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[Viitalahde]

Hey, I think we should discuss something about listening itself. We did it in the old RecPit, but I think it's time for a new topic with new people.

How do you listen? What would you like to learn and how do you teach yourself?

I start. Still learning and describing hearing is hard, but..

My way of listening has probably two levels. I listen to the allround sound of music: it's bounce, rhythm, timbre, space and such. From this I zoom to desired things and concentrate very much on stereo localization, distance and "space" around the voice or instrument.

I want to learn to concentrate more and gain more objectivity. Also I still need practise in listening to the allround sound itself - sometimes I feel I go too deep when I try to listen to certain ranges and get a little too far from the big picture.

My learning methods are simply listening a lot to good-sounding music and also a/b-ing against processors in-line for training hearing on the little details and (ahem) microdynamics.


Jaakko

[bellulah]

what i first start to notice when listening is what i like about it.  then, i try to find out why this element moves me in the way it does, and why it sounds like that.  

for example:  the latest yeah yeah yeahs record.  the drum sounds make me wanna hump.  and why?  well, brian chase kicks some serious ass and plays with beaucoup confidence so that helps.  but to me (and i stress to ME), i can hear the whole kit.  there's no part of it that's lost in the mix.  so why is that?  probably because there's no bass guitar.  but the... er... regular guitar is eq'd in a way that you barely notice that 'missing' instrument.  the end result is that the whole thing just sounds opened up.  it rocks and i dig it.  and i guess that boils down to less is more.  

and then there's another side - where you can't really figure out why the hell it sounds good.  TO ME, i love love love the sound of 'hot' by the squirell nut zippers.  would kill to be able to capture those kinds of sounds.  it sounds like 7 people in a room swinging.  that's it.  you don't start to listen for EQ tricks, or mastering, or what they did to eliminate the muddiness of a mix - the only thing you can think of is 'this is how it sounded in the room.'

and of course there can be things you hate.  some drum panning/mixing combos bother me.  like cold's 'year of the spider.'  every time dude lays on the open hi-hat, its panned hard left and seems like that's the only thing you hear.  

but this is a cool topic - i wanna know what other people listen for too.  and the things i mentioned are all recording aspects, but i really only get into something in the first place if the songs are good.  good songwrting will conquer all engieering woes (see: iron and wine).

thanks!
joshua dennison

[craig boychuk]

For training, a good tool to check out is the "Golden Ears" program ( http://www.moultonlabs.com/gold.htm ) It is a program of listening excercises that help you learn to recognize different frequency ranges, subtle compression, and lots of other things...I won't try to describe it in detail here, just check out the web site. Basically, it can greatly improve your critical listenting skills. Perhaps a tedious process for some, but they made us  do it in school way back when and I found that it really helped. This can be an especially useful tool for those who are a little green in the world of audio.

As far as listening goes, I often find if very difficult to get over production I don't like, even if the music is really good. Especially in regards to drum sounds. Bellulah, I totally agree with your panning comment. I prefer to hear the drums as though I was in the "audience", and you sure don't hear a hat coming from 8 o'clock when you're watching a band! This is just my preference, though.

[Ronny]

mid-fi wrote on Thu, 03 June 2004 11:49

For training, a good tool to check out is the "Golden Ears" program ( http://www.moultonlabs.com/gold.htm ) It is a program of listening excercises that help you learn to recognize different frequency ranges, subtle compression, and lots of other things...I won't try to describe it in detail here, just check out the web site. Basically, it can greatly improve your critical listenting skills. Perhaps a tedious process for some, but they made us  do it in school way back when and I found that it really helped. This can be an especially useful tool for those who are a little green in the world of audio. As far as listening goes, I often find if very difficult to get over production I don't like, even if the music is really good. Especially in regards to drum sounds. Bellulah, I totally agree with your panning comment. I prefer to hear the drums as though I was in the "audience", and you sure don't hear a hat coming from 8 o'clock when you're watching a band! This is just my preference, though.

Would that be a band with a right handed drummer or a left handed one?  

[bblackwood]

IMO, you learn to listen just like you learn to do anything else, instruction and practice.

Instruction: If you look at most (all?) successful engineers, they spent time working under the guidance of someone else - even if it wasn't in their particular area of expertise. A more experienced engineer can catch things and understand the balances better than a less experienced one, generally speaking.

Practice: The other thing is spending hours and hours listening to music, both great productions and horrid ones, on your system. You have to learn what sounds good for your market. in mastering, your market is pretty much everybody.

If you can get to the point that what sounds natural/good to you pleases a majority of people, you're golden.

[craig boychuk]

Quote:

Would that be a band with a right handed drummer or a left handed one?

