Riaan
Does one's ears get tired after prolonged listening when mixing and mastering? It seems to me that mine does. After about two hours or so of listening to the same tune over and over again, it appears that volumes, or my judgement of it, is not right anymore. It seems that the tone of my guitar deteriorates. More and more things that generally don't sound good pops up. When I stop and continue the next evening, it suddenly sounds better especially in terms of volume. And I don't monitor very loud. My room is not yet acoustically treated though - could that be the problem?
So I'm wondering if it's the auditory equivalent of staring into a bright light for too long, and continuing to see the "burned in" image when you close your eyes? Does it improve with experience? Do the pro recording engineers, who listen to stuff all day long, also experience this kind of thing?
AlanRatcliffe
Yes, your ears get tired. Better monitors are usually designed to minimise it and working at lower volume also helps, but it's always going to be a problem. Taking breaks every so often also helps. You can often work through it for things like tracking, but for critical listening like mixing and mastering, always check the results the next day and do the final tweaking with a fresh set of ears.
Gearhead
FWIW: I can listen a LOT longer to very good equipment than to lesser stuff - I get listening fatigue in the car after 3-4 songs while with my (rather audiophile) hifi system it takes 3-4 hours. The way I understand it, your brain 'sees through' the errors occurring in for instance speakers. Although this 'distilling the real sound' works subconsciously, it does wear you out.
Manfred-Klose
Reminds me of the "fletcher munson equal loudness contour"
*The ears frequency response is different according to level.[/li][/list]
*The ears frequency response is not flat.[/li][/list]
*This means that we must mix at different levels[/li][/list]
ear fatique is a common thing, just go and take a break once in a while when mixing.
Bob-Dubery
I'd just like to say that I thought Riaan asked a particularly interesting question here.
deanBailey
Yeah, when you edit/mix 9-14 hours a day your ears start to give in in the long run.
I hat ear fatigue especially when you're trying to dial in a guitar tone. (which usually takes a while). The tone that you first thought was cool might start to sound average or you start to pick up little (unnecessary) things you didn't mind origionally.
My way of getting around this (just for a short while before I need to take a break) is having a reference track that I A/B with to always bounce back to so that my ears get into something new and stray off from the tone that I'm trying to get. When I come back to the tone it's sorta fresh again.
I guess it's kinda like the "boiling your strings to get them new again" technique ?
Neps
Bad monitors tire out my ears quite quickly!! And a very live mixing space. I can work for about 3 hours straight in my studio before having to take a 10minute break. And that is with GOOD monitors. At home I can manage about 2hours before I'm slightly insane. But these times are based on when I do a lot of critical edits and mixing.
When it's just to get something down, or playing around I can sit for hours trying out diffrent things. But when it comes to work, breaks are important.
A cool thing to try and do, to relax your ears is to make a 5 minute loop of 'white noise' and play it through headphones before mixing. It's the randomness of diffrent Hz's tha get's me to relax my ears a bit and not to have to focus on a specific sound. But make sure it's a low level, otherwise you just tire them out before actualy working.
majestikc
Your ears are basically moving parts so they will eventually start to strain no matter what, it's usually the highs and lows that suffer the most, and it also depends on how much extreme eq'ing your doing and how much compression etc etc.I've never tried it but I'm sure that you could probably mix soft jazz a lot longer than you could metal, even at the same relative loudness.
But it's unavoidable, it's like walking, you can keep it up for a long time but eventually your legs will be tired.
Neps
majestikc wrote
.I've never tried it but I'm sure that you could probably mix soft jazz a lot longer than you could metal, even at the same relative loudness.
I get tireder more quickly doing jazz.. For some weird reason, I tend to have to realy concentrate to get jazz to sound lekke.. as where with rock and stuff like that, I can get a balance quite quickly, without too much of a fuss. My ears seem to get realy angry at me after a prolonged session of pop though. Nothing gets me wishing for a quiet room more than some sokkie stuff.
majestikc
So it's most likely a combination of actual ear tiredness and what kind of music you really don't enjoy, you'd probably notice the fatigue quicker with stuff you hate to listen to in the first place.
Neps
majestikc wrote
So it's most likely a combination of actual ear tiredness and what kind of music you really don't enjoy, you'd probably notice the fatigue quicker with stuff you hate to listen to in the first place.
i love jazz!! I'll just never be able to get jazz to sound as awesome as some of the legends do. It comes down to a couple of reasons, and so I always struggle to get it sounding good at least.
pop stuff... now i think there it's due to silicon coloring the vocals in a bad way.. 8)
deanBailey
I think Jazz is hard because its 100% feel and if the tone is in the hands, then most jazz musicians probably just don't have it.
That's basically what I've experienced. Anyone can pluck a note, but does the note actually sound good? :-\
Regarding ear fatigue for Jazz/Metal, I my understanding is that metal (or aggressive music) would tire you out more having tones of such high consistency blaring at you. (kinda like like listening to one sine wave frequency the whole time).
Where Jazz has dynamics to keep you more 'interested'.
Now what makes a good engineer/producer (in a perfect world) imo is someone that doesn't suffer from ear fatigue at all, ? because he/she knows what they want and gets it with a few tweaks and adjustments ?.
