Quick note on aural fatigue
KeithHandy posted in Producing, So You Want... on October 25th, 2007
I’m writing this one quickly, on my way out the door, so forgive my lapse in quality control.
Last night I was up late working on a song. I was adding overdubs to it. Lemme clarify something about aural fatigue: you don’t necessarily lose all your ability to function when it’s setting in. You can still work. You might be on a roll with putting stuff down, and that’s great. What you are in danger of doing, is over-fiddling with mixing related stuff, because you’ll be a little lost regarding how present or clear something should be.
Like, last night, I had mixed feelings about this organ track I was doing. It had an excitement to it, but I felt like it was drawing attention away from the spirit of the music underneath it. “This is cool, but did I really want to go this direction?”
Today, it was much easier to put it in context. The very end of this organ part was really cool, have that up front in the mix, but have it a little quieter before it gets to that. And I immediately knew a couple things like this orchestra bell thing could start later, but also be louder, so it was okay for it to be “noticeable”, because by that far into it you’ll be starting to get bored of what’s going on up to that point, and need to hear a new instrument come in.
So the kind of creative work you can do while your ears are fatigued, is that you can play around with crazy-ish ideas (i.e. tossing things in to see how they sound, in the spirit of “playing” in the “what children do” definition of the word), but then give yourself the next day to decide how much of them to keep and how prominent in the mix they should be. Before you fire it back up, paint a mental picture of what it should sound like.
Also remember that when you’re fatigued, you might think a special effect makes something sound better, because you were getting sick of it the way it was, but leave yourself the opportunity to switch the effect off, or only use it on a certain part of a track.
Gotta go. Will reduce this pile of words to its essential point later.
