Welcome to another episode of Are You Listening?
Today we're going to talk a little bit about how you listen what you listen to and your
environment.
Please look at the iZotope website to find companion blogs videos other educational materials
and today I want today spend a little time talking about your environment and how to
set it up and some strategies for setting it up because ultimately what you hear is
what matters most.
So we're looking to develop are brains and tune our brains to what the stimulus is right?
What you're listening to.
Which means you got to pay attention to the setup.
So I'm going to call this next section you can't hear the truth through rose-colored
glasses.
I mixing metaphors here right but you got to get the point, if there's something about
your listening environment that either enhances what you hear in a way that somehow hides
the truth or it filters out some information and doesn't allow you to hear everything that's
present in your track mastering you're going to have problems.
You're going to be surprised.
Either what you're doing isn't going to translate well out into the world or and this is kind
of a sneaky thing to happens sometimes your processors compressors especially might misbehave
because of something in your mix that is causing it to misbehave that you can't necessarily
hear.
To give you an example of what I'm talkin about, give a listen to the following example.
I have created, it's not a particularly musical example but created a version of a song where
you hear the mix and there's a 40 Hertz pulse that happens at the beginning every three
or four seconds or so give a listen to see what you notice.
So if you listen carefully would you probably heard is that the audio that you could hear
was ducking and it was ducking in response to this 40 Hertz tone and my guess is that
many of you in your listening environment couldn't hear the 40 Hertz tone.
So, we got a challenge here.
We're witnessing a symptom of something being problematic about the audio but we can't hear
the casue, right, now I think everybody probably recognizes what the issue is here now if you
can see behind me I've gotten really big speakers and a really big room to support them and
lots of low-frequency resolution so I can hear everything in the audio spectrum so I
wouldn't be surprised if you were saying yourself well that's fine but I can't afford your big
speakers and I understand that.
So what are some things that you can do to help you compensate for that.
Let's talk for a minute about headphones.
Headphones are a wonderful tool to complement your main monitoring environment.
They can give you a relatively inexpensive way of getting a good shot at hearing the
full spectrum and diagnosing problems that may be a little bit hard or impossible to
hear in your main monitors in your room.
So I would definitely advocate as a wise investment for getting some decent headphones.
It wouldn't surprise me if you end up spending 150$ or $200 at the lower end to get something
that's got good resolution through the bass.
Having said that I think as a general proposition the most people accept that or believe that
it's better to listen through speakers that headphones.
There are things about headphones that are unusual in that they cover your ear and they
prevent was called cross feed from the right speaker to the left ear the left speaker to
the right ear as well as the closer more direct path.
And while there are bits of software sometimes it's built into playback devices D to A converters
to help simulate this idea of cross feed you should just know that if you do most of your
working headphones you may make mistakes regarding imaging and maybe even tone so that a recording
my translate well to other people wearing headphones but not necessarily so well out
into environments where people are listening through speakers whether it's handheld speakers
or in rooms where there are speakers playing out into the air
Rule of thumb, use speakers but feel free to use headphones to augment your ability
to hear what you need to hear.
So assuming that you've done the best that you can with your listening hardware and your
listening environment we need to think about what you're going to use to measure what you're
doing against.
What you're going to use her as a reference.
Y know, the same way that all of us have developed this internalized reference of what
a guitar sounds like or what a drum sounds like, we weren't born knowing we learned that
by reptition over and over and over again a guitar plays and you're like oh that's a
guitar.
Mastering engineers and people who do mastering if they practice enough they begin to develop
an internalized reference of level and tone but that comes through practice and repeated
exposure.
If we are going to develop this internalized reference we need to develop a series of reference
materials to help us begin to understand what good tonal balance sounds like and what proper
level sounds like.
So I'm going to talk about it some of the strategies for doing that.
So the first thing is you want to begin to collect or curate a library of material that
sounds good to you and will post a link to a Spotify playlist that you can go to and
listen to good sounding mixes a good sounding masters.
But I would encourage you to start to develop your own library of files.
It's important to think about where those files come from.
If you were to record the stream coming from a streaming service they all play at different
levels and at different qualities of fidelity so if you're not careful about selecting good
material to use as reference material to help you educate your ears you may be calibrating
to something that's actually not the best case.
