But surely you need to learn while mixing? It's not all theory, surely?
Learn by listening is exactly what I mean; yes. The "theory" detailed in that frequency chart is useless if one can't hear first.
I'll agree that one should learn how to mix while mixing, but I think there's a lot of room for folks to learn how to
listen *before* they start mixing. Everybody is in such a hurry to make their CD or MP3, and they assume that the gear will do all the work for them, that they don't find out until they are stuck in the middle of a mix just how lost they are because they don't actually know what they are listening to or listening for. They just don't have the ears for it yet.
And yes, a lot can be done to get those ears long before one even sits down in front of a mixer or DAW. It's amazing what one can learn just sitting back and listening to a spring thunderstorm; principles of frequency response, directionality by frequency, delay/reflections/reverb, arrangement and instrument parts by frequency, attenuation, etc. - entire chapters of information relevant to audio engineering - can be learned just by *paying attention* to a spring thunderstorm and thinking abut it a bit.
After doing that kind of thing a few times, and getting used to listening vs. hearing, visit a live performance or three. Not the big honking auditoriums where you hear nothing but the barn your sitting in, but a more intimite setting with a band supplying more than just a wall of noise (even if you intend on making nothing but a wll of noise yourself.) Apply the same paying attention techniques you picked up listening to a thunderstorm, and actually pay attention to how things actually sound, what works together and what doesn't. *Pay attention* to why the ride and the crash sound different and how they interact different with the rest of the stage, *pay attention* to how the different vocalists' different mic techniques (or lack of them) have a positive or negative effect on the actual sound of the vocal track, etc.
Then augment that by playing around with a graphic eq and a couple of CDs for an hour a night for a fortnight, learning how what you have learned to hear actually relates to the numbers printed on the front of the gear and used in the frequency charts. *Then*, maybe the information contained in the frequency charts will actually *mean something* and make some sense. *Then*, maybe, one might be ready to start thinking about mixing music and prepping themself for stepping up to the controls.
Frequency charts like mine are very much like road maps. They contain a whole bunch of useful information. But what they don't tell you is which direction you are facing, where you are, where you want to wind up, or how to get from here to there. If you are driving in a car and find yourself lost, stopping and looking at a map is no good if you don't know which way is north, where you are currently located, or where you are trying to drive to. The map won't tell you any of that stuff. Once you have all that info, the map *still* won't tell you which way to go, it just describes every route that can potentially be taken, and it's your job to read and interpret that info to get you where you need to go.
In audio, one needs a critical ear to determine north, present location and (most important) your planned destination first, before a map such as a frequency chart can be of any real use. And even then it can't tell you what to do; it can only provide the lay of the land, which you as the driver need to interpret to decide the best way to get from here to there.
G.