Heh, I guess it depends, eh? You know what I mean....hard panned hihat = bad in most cases (in my opinion).

[lucey]

listening, is about hearing music.  by this i mean we generally hear 'ourselves' and have to learn to hear music.  by nature, we hear what we like and dislike and this is not hearing music.

analytically, any music of any style has 3 main elements, sound, pattern and quality.  a mix or a master has these same elements. this can be broken down further to:

the sound of the pattern, the pattern of the sound
the quality of the pattern, the quality of the sound
the pattern of the sound and the pattern of the quality.



but to make it simple, music is a quality organized in sound. a mix or a master is the further result of the intention of the creator to provide that quality to the audience


i listen to hear that quality and further arrange the quality along the lines of the intentions of the artists, or in some cases, the intentions of music itself.

this is really not as esoteric as it sounds, it's simple and effective.



and as Brad said, i learned these ideas being around people of greater experience, so a tradition of experience is helpful, if not necessary in these things, if we are able to connect with one.

[j.hall]

B-rad writes:

Quote:

IMO, you learn to listen just like you learn to do anything else, instruction and practice.

EXACTLY!!!!

there is a little more to it then that, more in a minute...

lucey writes:

Quote:

listening, is about hearing music. by this i mean we generally hear 'ourselves' and have to learn to hear music. by nature, we hear what we like and dislike and this is not hearing music.

i'm taking this slightly out of context......so don't take it personally brian.....

listening isn't about music at all, nor is it about sound hitting the ear drum in any way, shape, or form.

listening is what your brain does when it decodes the messages sent by your ear

listening is the brain paying attention to auditory stimuli

a recent study (and on going research) is showing that being exposed to sound.....of any kind....actually exercises the ear and shaprens the mind's auditory "sense"

this holds true with high volumes typically associated with "dangerous".  the idea is pretty basic and can be displayed in standard analogies we see all the time and have accepted as true

a trained and skilled chef typically has a much better sense of taste then the average man......he uses it daily, and relies on it to do is job.....thus his mind as sharpened and focused that sense.  surgeons typically have very steady hands and very sensitive hands.  their minds have sharpened their touch and reflex sense in their arms and hands in order to perform their jobs.....

it is not a new theory that, nor a theory at all any more, the mind can be focused and honed in specific areas to enhance a persons ability to perform a specific task repeatedily.

there is currently a lot of research going on regarding the ear and the the entire hearing chain.....

scientists are discovering some very interesting things on this topic, and it will be fascinating to see how it all develops and gets implimented into "common" practice for ENT's

[luke]

this is the best thread I have seen in here yet. although it hasn't picked up yet I love it. I am by no means a mastering engineer or a producer or a mixing engineer. but I have a strong desire to be an mastering.E. and have started my training years ago by listening to music in a critical scence. not the music but the sound of it. why does it sound the way it does. I also try listening to prominent frq,s. ones that just stick out like sore thumbs. as well as to what I can hear and where do I hear it at. I try to judge it, do I like the sound or not. I love the recordings of the POLICE. they are all so clear and they all sound pretty similar and I can hear everything everywhere. I have done recording and realized why all this is an art. not fully understanding what mastering was until about 6 months ago I can now listen to an album and tell if it was mastered well or not, or what the goal of the MA.E was. I am a big fan of dynamics so going for all out volume has not been my strongest thing. with limited experience I doubt i could get the volume any way but I get closer every time. one thing I know I can't stand is over compression. It kind of bugs me when I am listening to the music and can actually tell what was compressed either by a multi band or by the mixer himself.

   One thing that has always amazed me is how you can tell a major label recording from a minor label. yeah I know about the cost difference and all but it is in the mastering that I can tell the difference. I have a cd by a band done in a studio  and the quality is fenominal. absolutley no hiss or weird outlandish sounds in it, I mean amazing. BUT the mixing is rough and the sound is closed up or unexpanded. I have heard of masterer's expanding the stereo image a little or adding in the ambiance to the sound creating a life to the sound. what I don't understand is how. I feel it to be a shame that you can have such a decent recording only to have it never see it's full potential. I love to hear recordings that sound like they are in thier own environment, as said earlier " done in that room ".

