The most important and valuable piece of studio equipment is the ear. Any expensive or high end gears you are using in your home studio cannot guarantee to produce quality results unless you have a “trained ear”. Trained ear helps you at arriving correct sound recording, mixing and mastering decisions. If you have noticed; great sound engineers (mixing and mastering) and recording producers all have the common trait of great listening skills because they possess a “trained ear” acquired from years of practice and listening to both good and bad music.
This is not a complete training guide but the tips and exercises below dramatically helps you to have a trained ear which you could develop from at least a year of studio. Take note that there is no overnight success of having a well-trained ear in working with professional studios. It takes time, consistent correct practice and dedication that can help you developed your listening skills.
Exercise #1: If you know how to play a musical instrument, then you should know how to tune it.
Importance: Before I worked with studio full-time, I consistently plays a musical instrument such as guitar that helps me a lot in deciding what makes the sound good and bad. This is where my production skills start shaping up. The most important skill is of course- tuning the instrument. Being acquainted with tuning the instrument can develop your listening ability in spotting out of tune recordings. It is why if you have noticed over the years of playing and tuning an instrument, you can easily spot out of tune guitars and even singers!
Evaluation method: Devote some time tuning your instrument to perfection. To test your tuning ability, you can even measure the results versus a digital guitar tuner to assess your tuning skills. I do this at times and it helps a lot.
Exercise #2: Consistent listening to professionally produced recording material
Importance: If you are working in a studio or having a home studio, it will be strange that you are not fond of listening to any professionally produced recording materials. This helps you again trained your ear by detecting how those professional recorded and mixed instruments would sound like, such as guitars, vocals, bass and drums. Beyond that you can also assess whether how much reverb they have as well as some techniques in panning, etc.
Evaluation method: The nice thing about this is that you can measure the quality of your produced works versus these professionally produced materials to see if your ear are trained enough to arrive you at the proper mixing/mastering decisions. If something is not right during your comparison, congratulations you ear starts to sort out bad music that you have created and then use your ear consistently to shape the sound of the mix so that it will sound as professionally produced as possible. You can use the existing CD’s of your favorite major label artist as a reference.
Exercise #3: Be familiar with subwoofer and bass frequencies and how they actually sound
Importance: Bass is the hardest frequency to mix in any studio. One limiting factor is not the hardware gears alone (of course to mix bass frequencies right, you need a subwoofer), but it’s the ear itself that are not attuned in listening bass frequencies properly. Based on my experience, there is a “drastic difference” on how a 35Hz to 50Hz would sound compared when it now reaches the 80Hz and 100Hz frequency level. This is an important skill particularly if you are mixing rock music where the kick drums and bass played a strong role in the success of the song.
Guessing what frequencies that needs to be adjusted can be a very time consuming or a trial error process. And this mostly leads you to bad mixing decisions. The appropriate method is to memorize how they feel (because deep bass sometimes needs to be felt instead of listening it with your ear) for different bass frequency levels. This is the recommended low frequency response and subwoofer sound test.
bassfrequency level
Mouse over the volume control (enclosed inside the red box in the above screenshot) and a voice of the person will say what bass frequencies are being played (it will start at 10Hz all the way up to 200Hz).
Evaluation method: Try to play some bass guitar, and then record a couple of notes. Say you start a low E string then A, D and finally the G bass string. Try to analyze what the bass fundamental frequencies affected by those strings. You can check if you get the correct results by doing a musical instrument frequency range analysis.
Exercise #4: Practice detecting subtle changes in volume levels
Importance: If you need to mix properly in your home studio, you need to spot small differences in volume levels. It is not enough to subjectively decide that the sound is indeed loud or soft; you need to train your ear to be sensitive with the most common dB (decibel) adjustments. These are the 6dB, 3dB, 1dB, 0.5dB, 0.2dB, 0.1dB. Very small differences such as 0.5dB, 0.2dB and even a 0.1dB difference are useful in mastering where you only need to do very fine EQ and level adjustments.
Evaluation method: Start with the easiest test (big differences between loud and soft); you can start with the 6dB level difference test and then gradually to a more difficult test:
a.) Blind testing a 6dB level difference
b.) 3dB level difference
c.) 1dB level difference
d.) 0.5dB level difference
e.) 0.2dB level difference
f.) 0.1dB level difference
Exercise #5: Understand the fundamental frequencies of most common musical instruments
Professional audio mixing engineers are able to spot accurately the specific frequency range of different musical instruments that needs to be adjusted. In this way, they can be able to mix and do accurate EQ adjustments if problems occur in the mix that pertains to clarity.
You might already know that both kick and bass guitars occupy the bass/subwoofer frequencies, the vocals at mid (500Hz to 3000Hz) and the hi hats at high frequencies (9000Hz above). The main problem is how these frequencies actually sound in reality.
Evaluation method: Start with a single instrument such as a simple guitar strum, and then try to analyze what could be the fundamental frequency that needs to be adjusted by simple listening (using your ear). Double check if you arrive at the correct fundamental frequency by looking at the frequency analysis response of the instrument. Practice this every day, you will notice that after weeks or months of listening you will start to be very familiar with the fundamental frequencies of different instruments by just using your ear and now becoming independent of any frequency analysis tools.
Content last updated on July 5, 2012