Ears

It's funny how listening to more music in a better listening environment trains my ears.

By better environment, I mean on monitors instead of ear buds. The listening sensation is absolutely not the same. Something different happens when air is pushed by the monitor drivers and arrives milliseconds later to my ears. I can pick out people singing out of tune a lot better than before - and yes, that's painful, especially if you sing with other amateurs who don't train their ears and/or voice as much.

The other interesting thing happening is that as I am listening to music, I critique the mix and the balance of instruments. This never happened to me before; I guess reading all those books about recording and mixing, and doing it myself of course, helped me listening to music differently. Thge other thing I noticed is how lifeless most of our modern music is. Not a beat out of rythm, not a note out of tune. We can thank DAWs and plugins for that, but as an amateur, it's a lot tougher to actually try to make music without going in and changing all those little inconsistencies. Listen to music made in the 70s: incorrect notes are left in, technically inperfect guitar playing is left in, voice crackles are left in, and OMG the dynamic range of music is left in! What we listen to nowadays is so compressed! The problem is that people's ears are now trained to listen to music that way, and if you produce something that's not as "perfect", people will think your stuff sucks.

Off my soapbox, and on to my next endeavour: the perfect mix workflow :-)