It may actually play back quieter than what the original master was in which case it would
lead you to a wrong conclusion or loud or distorted or what have you.
So couple of guidelines here first of all if you're going to curate a library collect
a series of files that you download directly whether it's from iTunes or whether it's from
one of the high resolution file websites where you can buy a lossless audio or even you know
go find some CDs and rip those CDs directly into your library that gives you the best
shot of collecting material that sounds as much like the original Master as possible.
It won't sound exactly like the highest-resolution version but it'll be close enough for your
purposes.
So the next thing and this becomes a little bit more challenging, is always playing your
audio back through the same reference digital to analog converter, now digital analog converter
is something that shows up in any device that lets you to play digital audio but if you're
playing through a mixer of any sort and you're playing the output of a phone and comparing
it to the output of a streaming service and comparing that to the output of a CD player
those are not all the same; they don't all playback the same level and there may be some
subtle changes even in the tone that comes out for each.
So if you move your reference you're not actually able to compare what you're actually working
with if that makes sense.
Getting a single playback system that you can trust and you can rely on to be your reference
for level and tonal balance is incredibly important.
Ultimately what we want to do as mastering engineers, the goal, the best outcome would
be to be able to sit down at your system when you're about to master something, hit space
bar and immediately know oh that needs to be brighter and it needs to be louder, or
that's loud enough but it needs a little bit more compression or you know whatever
it is to be able to make those instantaneous judgments.
The best way to do that is to know, walking in what the playback level of your system
is and not change it.
When you listen to mixing tutorials it's not unusual to hear the advice: "sometimes
I turn it up for a while to get a better shot at the bass, sometimes I turn it down for
a while so I make sure I can hear the vocals in the context of the mix" there are a lot
of reasons for varying playback level in mixing.
In mastering if we just leave our playback level static and you hit play then you will
get whatever playback level you have for your system, you come back the next day and play
playing back a different track and if it's a lot louder you'll know that instantly cause
you haven't mucked around with a playback level okay, so how do you do that get 12 tracks,
10, 12 tracks from a variety of records from your favorite genre and load them all into
a timeline in your DAW.
And then do a needle drop, by needle drop on me and just take your playback head and
park it you know in almost the the loudest section where the hottest section of each
one of the tracks.
You probably noticed if they're well mastered that the level of the sound coming from your
playback system doesn't change a lot you can go from track to track to track the track
and not mess around with the playback level.
Get your SPL (sound pressure level measuring) device people is a phone with a sound pressure
level meter you can get a whole bunch of different software or app sound pressure level meters
that work on a phone.
Hold it about well more or less where your head would be when you're listening and as
you're going from track to track the track look at the readout and what you want to end
up with is something in the neighborhood of 85 DB SPL.
That's kind of the magic number you can be a little more or a little less but 85 DB SPL
is a great target because that's where our hearing is the most even you won't fatigue
when listening at that level and it's a good point of reference.
You adjust the playback on your machine playing back those tracks to 85 DB SPL and now take
a mix and put it in the timeline and hit play and you will notice that it doesn't sound
like everything else in your timeline.
It will become immediately clear what way it's different okay...
So you begin to notice "oh I see everything that's mastered sits at this level and has
a certain total balance to it I know now when I listen to something else I'm about to master
what I need to do with that track to make it sound more like everything else in that
timeline"
Once you got that make a note whether it's a mental note of where in the software control
your playback level is or if you have a hardware controller as I do here in the studio make
a note of the position of the playback level, that is your mastering.
So anytime you sit down the master something you put your playback level in that setting
and that's your starting point and now immediately you'll have a sense of what you need to do
to adjust the level and ultimately to adjust the tone of the track.
At the same time once you got that set up, take a look at the meter that's present at
the output of your DAW when you're playing your track you'll notice that the the average
level of the tracks you're playing are sitting at more or less the same volume whether it's
- 10 or - 12 dbfs you can make a mental note of that and now...well mastered equals 85
DB in the air equals -12 on your meter and you've made this equivalency and you can use
that as a point of reference to inform what you do in your mastering work.
