This weeks article is from Chris Gille he is the chief systems engineer at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. I found this article in the July edition of Church Production magazine. The title also links to the web-page for this article. He also has a pod-cast available HERE on the same topic. Ignore the terrible audio quality...

Ear Training and Critical listening

by Chris Gille

Behind the ability to listen is another world. When you discover the ability to self-analyze all those different sounds, you are rewarded with a new appreciation of how amazing sound really is. For those who can learn to dissect perceived sounds, it will be like you can “see” in a whole new way. Let’s review some techniques, methods, and practices that will help develop your ability to listen critically, and how it can compliment your engineering skills.

Using Your Head
You carry a myriad of acoustic signal sources and resonating cavities with you all the time, right in your head. Some are sounds you can make and are easily repeatable. For example, it could be your default pitch when you whistle, or even the nominal frequency of your speech when you talk ‘monotone’ or without inflection. These references can be super handy; especially when you learn to recognize that other sounds may be referenced to intervals of these. Even your limitations can be built-in references. What’s the highest note you can sing? The lowest? What note causes you to trip into falsetto? What’s the lowest note you can whistle? These can all be useful relative references, as long as you check them periodically against a known source for accuracy.

Intervals
Many sounds around us include the octave harmonic, which can sound like the same frequency. If you don’t know what an octave is musically or technically, you might be able to remember it when you recall the first two notes in the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” These are an octave apart, where the second note is double the frequency of the first, or eight musical half-steps higher. Every third slider on a 31-band graphic EQ is an octave higher. Thirds (like each consecutive slider on a 1/3 octave graphic EQ) are approximately triads. This is a rough comparison, but will get you in the “ballpark”.

Familiar Sounds
Sounds you hear every day can correlate to frequencies you may have memorized, and don’t even know it. Somewhere around you, in your every day routine, are tones that you might even subconsciously tune out. These can be very helpful as reference tones if you can pay new attention to them and feel their familiarity. The hum of a motor, or the predominant oscillation of a nearby machine. As a kid I remember the loud pitch of the vacuum cleaner, and humming it would seem to make it less obnoxious in my head. And then also noting how humming a slightly different pitch would create a ‘beat’ (a low-frequency resultant rhythm of cancellation) that would annoy my sister. This was one of my early recollections of a frequency I didn’t know the numeric value of, but could reproduce fairly closely from memory.

EQ Changes with Volume
The ear has a different frequency response curve at different volumes where listening to the same song at a quiet level will reveal different nuances than when played at loud levels. The ear’s response curve is non-linear, and that curve even changes relatively depending on overall volume level. Keep this in mind when listening, especially to pieces you love. Even if you play it at a very quiet level, the high-frequency information will often reveal details that you didn’t know were even there. Listening like this can help you appreciate how complex a great song and mix really are.

Capture Before You Compensate
The brain’s interpretation of the signals from the ear is so advanced that it knows what normal sounds are, what pleasing sounds are, and what your favorite sounds are. Your brain can even adjust and correct for sounds based on if they are expected, anticipated, familiar, or even similar to something else. The brain’s interpretation can tuck a sound back into the mix if it’s sticking out, especially if we are emotionally connected with the music. Or sometimes our minds are left with no choice but to exaggerate a sound that’s sticking out until it drives us crazy, especially if we know it’s not right. This amazing capability of the brain to modify what we are actually hearing is, in itself, another aspect of hearing. Try to capture you initial impression before you compensate. For example, let’s say you walk into a new room and someone wants your opinion of how it sounds. It can help you have a fuller rounded picture if you first walk in the room in silence and just experience the ambient noise floor, the reverberation, the resonances that are occurring as you talk. Then, from the sound board, you fade up a song you are very familiar with. Capture the first several seconds and minutes of that experience, and even jot down some notes, because after two hours, it’s possible to experience so many great and not-so-great moments in a system and a room to just about go crazy. Those first few moments can be a great reminder of what first-impression nominal was when you first walked in. If you walked in, stood in the isle, and the sound engineer fires up their favorite playlist at their favorite volume, that first impression can throw your whole evaluation off. (This can also give you some insight on the engineer, which can be of great value as well.) Analysis equipment can take this variable out, but often I’m asked what I think, and I don’t have the racks of gear with me. And after playing with the gear, and it’s all said and done, the final step is still to walk the room with just your ears anyway.

More than the Source
No matter where you are, what you are hearing is likely from several sources of sounds with several reflections (reverberation, delay, and echo lengths) all blended into one overall sound the brain is interpreting. The source may not change, but your position and relationship to reflective surfaces and objects will change the experience of those combined sounds. Some can feel these subtle differences in how sources are combining, and how they are combined with reflections. Rocking back and forth, turning the head as if to look at strange uninteresting places, bobbing up and down, lunging forward and backward as if something just smacked them in the face. These reactions can actually be in response to something they heard that stopped them in their tracks. One of my favorites is walking down the isle of an electronics store, and if I walk by a system with the speakers wired out of polarity to each other, I stop like I just hit a brick wall. I contemplate the brain-twisting underwater effect for a moment, wonder why anyone would buy a system sounding like that, and then move on wondering who just noticed my reaction.

