Mixing ruins listening!

[kev]

Well, day by day now i find myself recording and trying to mix more and more... and i just dont seem to hear music in the same light anymore! Im not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but whereas i used to enjoy listening to a track for face value, i automatically listen in to try and pick it apart... do you guys experience this a lot? I want the old days back when i could properly listen to a track without thinking about how good the guitar was or whether stuffs right in a mix

Oh, and on a side note, heard 'swim' by in flames on clayman, and oh my god is that a tasty lead guitar tone 13 seconds in... that is the most beutiful damn thing ive heard in ages!!!

 

[Razorjack]

It's the reason I've started to listen to sleazy 80's rock again in most cases the production is awesome or so bad you stop caring!!

 

[evilmanny]

yep.

I found it especially bad after mixing our album. I couldn't listen to anything without finding something that I would change or tweak.
Same thing happened when I learnt to play guitar. I mainly learned by playing along to Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer... once I learnt their stuff I found I had lost that 'magic'.

mmm... "music, the first casualty of audio engineering is innocence".

 

[wicked_s]

evilmanny:
I know. The same thing with me when I started playing guitar. I learned some of my favourite songs and played it over and over... until the "magic" feeling faded away.

 

[kev]

Yeh, this is the exact terrible feeling!

 

[marcust]

It's the reason I've started to listen to sleazy 80's rock again in most cases the production is awesome or so bad you stop caring!!

hey,
yeah indeed same here always check production first nowadays
80's albums are indeed a good choice they are mostly bad enough sounding
to the point that it stops irritating me .

 

[Black neon bob]

Hmm.. not quite.

I can still just sit down and enjoy a "bad" or average mixed album without trying to listen to it so closely to a point that it irritates me..

That being said, i do listen to that the very first time i listen to a song/album.. i start out, from the first note, listening to everything in it's place, wondering what has been used to achieve that sound... so to a certain degree, yes, i do irritate myself listening to drums, guitars, and wondering how everything came out that way..

But like i said, i can just sit down, and let the music do the talking once i heard that album or song once..

 

[A Toolish Circle]

lol i actually hate this band i'm recording now because i've had to produce record mix and master them

so i'm quite sick of the songs ,plus when i see them live i can pick out alll their fuckups

 

[deathtotaliban]

haha omg all my friends hate listen to music with me because im always like well that could be better and blah blah. i wish i could still just listen to music for the music and not the production, ha

Jordan

 

[chadsxe]

You know I was worried about the same thing when I started. I always would over analzye things. After awhile though it kind of becomes selective. There is nothing wrong with it though. It is the best learning tool I have.

 

[Gomez]

On the other hand you start appreciating albums you didn't like before... Some rock stuff I wasn't into seems very interesting now - big budgets, great productions.

 

[NathanSoulfracture]

i feel the same about movies aswell, never take media studies cos when you watch a film you end up analyzing the camera angles and everything, doesnt half annoy me.

 

[Fragle]

yeah, definitely. it's the same with playing guitar. once you figure out how to play that stuff it does loose some of its magic. it's like this....when you don't know how to play it, you just STFU and LISTEN to the music. as soon as you know how to play it, you'll start thinking about actually playing it when listening to it....kinda weird.

 

[Radd]

You just have to seperate your education of the music production from the music itself. Yes you will analyze it much more and know the things that can be done to make it more to your liking but you can't. (unless you try to remix it yourself ) There is nothing you can do about it so why over analyze it and let it drive you a crazy?
Just accept it for what it is and enjoy it. Or not.

It's the music that matters the most.
I'd much rather listen to a cd I love with bad production than a cd I hate with amazing production.

This is my philosophy and I believe that it could even kind of apply to other situations as well like that recent metallica thread. If you can seperate the speed metal/thrash metallica from the hard rock metallica and accept them both for what they are then maybe you can appreciate them more. Or solos with no wah vs. solos with.

Seperation and acceptance leads to appreciation.

This is all of course my own opinion and I guess I had to get some stuff of my chest. I hope I was'nt all over the place and got to far off from your original post Kev.

 

[Frank'nfurter]

Same prob here. I had started to overanalyse our own and other metal productions. I'm not able to listen to Metal music in the normal way anymore. Maybe that's the point why I had started listening to classic music after a Studio session.

 

[evilmanny]

You just have to seperate your education of the music production from the music itself. Yes you will analyze it much more and know the things that can be done to make it more to your liking but you can't. (unless you try to remix it yourself ) There is nothing you can do about it so why over analyze it and let it drive you a crazy?
Just accept it for what it is and enjoy it. Or not.

I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as that... it's certainly not something that I can turn on or off. It's simply every time I hear music, I start working it out... nothing I can do about it, it just happens all 'rain man' like, hahaha.

It's immensly hard to seperate those abilities you've trained yourself in from enjoying a tune or a song. I wouldn't say it destroys listening outright (deafness will do that), but you miss 'something' about music you had before you decided to use your ears for a living (or hobby)

I find it especially prevalent in programmed music where I'll notice samples from CDs or even particular synths (I tend to loose a bit of respect for the artist if they use a sample I recognise without changing it in some way...). I guess a metal equivalent would be recognising a particular snare or maybe a mic being used (I'd like to see someone do that though, :Spin: ).

Simple fact is, it's there... and there's nothing you can do to change it however much you may want to (or not). Every time you hear an album your mind whirrs into action and you think "mmmm, maybe a little less 4k?". I think the great yoda once said "you must unlearn what you have learnt", but then he was always a bit of a crap philosopher and I'm pretty sure he never mixed anything in his 400 odd years...

But, for all the loss of audio innocence, there's something damn cool about being able to listen to an album and pick out if the guitars are mesa or 5150.

 

[cobrahead1030]

i feel the same way about some albums, while other stuff just never gets old...the fact that i'm constantly trying to push my playing and recording skills further makes things interesting tho

i own nearly 300 CD's, i can always find old stuff to go back and listen to, and hear them differently than before

 

[Dushan S]

I have felt like that, especially about guitar and other instruments when I was really beginning playing, but after some point it just sits nicely and nova days I feel it is like having two streams of information at the same time. My intellectual, mind oriented part of myself is listening to the details, but on the other hand my "emotive" self enjoyes music at the same time.
In the sam way, I don't feel it is a problem anymore for me, to play song at the stage accurately, listen what other musicians play, look at the faces in the crowd and enjoy what I am playing at the same time.

 

[Sinister Mephisto]

I have the same thing but I've think it's very exciting to listen to something and hear even more then I was hearing before. It gives me something new to pay attention to in not very interesting/bad music and something new to listen to in my favorite bands music. And I over thing bad production as well as good but for some reason it doesn't really bother me, it's just different, and I like thinking of how I could fix it. It's a cool challenge I'm almost never up to.

 

[Jackal_Strain]

I seriously miss the time when listening to music was a magical experience. I would pop a cd in the player and wonder why it gave me goosebumps. I still get goosebumps from listenig to music, but now it's usually because the production is so horrible or the music just bad.
Another aspect of listening to music that I miss is the whole getting into a new band vibe. I remember being sixteen years old, running home from the record store with my new cd and just listen to it for hours and hours every day.
These days I hardly get exited at all... There's only a precious few bands these days that keeps me interrested and focused, but even then I only listen to the album a once per day, or loose interrest quick.