ProSoundWeb: As a sound engineer, you spend years honing the ability to subtly appraise a mix. You learn to zoom in on each individual element and then zoom out to the whole mix, rapidly making decisions about what is and isn’t working so that you can tweak various parameters to bring those individual elements into one glorious whole.
2 comments:
This was a super interesting article to read about since I want to get more into mixing and the live sound world. I have never really experience mixing outside watching other work on mix and asking questions, so learning about the pitfalls that people experience will hopefully help me when I start getting my hands on more live mixing and working in sound as whole. I think the biggest takeaway from this article for me what preparation. Knowing the space you will be mixing in, what console you will use, what the band is like, etc. will help your mix exponentially. Reading about all these different practices in mixing makes me want to start implementing them and begin to work in mixing and live sound. I am excited to continue down this track and learn as much as I can about sound and live mixing. I hope that I can gain as much knowledge and experience during my time at CMU.
As someone who is an avid sound person, it is so hard to turn off my ears and just enjoy the show because I feel like my ears are always on and picking up on things that bother me that other audience members probably just do not notice or cancel out. It sucks to listen to music where everything is muddy and the engineer’s solution is just to bring all the levels up and blast your ears. I feel like with sound mixing, it is incredibly hard to train someone to have a good ear and most people are either born with it or not. I feel like in order to spot bad mixes, you also have to recognize that they are bad in the first place. More often that not, sound engineers or mixers can’t even tell what a good baseline mix is in the first place because everything they listen to is so bass boosted or uneven that it skews their perception of sound and how everything should sound.
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