the other songs. You may correct this area in your next few songs, based on the frequency analyzer, until you eventually start hearing and fixing it before you need to reach for the analyzer. Analyzers can be dangerous if used incorrectly (such as indiscriminately pushing up 300 Hz with an equalizer rather than looking first to correct the level of the bass), but as stated, can also be great learning aids.
Keep making great music!
Fabian
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