Secret tips to improve your mix by avoiding Ear Fatigue
How come my tracks don’t sound like a commercial release?
Part 1: Ear Fatigue
News flash…Your ears fatigue Very quickly at high listening levels (yes, that means your ears do indeed get ‘tired’). When your ears are fatigued, your brains ability to register & seperate frequencies is dramstically reduced. Tha means your hearing becomes ‘muddy’!!
What is it about dance music that really drives us on? Why do we fell so empowered by it to move and shake?
Because the air being pushed by the massive (& extremely loud) speakers in your favourite club are quite literally pushing you around! The gravity effect of a kick and bass over a loud PA (public address) system is quite literally physics moving your body.
Don’t believe me? Next time you are in a club where the music is pounding your body (as well as your poor ears), try and move your self up and down (some call it dancing) in the opposite direction to the kick drum. i.e. move upwards when the kick strikes, and move downwards inbetween the kicks. I guarantee you it will feel awkward, uncomfortable and down right unnatural. Not to mention everyone around looking at you like your an alien! Get my point? Music is sound, and sound is physical.
So…. Why did I bother running you through that little episode and whats it got to do with Ear Fatigue? Well, quite simply, your ears are able to fatigue at levels much lower than that experienced in a club. And it is up to you to protect them from this fatigue to ensure you are making the most informed decisions possible about your music. If what I’ve said so far means nothing to you, perhaps skip the rest of this article and keep turning up your mixer to full. Good luck getting a decent sound, let alone being able to hear in 10 years.
Okay, thats all good and well, but what am I supposed to do about it and how do I know if my ears are ‘fatigued’?
The phenomenon known as TTS (Temporary Threshold Shift) basically means after prolonged exposure to loud listening levels, your ears’ ability to actually hear is reduced. You’re going temporarily Deaf! Don’t freak out, as the name suggests, this is temporary. But if you keep it up, can lead to permanent loss of hearing.
This handy site has provided a nice little chart with some real life decibel comparisons and even how long you can listen to certain levels before causing yourself damage. You’ll notice that increasing the volume from 90db to 95db (train whistle at 500 feet to a subway train at 200 feet) reduces the safe listening times from 8 hours to 4 hours! Don’t know what 90db is? Get yourself one of these valuable assets. A decent meter will only set you back about $100aud, and it will save you a lifetime of hearing if you use it… a wise investment if you ask me.
So, if you’re still wondering how loud you should be monitoring your productions, well that is a relative question. How long do you want to sit at the computer for? A good & safe place to start is: 8 hrs = 90db; 4 hrs = 95db; 2 hrs = 100db. Overall, if you stick to around 90db, you’ll protect your ears (you only have one pair!) and produce better music (since you won’t fatigue as quickly).
Now, if you thought I’d be finished, you’re wrong. Sound level is only one part of the ‘fatigue’ equation. Another very important area which often gets no attention, especially when you are feeling ‘in the zone’, is how long you spend listening to any one piece of audio. The longer you spend listening exclusively to one loop, one vocal part or one whole track, the quicker your ability to make objective mixing decisions fades.
Comparison is your best friend in this situation. The longer you listen to one piece of music, or one EQ setting, the quicker your ears adjust and get ‘comfortable’ with what they are hearing. This is a nasty trick your ears play on you and the only way to combat the adjustment is by making regular comparisons to other sounds.
If you are mixing your track, working on levels, panning, eq, compression etc, then by now you should have already chosen a commercial song from which to draw inspiration. Deciding which track is best suited to your needs is a personal choice but things to keep in mind are:
- Does it have the groove, energy, direction I want to achieve?
- Do I like the ’sound’ of the song?
i.e. Is the Kick/Bass prominent and punchy enough? Can I see myself going mental to this on the dance-floor (or not… if that’s your direction). Are the different elements of the song (snare, hats, melody, pads etc) clear and cohesive or are they muddy and jumbled?
Once you’ve chosen the right track from which to compare, you should do so regularly.
