Hearing Focus

Hearing Memory & Focus

Your ears are not just a couple of microphones. Your ears are connected to and controlled by your brain. Hearing is 70% mental and 30% physical. The hearing mechanism (including the ear drum, the inner ear and its nerve endings) has to be in reasonable shape to be able to hear. Just because we can hear doesn't mean that we do hear. Actually hearing is something that requires mental focus as well as a good hearing mechanism. Small deficiencies in mechanics can be "made up for" with mental power.

One of the best illustrations of how hearing is mostly mental is illustrated by something called the "cocktail party effect." This is where a person can hear what a friend is saying across the room through all sorts of chatter and noise that should obscure the conversation. Then there is the husband that won't hear the wife because he's watching football. The TV can be 65 dB SPL and the wife can be 100 dB SPL and she won't be "heard." Thus we can "tune in" or "tune-out" our hearing with the brain.

It is not uncommon during a mixing session to see the producers take a run-off CD out to their car to "check" the mix. Why leave the control room with a monitor systems that costs thousands of dollars to hear the mix in the car? The answer is simple, the producers know how music should sound in their cars, because they've heard their car systems so many times.

This is good news to the project studio engineer who can't afford the $5000+ that it would take to install a really professional monitoring system in their studio. For a monitor system to be able to be used for mixing & mastering, it must reproduce all of the frequencies fairly evenly and that usually means that it will need a sub-woofer to reproduce that bottom octave that is easily lost with smaller monitor systems. It is also important that the room acoustics be reasonably good, but they don't have to be perfect. With a system like this, you will begin to "hear" through the monitor system and be able to judge how the product you are working on sounds.

Attaining Focus

Since hearing is mostly mental one has to focus on what the final sound of the master should be. One begins by listening to product that is worthy of being emulated. Hearing well mixed and mastered product on your monitoring system, will "tune your ears" and give you an idea of the final sound you are trying to achieve. In the business. we call these well mixed and mastered cuts our "references" Once you get into mastering, you'll want to have several references that you use. One way of getting started on this is to use references lauded by professional mastering engineers.**

Berry Gordy had the saying, "A good mix sounds good anywhere." You can use this principle in mastering. Especially when you are beginning to master, it is a good idea to review your work, and compare it to your references, on different systems. Just like it was for the producer in the mixing session, if the sound on your master is good, it will also sound good in your car, or any other system you normally use to listen to music.

So if all of this is true and workable, why do mastering engineers pay so much for monitoring systems and pay acoustic technicians to adjust the acoustics in their mastering suites? The answer is that the mastering engineer wants to attain 100% quality in the quickest amount of time - they don't want to spend the time listening to different systems to be certain of their work. The average mastering engineer will master more than one full-length project on a good day. But if the mastering engineer worked for eight hours doing only one full-length product, there would only be 26 minutes per cut to complete the mastering. At Motown we averaged 23 minutes per cut when we mastered.

As a project engineer doing mastering, you probably can take a lot more time to get things "right" or "as right as you can get them." Perhaps you will never achieve 100% quality until you get a real good monitor system and have an acoustically treated room, but I'm convinced that you can approach this quality by properly using what is available to you.

** See Bob Katz's Digital DomainTM Honor Role http://www.digido.com/honor-roll.html

wise

bob

From The Text Loud & Clear - Motown Heritage Mastering by Bob Dennis - available 8/3/2009