Ears are Portable
There’s nothing like the actual source. It is sometimes easy to be lazy, push up the fader, and start reaching for the EQ. It’s helpful to take a breath before spinning knobs and listen for just a moment and at the same time, recognize that you are hearing a system’s interpretation of that source with many artifacts accumulated along the way. Put your ear (with caution) near the source. Walk up to that guitar amp and give it an appreciating and worthy listen, capturing all the tone and power, with its compound and complex overall effect and reflections off the stage floor. That’s what the guitar player is considering the back-end of their total instrument. When you have listened to that, and walk back to FOH and listed to the PA, that comparison can quickly reveal that strip EQ may not have anything to do with what’s actually needed. Mic placement, mic choice, problems, source volume contributing to stage-noise (acoustically combining with the PA), are all up to you and your ear to discern, and can’t be fixed with EQ. It’s up to your ear to capture the musician’s intent, memorize it, and help that source through your system and into the larger space. Using your trained ear in this way makes you an extension of the band before the rig is even turned up. That is an entire subject in itself: the value of the professional connect and relationship with the band, and how much that can contribute to the final mix; all based on your ears and training to analyze what they hear, and combining that with your skill as a technical engineer.

Profiling
Listening more carefully starts to reveal ‘themes’ as you compare different systems, rooms, room-system interfaces, and engineers. For years now, some friends and I joke about themes we hear in each other’s mix, and it seems to be consistent even across systems and in different rooms. “Still pushing 800h?”, or “get rid of that 1.6khz yet?” referring to that predominant but subtle ‘hump’ in the overall sound of our mixes. We all tend towards a certain ”color,” and we build towards that result on a per-input, per-eq-band basis without even knowing it. And it takes objectivity, discipline, initiative, relationships, equipment, and humility to recognize the characteristics of our mix style, evaluate it, and make corrections. The overall color of our sound makes us unique, and specializes us for different scenarios, styles of music, volume levels, etc…

Go Fishing
If you hear something in the mix that seems subtle, but somehow sticking out, go fishing for it. As you develop your ear, you will be able to target these directly. For starters, practice sweeping narrow filters of slightly boosted frequencies, with your hand on the fader. For example, if the cymbals have a harsh hi-freq edge to them, and you have considered all the other variables (mic placement, mic choice, system is set right, etc…) then you can pull that fader way back. And while leaving your hand on that fader as though someone’s life depended on it, boost that high freq filter, make it narrow, and sweep that freq until it exaggerates the problem you originally noticed. None of this needs to be loud, and often can be executed unnoticed. Turn that boost back into a cut, like 3dB, and put your fader back. Now you have the target freq, and you can massage the filter width and amount of cut gently and accurately.

Spring Cleaning
As we EQ things in the same room day in and day out, year after year, some cumulatively destructive EQ is inevitable. EQ adjustments can cumulate from dodging surprises in mid-program: the crowd pushes the level a little higher than in sound check causing that new vocal edge to appear, or compensating for that overhead mic that is spraying new high-end stage noise into the mix from out of nowhere. These harsh momentary surprises get tucked back into the mix to make it safe and smooth. But unless they are purged out, then the next time the new surprise or quick-adjustments will get piled onto the old one. EQ cuts get made deeper and wider. All the filters get used. This is a very common occurrence per person, and per system, with different engineers adding to each other’s adjustments. Digital consoles with defaults and personal configuration files have helped in this area, accommodating a consistently-recalled foundation every time the engineer sits down at the desk. I have brought analog systems “back to life” simply by bypassing everything and/or opening all the deep EQ cuts, at all stages including channel, subgroups, outputs, outboard processing, and drive racks. This ”spring cleaning” can make things feel touchy again, so it’s good for it to be a well-communicated team effort, with extra time padded in for sound check and for the band. It is totally worth it when the mix sparkles again, when the breath and the air are back in that vocal mic, and when the subtle details show back up. A trained ear can listen for these overall effects, and guard against them getting lost.

How to Develop Your Ear
One of the most effective training opportunities are those awesome times where you are privileged to sit close to a skilled and well-rounded engineer, and just watch and listen to every move they make. Buy them coffee, tell them they are a unique professional for letting you sit that close to their desk, and enjoy a great ear-training opportunity.

For self-training back in the day, I’d grab a buddy and hook up a pink noise generator and a mic/amp/speaker through a pair of 31 band eq’s. My friend (who dug annoying sounds, and was trustworthy enough to not trash my hearing for laughs), would boost a freq on his graphic, and I would react by trying to grab and cut the matching freq as fast as possible. If I guessed wrong, I would slightly boost other freq’s and ‘fish’ it out. As an alternate to this effective approach, I recently created a training tool to help folks guess and memorize frequencies. It’s called “Freq Geek vol. 1” (available on iTunes) and I hope you might find this a helpful resource. (One I wish I would have had 20 years ago.) The website is www.freqgeek.com where you can hover or click on frequency buttons and get a chime of the frequencies found on a 31band graphic EQ.