For simplicity and speed, load the track into your project on an empty audio track, mute it and drop the channel volume until it matches the master bus when your own song is playing. Now that its at the same level, you can easily hit the ‘Solo’ button for a quick reference to what should be considered a professionally mixed & mastered track. You can make things even faster and intuitive by assigning the reference tracks solo button to a Hot-Key on your keyboard.
Now when you are making important decisions about how much bass to have, how loud the snare should be, how far back the pads should sit etc, you have an accurate place to compare your own project to. Sure it will be very challenging if not impossible to achieve exactly the same sonic signature, but with a lot of practice and perseverance you will find your sound quality improving dramatically.
Make sure when you are working with these tools that you check sooner rather than later. Don’t leave it until you’ve been at it for an hour, or even 10 minutes. The ear will adapt within seconds to fine EQ adjustments, and within minutes to a whole song.
This same technique can be applied when making EQ adjustments. The trick here is to ‘bypass’ the EQ instead:
- You have decided a certain sound requires an EQ tweak
- Reach for the EQ and start affecting the areas you feel necessary
- Turn the EQ off (or bypass the zones you have changed) and listen to the sound as it was previously
- Turn the EQ back on and compare to what you were trying to achieve
- Repeat until you have the sound just as you need it without making it sound worse
If you leave too much time between swapping the EQ in & out, you run the risk of allowing your ears to get used to your newly EQ’d sound. This will greatly hinder your ability to make objective decisions regarding your music.
In summary, your ears are your best friend and should be treated with respect. These friends like variety, hate loud noise for long periods of time and only have one lifetime. Once they are damaged, they are gone for good.
Monitor your music at safe levels for the appropriate lengths of time and you will find your ears lasting a very long time. Make quick comparisons to music that you would consider very well made, to a professional standard, and you will find the decisions you make in regards to your own sound become much easier and yield better results.
If you have any questions about this article or want to get into further detail, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m able.
Good luck on your musical journey,
Adam
How come my tracks don’t sound like a commercial release?
Introducing a short series of tutorials
Next day, after listening to some of your favourite commercial tracks on the ride home from work you’re thinking, “Hell yea, I totally nailed that beat last night, it sounds just like whats on my iPod!” But all is not the case is it! You come home, all fired up ready to push play and bask in the glory that should rightly be the next big hit, only to find that in comparison to everything you’ve been listening to on the ride home, you’re new baby seems (prepare for some buzz words), lack-luster, plain, lumpy, lifeless, busy, cluttered, muddy or just plain Whack!
Well…?? What the hell happened?
There’s about 10 topics I will cover which could have occured to rob you of your glory. Be certain that this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are some of the more common areas I find affecting people on the road to their own musical nirvana.
You could have been suffering from ‘ear fatigue’ last night, a bad listening environment or even mixing the track at a level that’s too high (or too low).
You listened to your own project for too long and didn’t reference other material or you didn’t program your sounds appropriately (with regard to each and every other sound in the mix). The sounds that you programmed so delicately weren’t placed in the mix properly or your little pet that’s always jumping up at you with beaming eyes wanting to be played with (your effects!) got the better of you!
You had a little too much alcohol or drugs (contrary to how you feel at the time, you don’t do things better when drunk or high), or maybe you were acting like a kid in a candy store, adding sound after sound, trying to ever evolve that otherwise rockin’ beat.
Boost your screen space with a USB powered 7″ Touch Screen
The time is fast approaching when open-source programmers and affordable hardware combine to make the ultimate customizable dj setup at a very affordable price. Until that day inevitably arrives (when we all have exactly what we want right at our finger tips for every performance) you can start yourself towards that dream with one (or many) of these babies.
Mimo have just released their very affordable 7″ Touch Screen for a meagre $199US. Hosting a resolution of 840×400 and powered by USB, not only is it super light at 600 grams but it has a rotatable screen so you could use it equally well for sequencing as for menu browsing!
