Are you mixing with your eyes?

The importance of ear-training for music producers

The modern music-making process relies on computers. We use them to play virtual instruments with our keyboards, program MIDI patterns and record music in our DAW; we use digital plugins to process the audio during mixing and mastering, and we distribute our songs on digital platforms. We spend so much time in front of screens that sometimes we forget that working with audio is all about one simple thing: listening and developing strong ear-training skills.

Being able to see waveforms and frequency spectrum for analysing audio and finding problems in mixes and masters is super helpful for modern-day workflows, but it’s important to understand that before using all these tools, we need to listen to know what and where the problems are.

Is the song too bright? Is it too boomy? Or is it overcompressed? To know what to listen for and learn how things sound, we need to work on our ear training before jumping into any piece of software. But what is ear training? Let’s learn about this training process and how it can help you in your audio career.

What is ear-training?

In music, ear training is the study and practice of identifying pitches, intervals, melodies, rhythms, and other basic elements solely by hearing. Similarly, in the audio world, ear training is the study of frequencies, dynamics, panning, and space through listening. This skill helps music producers and engineers get the most out of their productions by identifying subtle audio nuances that can create a significant creative impact.

The Analogue Era

Back in the days, when music was written by hand and recorded on vinyl or tape, musicians and engineers relied mainly on their ears to identify problems or enhance the sound by positioning microphones or applying EQ. It was a skill developed through practice and mentored by audio professionals. The more you played an instrument or recorded or mixed music, the easier it became to identify sounds, pitches, and frequencies.

But with the advent of the digital era and the democratisation of audio recording, many people who have jumped into recording or production have forgotten to train this skill and start mixing with their eyes instead.

The problem with Screens

Being able to identify frequencies and see, in real time, how sound behaves through waveforms and spectrograms is very helpful and can speed up the entire mixing and production workflow. The problem is that sometimes our eyes can trick us into believing that by clicking a switch or moving a fader on the screen, things sound better, when in reality, it might just be making things louder. 

“It’s so easy to get distracted by the visuals involved in making music that you forget your audience are listeners.” – Charlie Thomas, Sound Engineer & Lecturer at Abbey Road Institute

That’s why training our ears on how things sound helps engineers and producers make better decisions in their work.

How to do ear-training

As we previously mentioned, the main way to develop this skill is by critical listening. Having a reference playlist to listen to your favourite-sounding songs and study them can be a first step in your ear training. Try identifying instruments with different frequencies, like bass, guitars, and vocals, what they are playing, where they are panned or how loud they are in each section of the song. This is a good starting point for understanding how professional producers and engineers approach mixing and production.

“When you start listening like this, you begin unlocking your ears and training yourself to hear beyond the surface of a song.” – Charlie Thomas, Sound Engineer & Lecturer at Abbey Road Institute

As we previously mentioned, screens can be deceiving, but they can also complement and even improve our ear training when used correctly. Listening to recorded music or instruments and applying a simple EQ boost or cut at different frequencies by 6dB in our DAW can help us start identifying where terms like boomy, boxy, or harsh live in the frequency spectrum and quickly work on them the next time we hear them. Try boosting 100 Hz, 700 Hz, 2 kHz, 6 kHz or 10 kHz and hear how the sound changes. Also, by looking at the spectrogram, we can see which frequencies are more predominant in certain instruments or mixes, which can help us avoid frequency masking between different elements in the mix.

There is also software and platforms dedicated to helping you improve your ear training, providing exercises to work on your listening skills. Websites like SoundGym give users the ability to train skills such as frequency recognition, compression, panning, and mix balance through short daily “workouts”.

At Abbey Road Institute, we firmly believe that improving listening skills makes our students better prepared for the professional audio world and helps them make better decisions in their mixes and productions. That’s why both musical and audio ear training are an essential part of our curriculum, helping our students to learn how to identify elements in the mixes, tuning, frequencies, or volume changes, listen to music with new ears and allowing them to make better audio decisions.

If you’re serious about a career in audio, check out our Advanced Diploma in Music Production and Sound Engineering and sign up for our newsletter to get the latest blog post right into your email.