Sound Mixing Tip #2: Rest Them Ears

If you're concentrating on a song-part for too long, your ears become quickly tired - You will sit there and think, 'nah...', and convince yourself everything is fine, but what you've probably done in fact, is over-compensate without realising.

This is one of my weaknesses I have to say; simply because I become so engrossed I just can't let go until I'm happy... even if that takes 14 hours (cough - or more!).

It can be more troublesome when you're trying to create a complex sound on a synth or something that covers several frequency spectrums - You can be spending hours refining the sound and during that process, you'll be overly concentrating on the lower, mid or higher freq's of that sound, almost to the exclusion of the others... basically, you lose the wider perspective.

It's usually the higher-frequencies that suffer, meaning you'll more than likely make them more prominent... of course, you won't realise until you listen-back a couple of days later.

What to do?

• Don't monitor at loud volumes - Conversational volume is just fine.
• Do lots of referencing, often: Make adjustments and listen to it with other instruments, AKA, A/B testing.
• Reference with professionally-recorded CD's.
• Try referencing the mix in mono to see if the overall balance of instruments is clear and even.

Have a freakin' break!