I can think of several great uses for a light weight screen like this:
- Keep plugin windows open & out of the way for quick adjustment to non-assigned parameters & preset navigation
- Emulate a Kaoss pad type system for fancy effects
- Have a dedicated browser screen to free up your main screen for more important items
- Can’t afford a Lemur and think an iPod is tacky? Setup your own touch-screen midi controller with the MonoTouch software in style!! It’s only $29US, so thats under $230US for your own Lemur… Nice!
Of course, you can use this for many mroe purposes like triggering visual clips and multi-tasking at your day-job, but thats upto you to decide.
Think you’ve got some great alternative uses for a 7″ touch screen in a performance related environment, let us know by commenting at the bottom!
How to get your sounds as wide as possible in the mix
Somewhere along the way when you are composing your latest track you will start thinking about where the sounds appear on the sound stage.  A key principle to achieving a really nice mix is not just having the right balance of mono and stereo sounds but having those stereo sounds just where you want them.  
You may notice that on some tracks by the upper echelon of music producers, sounds can be placed so wide in the mix that you simply cannot get there by using any conventional stereo widerers like Cryosonics Sindo V2. ¬†While these tools are great for the usual task of ’sweetening up’ a sample with a boring stereo image, they won’t give you that extra ‘magic’ that you are looking for.
The key here is to employ a Double Tracking technique with the use of a basic delay like Ableton’s Simple Delay. ¬†You can easily replace the delay with any other effect in your arsenal, however delays usually get the best, most controllable results.¬†
I am going to explain the rest with focus on Ableton’s Live production software as this is my weapon of choice. ¬†The principles you will find translate to any DAW you choose as well as any hardware mixing solutions. ¬†
How to get that wide sound:
- - Choose an audio source to double track (a synth line or vocal/percussion track/ or anything you want) and turn it¬†down at least 3db…it will get louder shortly.
- -  Duplicate the audio track
- - Double tracking essentially means duplicating the audio source so you have two copies playing at exactly the same time. This technique is used to apply different processing to separate parts of the audio spectrum in a single audio source.
- - Pan one channel Full-Left the other Full-Right
- - Add a Simple Delay (or your delay/effect of choice) to one of the two channels.
- - Feedback at 0%, Dry/Wet at 100% Wet
- - Adjust a desired amount of short delay (2ms-20ms) or a very subtle amount of chorus or reverb.
- To do this, click the SYNC buttons on the delay plugin which will take off the Quantization and allow you to apply small time-based settings.
You will immediately hear the sound become spread into that ’super’ wide zone you previously thought unreachable. ¬†Now we need to gain collective control over the sound again…
- - Send both channels to a stereo Bus or Group channel
- - To do this in Abelton Live create a new audio track
- - Set the tracks Monitoring to IN (on the routing section’s I/O)
- - Now you can control the two tracks as if they were one super wide source from that single Bus channel.
Good luck with your exploration,
Adam
What to expect from Kana’s music theory articles
To those that are interested in music production or even those who have been developing their skills over the years, Kana will be presenting a series of articles on music production theory.  Some articles will be aimed at the advanced producer and others at the beginner.  
Overall, some knowledge about computers and music software will be required to comprehend these topics.  Since it would take a very long time to go through all of the basics, these topics are best left to other resources where the time has already been invested.  
You will most likely find information here that you can find elsewhere.  These articles are being shared with the sole purpose of giving value back to our readers and possibly shedding new light on a concept you perhaps are already very familiar with.  You will be able to bring up the articles any time by using the Tag Cloud to the right of this page or by using the Categories beneath it.
To quote¬†Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, a Zen priest who has been noted as one of the principle founder’s of Buddihsim in America. ¬†More information can be found on Suzuki here¬†http://sfzc.org/
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Top 5 blogs on music production and djing
Step one in the battle to beat the “Loudness War!”
Turn Me Up!‚Ñ¢:¬†www.turnmeup.org¬†Ever wonder why recorded music used to sound so much better? If you think mastering is all about making your music LOUD then you need to read this…
:: follow link for more info.
