Combating Listening Fatigue

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Listening fatigue is a concept familiar to almost anyone with longterm mixing experience. Even if you are not familiar with the term, chances are you have experienced it in your music making journey. It is often subtle (you have trouble determining what is wrong with your mix) and insidious (you think your mix is going great only until coming back to it with fresh ears, realizing the balance is way out of whack). But, no matter the case the result is always the same: lost time and energy, and shitty sounding mixes.

Listening fatigue is technically considered a physiological “problem” with the inner ear or the brain while being exposed to constant, repetitive frequencies (especially those with loud amplitude, percussive envelopes, or saturated mids). Due to the nature of music mixing, there is no escaping the fact that you will have to keep listening to looping portions of your recorded material over and over again, although determining the precise moment you reach diminishing returns, despite the more time spent, is difficult to gauge.

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The Awkward Transition

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One of the most aggravating things to deal with when writing a song is coming up with proper transitions, usually between verses and choruses. However, transitions can also occur as key changes, progressions, and tempo changes. This is not an exhaustive tutorial on the subject matter but rather an overview of some of your options.

Regardless of what kind of change you are dealing with, you should always consider an intermediary change, or bridge. Yes, this adds yet another change and must now also be connected with, both, the preceding AND succeeding parts. However, the intermediary part is usually a lot less musically dense, so it should be easier to lead in and lead out of than simply conjoining two completely disparate parts. Sometimes this bridge is as simple as a stripped down drum break, or even easier, a 1 or 2 bar sweeping effect. That is usually the best option if the chorus (for example) contains elements familiar to the preceding verse. If your chorus sounds a lot like the verse, there is no sense in drawing-out the suspense and tricking the listeners ear into anticipating some sort of big event (which will likely be a letdown if it sounds much like what was preceding it).
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Tutorial: Mid-Side Processing Basics

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You’ve probably been hearing a lot about mid-side processing and are thinking, “great, one more thing I have to learn just to make my tracks presentable.” Well, not really. MS processing is just another tool you can use to add depth to, or clean up, your mixes and in practise it is just another way to apply the fx and mixing routines you are allready familiar with. MS processing at its base is simply a different way of splitting up a stereo signal. Ordinary stereo signals are split between a left and right channel, whereas an MS processor takes a stereo signal and splits it between the sum and difference channels. The sum channel would be any audio signal which is equivalent in both the left and the right channel, or in other words, the mono audio material which is dead center in your stereo field. The difference channel would be all other audio content. The terms “sum” and “difference” are just another way of understanding “mid” and “side” processing.

Once you have your mix separated by its middle (sum) and side (difference) audio content, it will sound exactly the same as your usual left/right channel stereo mix with the notable exception that you can separately process the middle of your mix from the sides of your mix. This is useful in a myriad of ways, but here are some common uses of the technique:

She’s a thing of beauty ain’t she? Believe it or not, this unassuming little plugin can totally change the sound of your mix.

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In Search Of Higher Quality Audio

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– “FINALLY! A new audio player that features negligible improvements to sound quality while digging into my junk with a sleek triangular form-factor!” …or… “Is that a pono in your pocket or do we have a date?”

Record producers are always trying to get an edge over competition and will try any trick in the book to improve the perceived quality of their recordings. Witness the mastering limiter, SA-CD, surround sound, exciters, et al. All of those either lost favor, never took hold, or became self-limiting in the case of the loudness wars (wonky engineering pun intended).

Now we stand at a crossroads in regards to the next great leap in sound technology. It could be argued that the last great leap was the development of the MP3 file compression format back in the mid-90’s – which was a step backwards from the trend of increased recording fidelity. Naysayers aside, the leap that came before the MP3 – the almighty CD – was the last great leap forward. Proponents and naysayers alike agreed that the qualitative shift that occurred from records, cassettes, and 8-track (google it) to CD was vast. It was not a technology that was difficult to sell. You did not have to be a sound engineer to notice the difference in quality that CD could bring. To the average music-listening public it was a “no-brainer.”
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Tutorial: Sidechain Compression And Its Various Uses

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For its fancy sounding name and esoteric roots, sidechain compression is an extremely simple studio technique both in principle and practice. What is sidechain compression? Basically, it is the same as ordinary audio compression except that it uses another audio source as its input, and then uses the resulting gain reduction on the destination audio track. The most common application of this method is in the ubiquitous ‘ducking’ or ‘pumping’ effect heard peppered throughout just about every dance track recorded in the last 15 years. This effect is achieved by using the kick drum as the sidechain input, which then sends the resulting gain reduction to, usually, a sustained sound on another track like a pad, chord, or noise loop.

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