Your Ears, Your Life.

Oh you kids, with your rock and roll and your hippedy hop music. It’s so loud and obtrusive! Well, yes and no… While lots of us love to listen to our music at a pretty intense level, most of the time it’s not really all that out of hand from a health perspective. For those of us working or looking to work with music and sound for the rest of our lives, it’s extremely important to take care of our hearing in order to be able to competently perform in the workplace or even as a hobbyist in a home studio or concert environment (yes, I’m talking to you too live sound people!).

In the studio, you want to be listening at a level that is comfortable but is also loud enough to be able to make out the details in a complex mix. The first step towards this is obviously good quality monitors and amplifiers, but that’s for another article all together. Many engineers will tell you that about 80-85dB is an ideal level, though this number can vary either upwards or downwards as much as 15dB depending who you ask. You might find that older or more experienced engineers will say more, this is likely because they are already suffering from hearing loss due to damage throughout life or natural loss that occurs as you age (though this effects your audible frequency band without actually damaging your ears per se, they will often turn up their monitors louder so they can hear the frequencies they’ve lost the ability to hear over time). So, how do you tell how loud it is? A digital SPL (Sound Pressure Level) meter is the easiest method to recommend, as they will tell you within a few dB how loud you’re monitoring in the studio. There are various charts available online that can give you real world references of dB level if you would like something to compare your mix environment to, such as a telephone dial tone (about 80dB, seriously). Of course, you can stand higher and lower levels of sound, and it’s important to reference your mix at different levels to be able to hear nuances that may be inaudible or much less pronounced at other levels. I’ve found that once you’ve found a mix that you’re really starting to be happy with that referencing at a lower level will often let you know how your mix is going to sound on smaller speakers with less dynamic response (I don’t think most people have SOTA CF-750s in their cars… do they?). This is obviously besides referencing the mix on entirely different monitors all together. On the other side, when someone comes into listen to my mix I like to give a little more level to really get that live feeling, clients don’t want to hear a great mix at a comfortable level, they want to hear that shit rock. Again, the situation will arise when you’re not working with a bunch of punk-rockin’, beer chugging sons of bitches when you’re going to simply listen to the product at a level appropriate to it, radio ads don’t need to be heard at 130dB… in most cases…

Concert goers; earplugs are your friends! You don’t look stupid, the guy drunk and moshing without ear plugs does because he will be the one loudly exclaiming “Whaaaa?!?!” by the time he’s 25, presumably questioning why exactly he’s been ostracized from society even with his wicked long hair and shitty beard… Personally, I find in most venues, since the acoustics are often less than ideal, that wearing ear plugs simply gets rid of what I like to call “shitnoise”, which is mostly just sound resonating in that big metal box your watching your favorite band play in. It’s garbage sound that only serves to muddy up the good sound that is consistently coming from the mains, assuming that the originating sound is, in fact, good.

For those of you tasked with the job of actually having to mix live sound, earplugs obviously are not an option [see Jon's notes below], since you need to be hearing what the majority of the audience is hearing, whether it’s good or bad. First of all, know what you’re doing before you begin, have a strategy! Just making it louder is not going to do anyone any good. When you’re sound checking you should be thinking about your final mix, think about how much room your going to have to give every piece of the band or performers. Sure, your drums might sound great, nice and loud and out front like that, but you need to leave room to put bass, guitars, vocals, and whatever else on top of that. Bring the drums down and then build everything around those instead of just trying to pile more sound on top of them, your audience will thank you and your mix will sound like a mix, not a mess. This strategy can apply to any mixing; you need to build a package with everything in it and it has to sound good if not great, no excuses!

If others have personal mixing strategies it would be great if they would share them in the comments section, because there is of course no end all/be all approach to mixing anything. Any comments in general are welcome, since I’d really like to know how many people read the excellent articles on this site. Thanks for your time, I hope you learned something. Remember to take care of your ears, because they will actually, in turn, take care of you… or maybe not, since most people never make a damn dime in this industry anyway… right? You guys aren’t making any money either right?? Right?!?

Syd

[Jon's notes]

You can get really good earplugs from places like ListenUP! Canada. They are built on a mold of your ear and have a very neutral frequency response just providing a lower listening level. They cost around $200.