While the advice of just using your ears has its merits, the reality is we need to be mindful of our auditory system’s strengths and weaknesses and know when to use the right tools to support it. Rides or hi‑hats creep up in volume way past where they need to be vocals that appear appropriately loud loiter 5dB under where they need to be in the cold light of day effects chains containing a traffic jam of plug‑ins render an initially perfectly good sound into a fuzzy mess. The wearier our ears become, the more likely we are to allow a mix to mutate out of shape. If you’ve ever eagerly opened a laptop to listen to the fruits of last night’s recording work only to be greeted with a sonic mess, you’ve experienced our hearing’s tendency to fall off the wagon when tired. For a classic example, just recall the last time you patted yourself on the back for your clever use of a compressor before realising the bypass button was still on. When the brain is not able to understand the signals it is receiving, or is distracted by other sensory information, it can fill in the gaps with auditory hallucinations. Room acoustics, tiredness, headphone EQ and stress are some of the factors conspiring against our hearing. It’s a microphone with the ability to selectively choose what it listens to, with in‑built compressors and dynamic EQs to protect it from damaging noise, and a system of analogue‑to‑digital conversion that is capable of translating the air pressure from a farting speaker into Bach or Beethoven.Įvery sound you hear is delivered by a miracle of nature, but like any piece of technology, the ear has its limitations. But what if your ears aren’t always to be trusted? The human hearing system is the most powerful machine in each and every one of our studios. That’s the advice drummed into us since day one of our musical lives. We explain how to interpret what they’re telling you. Our ears are the most important tool we have, but they’re surprisingly unreliable.
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