Thursday, November 15, 2018
The Mental Side Of Mixing: The Benefits Of Exposing Our Minds To A Vast Library Of Sounds
ProSoundWeb: Just because someone knows where the buttons and knobs are, and what they do, doesn’t mean that person knows how to mix. The secret lies in our mind’s ability to recognize, learn and store a huge library of good, bad and unusual sounds. The collected and archived, personal sound library is the mental gateway to the audio mixing craft.
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2 comments:
This article is a little hokey, but it certainly does have some useful thoughts and strategies on how to think about sound and mixing. In particular, the idea of gathering a literal library of recordings to add to your mental library of sounds is a good one. Most people train their ears through trial and error or through intuition, but it does seem like it should be more efficient to try to learn from a finished product. In that case, you can learn from others' mistakes instead of your own. By studying in detail well thought out and compelling mixes, the path of reverse engineering to derive mixing techniques becomes available. In addition, the author's description and definition of "active listening" is a good one. I think most sound technicians, designers, and many musicians tend to do this intuitively, but defining the act and prescribing it does not hurt anyone.
I really like this article. I find it so interesting, thinking about the way people who deal with sound work. So much of it is so unquantifiable, once everything is working, you can’t just look at the stage and necessarily know what is wrong. Training my ears is something I will have to work on for the rest of my life, continually. Something I love about this process, is active listening. Active listening is one method of mindfulness, it focuses your brain entirely onto a sense, and helps you be very present. Being able to hear very specific instruments in your head is very important, and often untrained engineers can be seen just trying to make it sound ‘ok’ but not look at each individual thing. I appreciate the writer of this article for calling mixing an artistry, but I struggle thinking about it. The act of it is artistic, but the end result is to reinforce someone else's art. What you create is not noticed till it goes wrong, however with sound, it is satisfying enough just to hear something be exactly the way you wanted it to be.
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