O.K so we got the whole train your ears thing but what about recreating what it is you want to hear. is it a hit and miss thing. you recieve a recording and the producers want it hot as it can be. so dynamics are ruled out a little, but the mix is a bit dry and up front already, lacks a feel and has little or no life in it. so getting the volume shouldn't be hard but addind life and space to it and getting the volume might be more of a chore. do you listen to another cd similar in style and try to replicate it or do you start tweaking until you you have a good sound and then start adding space with your special gear and then retweak again, repeat until satisfied. to me it seems difficult to reproduce a sound not knowing what it's begining sounded like. Or is that a training thing as well, learning to asociate a finished sound to what it probably sounded like to begin with before mastering. One of the albums i like the least for sound is TAPPROOT, GIFT. this album to me seems like it had soo much taken away from it that there was nothing left to take before thing started disapering. In turn it sounds like a brick wall that you are standing on the other side of listening with a glass cup to your ear. when I listen to the cd on about any system it honestley sounds like a bunch of noise and I cant realy pick out where it is coming from. One of the best albums i have heared for the style of music is KORN, ISSUES. obviosly a high dollar album it actaually sound good to me based on todays standards----- SUPER LIMITING------.

   what i would like to know is what everyone did thier comparisons on and what it is they awed over it about.

[j.hall]

"major label sound" and "independent label sound" are quickly becoming indistiguishable

and personally, mastering isn't where that happens

it's in the tracking and mixing

smaller budget projects get less time, lower quality studios, and less experienced AE's.....

i have MANY friends that are making AWESOME sounding records for less then 10k, and having them mastered by VERY professional mastering houses....

the technology is there, making a bad sounding record these days leaves you with no one to blame but yourself...

[lucey]

j.hall wrote on Tue, 08 June 2004 09:21

i'm taking this slightly out of context......so don't take it personally brian..... listening isn't about music at all, nor is it about sound hitting the ear drum in any way, shape, or form. listening is what your brain does when it decodes the messages sent by your ear

we agree here, no offense at all.

Quote:

listening is the brain paying attention to auditory stimuli

i was trying to say that listening is not so much a factor of paying attention or ear training per se, it's the kind of attention we bring to the stimuli and it's how we decode what we hear.


there are many forms of paying attention: distracted attention, professional attention, creative attention, conscious attention.

so our listening skill is a factor of consciousness, really.



now what we can do with what we hear, that's professional skill.

[Viitalahde]

So I finally write in this thread again. This happens to me sometimes - I start a thread of a complicated thing and then I never seem to find time to get in to it. I quess a big part of it is the language barrier: quality of sound and listening perception is a difficult thing to discuss on its own, and even more so on a foreign language.

Anyhow, I like this Brian's quote:

Quote:

listening, is about hearing music.

Music is of course what it's all about. I need to train my brain to connect the wire between music and sound better. As I said, it's just way too easy to drop in the mass of sound and kinda forget the music.

As Brad said, it's of course up to hours and hours of work. I believe in this.. And try to listen, as much as possible. I think I'm sometimes a little nervous when listening, in a "Now what am I supposed to analyze from this???" sort of a way. This takes my concentration way away from the important bits.

How would you describe your "decoding" process of music when you listen and you're supposed to do something?

My mind pays attention to frequency imbalances first.. When "fixed", it's easier to focus on what else is wrong.

[guerillamixer]

Hmm.

Taking it all from a mixing point of view..(assuming song and arrangement have been taken care of)

I tend to hear problems, then solutions. Not frequencies then dynamics.

If the snare is too loud, or the vocal too spitting, its the source itself that I pay attention to. Fixing it is where the frequency and dynamics come into play.

The bigger the problem. the quicker I notice it, like potentialy painful highs, obvious low frequency bumps. Or edit clicks.  

I sometimes have trouble switching between dynamic and pitch perception. I really couldn't tell you straight away whether to vocal is out of tune if all i've been listening to the drum mics for a while.  Even worse if I'm looking at meters.

But if a sound or performance is drop dead gorgeous. I definelty hear that.

[Bob Olhsson]

What makes something drop dead gorgeous is the overall effect being more than just the sum of the parts. The production process is stepping completely out of the way of the music.

It's tricky because sometimes fixing one element draws the listener's attention to other problems. This is why everybody really NEEDS a producer. Most of the great recordings I know about from behind the scenes are in truth a very fragile illusion. This is why, for example, I think surround remixes of records that were produced for mono or stereo vinyl are almost never going to be as satisfying as the original. Many CDs of them only barely make it compared to the vinyl. It's not that vinyl is inherently better, it's that they were produced for the quirks of that medium.

[guerillamixer]

True Bob.

Sometimes with every "problem" fixed there is nothing left to pay attention to.

Sometimes the problems get smaller, then smaller then at some point cease to be problems and become features, but because I've gone microscopic focusing on some detail I can't perceive the change from problem to feature. Thats when I really appreciate a producer tapping me on the shoulder, and politely(or crudely)  telling me to remove my head from my behind.