Here's a weird little sensory experience I had once that serves as a perfect learning moment:
I was at a Rennaissance Fair one year, at a booth where they had all kinds of scented oils, perfumes, and incense. I was sniffing along at different scents when I saw a jar of coffee beans with a perforated top next to the perfumes. I asked the saleslady what it was for, and she explained that our sense of smell eventually gets overwhelmed and desensitized with too many fragrances in a short period, and that it gets harder and harder to detect the subleties of a fragrance when that happens. Coffee, however, has the unique property of resetting our sense of smell, so when your sniffer gets overworked, you just shake the jar, smell the coffee beans, and you're all reset! She called it "cleansing the smell palate".
Let's say you've got all the tracks recorded into your DAW, and you're ready to get a good mix between all the instruments. You've been recording for hours, and you're a little too close to your work. Your ears might be tired! Your first instincts will tell you to choose a track and try to ride the volume up and down until it sounds right, but I've found this sometimes fools my ear and makes it harder to judge the proper mix. So for me, a quick trick that always works is to "cleanse the palate" of your ears and start each track from absolute zero silence, and SLOWLY bring it up into the mix to hear its effect. I find that when i do this, it's easier to detect the exact moment of "sweet spot" for each track. If I miss it, I just start from zero again and repeat the process until the track setttles in to a good spot.
Do you know any quick tricks or hacks like this that work for mixdowns? Are there different ways you approach different instruments in mixdowns? Share your thoughts below!
Tyson Farmer
www.lessonface.com/TysonFarmer
