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Old 12-02-2008, 05:18 PM   #5
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,019
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First, a bit of theory to set the tone:

"All you need is ears."

So said George Martin, legendary producer of the Beatles, among others. Regardless of whether you regard the man as the final authority on all things audio, his resume is worthy of respect, and the simplicity and contrarianism of this statement makes it worth a few moments of thought.

If you have more or less functional hearing, then you have everything you need to make the same evaluations that million-dollar producers do (in fact many of them have less functional hearing than you do, probably).

Your objective is simple: to make recordings that sound good. And regardless of the complexities along the road, you, as the creative mind behind the recordings, are the final arbiter of what sounds good. So all you have to do is fix it so that it sounds good to you.

There is this notion of "golden ears," of people with a super-magical ability to hear the difference between good and bad sound. The idea is that this this supernatural hearing is what makes their recordings so good. That is nonsense. If their hearing were so much better, then none of us would be able to detect how much better their recordings were. They make "golden recordings" that are still "golden" even to those of us with regular ears. If you cannot distinguish between good-sounding recordings and bad ones, then yes, you should give up, but that's not the case, because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this thread. You'd be perfectly happy with bad recordings.

The fact that you can tell the difference between good-sounding recordings and bad-sounding ones means that you have the necessary physiological attributes to get from A to B. Skills, experience, and learned techniques will speed up the process, but the slow slog through blind trial-and-error can still get you there if you keep your eyes on the prize of getting the sound from the speakers to match the sound in your mind's eye (or mind's ear, so to speak).

In other words, if it doesn't sound good, you have to fix it until it does. This is sometimes easier said than done, but it is always doable, as long as you are willing to turn down the faders, take ten deep breaths, and repeat out loud: "all you need is ears."
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