All right so I'm going to call this next section your echo chamber you live in your own echo
chamber of thought.
One of the greatest challenges when you are trying to master your own mixes is to revisit
decisions that you've made and do something different.
One of the advantages of collaborating with the mastering engineer that somebody else
is they can listen to what you've done and they hear it differently they hear in a different
environment and they hear it in a different context which is their own experience and
their own brain so if you spent hours and hours and hours in a mix making something
sound the way you wanted to sound why would you then change it in mastering?
Now if you got a great mix you may not want to change very much you may want to just a
little bit more high end or a little bit more bass you may want to change the level a little
bit and we're good to go in that case fine, but you do miss the advantage of that collaboration.
Here's a weird trick that I like to use actually not a weird trick but I have a weird idea.
So the trick is after you've been working on a track for a while go find somebody else
in the house in the hallway put him off the street I don't know by him a lemonade to get
them to come in and sit down next to you in the studio.
They don't have to say anything but just by inviting someone else to come in and sit next
to you for me it changes my brain and I hear things differently it's almost as if I can
hear it through their ears and sometimes the thing that's obvious that I totally missed
because I'm so focused on something else becomes apparent to me.
Now I'm going to spend a minute or two talking about your studio setup there's so much literature
out there and there's so much to be said about room acoustics and design sometimes there
are things that you can do to improve your environment that cost nothing at all or very
little.
If you want to build the perfect room chances are you probably can't make a business plan
to support that but anyway I don't want to be presumptuous but let's talk about some
of the basic core ideas around setting up a listening environment.
Most people are familiar with these but the first thing is make sure that you're listening
environment is set up in such a way that you are equidistant from the speakers you got
an equilateral triangle between speakers in your ears and that you have some symmetry
in terms of where you are positioned in a room.
If you're all the way off to one side so that you're closer to a boundary on one side of
the stereo image than the other that will certainly cause you to hear things in a way
that's less accurate.
You'll get comb filtering another kind of sound pollution from one direction compared
to the other so symmetry is important.
The worst place to listen and most environments is right in the middle of the room because
all of the unevenness the room modes are going to collide to the greatest extent in the geographical
center of your room.
So she can be about a third of the way back from the front wall or two-thirds of the way
back from the front wall those are better starting points.
Don't put your speaker's right next to a boundary because right next to a boundary unless you
feel like there's a deficiency in the bass, the boundary will exaggerate the low frequency
response and if you put your speaker in a corner it's going to be that much worse.
You'll get basically double that phenomenon.
So those are a few basic ideas maybe one more to consider is if you have the luxury is to
set up your playback system so that the front plane the stereo image is oriented across
the narrow wall and not the wide wall.
That way the first reflection coming off the wall behind you will take longer to get back
to you and that first reflected sound is the one that has the greatest possibility of interacting
with what you hear coming from your speakers.
It's one of the reasons that you'll find people relying more on midfielder near-field
speakers to eliminate the influence of the room but in an ideal world you have a great
room and great speakers and you can back off a little bit and you get the best shot of
hearing everything in the sound a good proportion.
I'm going to call this next section you can't clean your kitchen floor with a dirty mop
the point is that we want to have the most control in mastering of the result.
And if were using gear that has a particular kind of color that comes from a particular
kind of distortion not that there aren't times and places for that but in general your toolbox
should be full of gear that allows you to only make the change you want to make and
not add anything.
The problem with colorful gear in mastering is that if it imparts a particular kind of
color the assumption is that that kind of color would suit every recording.
And every genre and everything that you're doing.
Now if your master in your own material and you're only making one genre and I'll just
say you but say it's electronic dance music of some sort or other and you get a little
bit more upper harmonic edge from the EQ that you use that might be a cool thing but if
you want to be versatile and be able to treat lots of different kinds of material and maybe
have the opportunity to not impart that edge but make something sound a little bit fuller
or bigger or smoother you want a tool that cleaner that's more versatile that has the
option to change the character of the tool.
In mastering we tend to seek out tools that are both exacting and also don't have a sound
of their own unless we really need color in which case we'll go looking for it.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of Are You Listening if you want to be notified
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and I look forward to seeing you next time hope you find this useful.
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