Human Mistakes

[Pedaling Prince]

.........if you hear something in one of my mixes you don't like it's not because I'm being affected by my room; it's because I liked the sound the way you're hearing it.

this statement is incorrect and naive.

you have no way of telling how much you are being affected by your room.

If that's true then a truly "accurate" recording is physically impossible. Even professionally treated rooms are never perfect; nothing is. Your best defence against that is to get familiar with how high quality professionally mixed material sounds in your environment; do enough of that and you should get a good feel for how your gear sounds the way you have it set up. Will you ever have a completely "accurate" picture? No. But then again, the goal of art is expression, not accuracy. You need not know how the canvas was made to know how your paint looks on it.

headphones sacrifice stereo and depth image . . .

I suppose, if you're speaking strictly of the stereo image provided by speakers you could say you're sacrificing that, but I believe the word "sacrificing" is misleading as it implies a total loss of stereo image. Headphones do not do that; they merely alter your perceptions of stereo and depth. More to the point they tend to exaggerate them since your ears are now physically isolated from one another and each channel's signal is being fed directly into them. This tends to exaggerate the effect of any panning or reverb, which is why it's so important to check a mix on both speakers and headphones. Headphones will tend to distort your judgment of reverbs and pans, but they'll also pick out details in the sound you're likely to miss on speakers, like that tiny click or dropout. Not to mention that listening on headphones gives you a good idea of how your mix will sound if the listener decides to listen on headphones, or is using an iPod, an MP3 player or a cell phone to listen to your work.

. . .and most will have extremely uneven frequency response issues too.

So do speakers. Unless you can afford multi thousand dollar THX approved studio monitors.

Which most of us can't.

being familiar with your gear doesn't address these problems, but merely conditions our brain's perceptions and colour's judgement.

All judgment is "coloured." By your room. By your gear. By your mood. By your ears. By your attitude. By your taste, for that matter.

Being familiar with your gear merely means you're aware of how it colours your judgment. You can never entirely eliminate inaccuracy endemic to your environment but you can at least minimize it by maintaining an awareness of how your studio environment affects what you're hearing. Once you're familiar enough with your gear and your setup you can produce work that will sound good on a wide variety of systems. I've played my mixes on everything from high end systems all the way back to the little speaker in my iPhone. I've played my mixes on high end headphones all the way down to Koss iSparks (ugh... those things were terrible for anything; if you're on a budget do not consider these things). I have yet to create a completed mix that didn't sound good in every environment I tried it in. And when I complete a mix, at minimum I listen to it on my speakers, my headphones and the iPhone speaker to get a good, balanced feel for it from those three different perspectives; that gives me a good solid idea how it will sound in a variety of environments.

i'd also add in passing, that if you can look at a spectrum for a vocal and deduce the tone from such, you are likely to be the first in living history to do so.

I didn't say I could "deduce the tone" of a vocal with a spectrum analyzer; that can be done only by listening. What I said was:

"I rarely use any kind of spectrum analyzer unless I'm having difficulty resolving a particular problem, most often when vocal tone doesn't sound right. Sometimes it helps, when something sounds off, to have a visual representation of that sound to help you figure out where the problem might be."

If you're going to comment on my ideas, at least get your facts straight. What I said was a spectrum analyzer can be useful in determining where the problem is after I've already determined that the tone is off by listening.

when did you last have your hearing professionally checked, by the way?

Seriously...?

There are plenty of mixers out there who have damaged hearing from years of working in the field and are able to function just fine so long as they bear their hearing's limitations in mind; like getting familiar with your gear, you also have to get familiar with your ears and their limitations as well. Once your ears are unable to hear above, say, 12 kHz that's probably where you're at the point where you just don't have good enough hearing to judge.

As for my hearing, I haven't had it professionally tested if you must know (wow you depend heavily on measuring stuff, don't you? ). However, to give you some practical real-world examples of how good my hearing is:

I have always been able to tell when there is a CRT-based TV or monitor on in a room because I can detect the 15,734 Hz tone created by the frequency of the CRT's electron gun scanning the screen; I can still hear this tone even today. I'm 41 years old; the average man my age can't hear about 14 kHz. Also, in the tub this morning I pressed the Indiglo night light on my watch and discovered it, too, makes a faint high pitched whine when the light is on. It sounds a lot like the CRT noise so I'm guessing it's at least 15 kHz, possibly higher.

All right. To me, here's what it boils down to:

So far I've listened to two of your mixes: "Revelations" and "Human Mistakes." Granted, two mixes is probably only a tiny fraction of your work. Still, I think it's rather telling that I liked neither of them (which is why I haven't thus far sought to listen to any more).

Now. If I did like your work, and you were saying all this, then I might be a little worried about the quality of my own. However, thus far you have done nothing to prove to me that you have any idea what you're talking about. Sure your technical ideas seem to make sense on proverbial paper, but if the work I've heard from you so far is a representative sample of those theories in action... well... doesn't sound like your approach is working to my ears...

Also, from what I've read of your comments to me and others, you seem to have this idea in your head that your way is the only right way. That's the way you come off, at any rate. In any art, and make no mistake music mixing is an art, there is no such thing as that one "right" way to do something.

For example, normally I am unequivocally against the idea of master buss compression, genre of music notwithstanding; I view compression as something that should only be used on individual tracks in a mix, not on the mix as a whole. However, while I will never use compression on my master buss, I am fully willing to recognize a legitimately effective use of it, such as juanjose1967's mix of this song. He used master buss compression but made it astonishingly transparent and effective. Though he used a technique I oppose, he ultimately created something I liked, which only goes to prove that no matter how strongly you believe something should not be done a certain way, there will always be someone, somewhere, who does it that way and makes it work better than you ever would have thought it could.

If you don't like my work, so be it; you have a right to your opinion. However, you should be aware that based on the comments I've gotten here, and elsewhere, you appear to be in the minority in that. Even Mike Senior himself has enjoyed my work, praising my sense of balance in particular.

So. You want me to take your advice seriously? Drop the technobabble; to me, it's meaningless. If you want to impress me, you've got to create a mix I like.

I've heard work by Mike Senior, and I liked it. That proves to me that his technospeak is not just babble; he knows what he's talking about.

From the work I've seen from you so far, you have yet to prove that to me.