CyanJaguar
New member
There is a technique that I stumbled on that I want to know if anybody has had the same experience.
I call it "subconscious mixing", where you dont hear the different instruments anymore, you dont hear different frequencies, you just see a picture and you try to do what you can to make that picture come to life because when something is different in that picture it is very glaring that something is wrong.
An illustration: in the banking industry, to train the workers to spot fake currency, they expose them to loads and loads of real notes and coins over a long period. They dont once show them a fake note. How it works is when the cashier eventually feels or sees a fake note, he spots it immediately because in his/her subconscious, its glaringly different from the real thing.
I have seen this first hand before. I went to my local exxon with a bunch of coins and she quickly returned a dime. I asked her why, and she said it was not american currency. To me, it looked like american currency but it was actually from another country that I had visited. I asked her how on earth she spotted it and she said that she works with coins all day and all night, so she just knew. She knew in here subconscious.
THis is a method that works great for mixing: pros say to use a few Cds to reference, but I think it goes much deeper than this. To spot a fake sound, one has to be exposed to real(and the same sounds) for a very long time.
So the theory is that if a person wants to mix rock, he should listen to the best rock mixes over and over for an extended period of time(maybe one week). He cant listen to anything else, as it could lead to second guessing. The way that country mixes sound is entirely different from rock or rap. And he also cant listen to ANY homerecordings in that period.
The fact is that it actually works. Listen to rock CDs for a week or even better, your favorite rock CD. After a while, the cd imprints itself in your subconscious, and when you listen to another cd or another genre, it now sounds strange. Suddenly, country vocals are too loud, or the low end in rap is too big, or the mids in dance are too prominent.
Of course, make sure you listen to the CD you want to sound like, because when you listen long enough on one set of speakers at one set level, that sound becomes imprinted in your mind and that is how your CD WILL sound when you mix it.
Any thoughts or additions are welcome.
ps. Coming next, how critical listening is just like that college class, critical reading.
I call it "subconscious mixing", where you dont hear the different instruments anymore, you dont hear different frequencies, you just see a picture and you try to do what you can to make that picture come to life because when something is different in that picture it is very glaring that something is wrong.
An illustration: in the banking industry, to train the workers to spot fake currency, they expose them to loads and loads of real notes and coins over a long period. They dont once show them a fake note. How it works is when the cashier eventually feels or sees a fake note, he spots it immediately because in his/her subconscious, its glaringly different from the real thing.
I have seen this first hand before. I went to my local exxon with a bunch of coins and she quickly returned a dime. I asked her why, and she said it was not american currency. To me, it looked like american currency but it was actually from another country that I had visited. I asked her how on earth she spotted it and she said that she works with coins all day and all night, so she just knew. She knew in here subconscious.
THis is a method that works great for mixing: pros say to use a few Cds to reference, but I think it goes much deeper than this. To spot a fake sound, one has to be exposed to real(and the same sounds) for a very long time.
So the theory is that if a person wants to mix rock, he should listen to the best rock mixes over and over for an extended period of time(maybe one week). He cant listen to anything else, as it could lead to second guessing. The way that country mixes sound is entirely different from rock or rap. And he also cant listen to ANY homerecordings in that period.
The fact is that it actually works. Listen to rock CDs for a week or even better, your favorite rock CD. After a while, the cd imprints itself in your subconscious, and when you listen to another cd or another genre, it now sounds strange. Suddenly, country vocals are too loud, or the low end in rap is too big, or the mids in dance are too prominent.
Of course, make sure you listen to the CD you want to sound like, because when you listen long enough on one set of speakers at one set level, that sound becomes imprinted in your mind and that is how your CD WILL sound when you mix it.
Any thoughts or additions are welcome.
ps. Coming next, how critical listening is just like that college class, critical reading.