I'm in the same boat as you. After a little over a year, I can notice a slight improvement in my ability to draw distinctions, but I don't feel it's quite where Id like it to be yet. Having spent hours and hours on tutorials (eg. Youtube, Lynda, Coursera), I feel the addition of audio literature helps tremendously in understanding signal processing. Do some reading when it comes to specifics and what each processor is capable of; its helped me out plenty along the way, and in such a short time.5argon wrote:I have a big issue here. 80% of people says Glue Compressor is good, but I can never detect difference between Glue and normal Compressor! (asides from GUI stuff like you cannot set knee in Glue etc.)
Another example is when I was told to add a bit of Dynamic Tube to my kick drum. Yeah when solo-ing I can hear the difference, but not in the whole mix. Do I supposed to believe "The kick sounds better on its own, so now it's probably doing better in the mix although I cannot hear any difference!" like this?
The same thing happened on mastering stuff. You have to made subtle adjustment. But each individual adjustment is barely intelligible.. only as a whole then you can hear the difference. But then, I cannot make any judgment if each things I adjust barely change anything and in the end the result I got is often unsatisfactory.
I'm making music for about 1 year and probably haven't improved at all in this regard compared to day one. (I can say I certainly get better at using Live and knowing plugins stuff better.) Now I think I have missed some important point and/or specific ear training required to understand subtle stuff. Any idea to help me improve myself in this? Thanks.
What I've gotten in the habit of doing is spending time tinkering with frequency specific instruments; I'll load a blank audio track with the "audio in" set to "resample", then disable the output on it. I'll then load a kick, hi-hat, snare, synth, whatever loop onto a separate midi track. after, I'll choose an effects processor I want to study, drop it on the midi track, then dial in settings on it. To cross reference what the actual changes in my settings are doing to the signal, I'll record an audio clip of the instrument playing onto the blank audio track to check the visual readout of the signal, and how its changes correspond to those I've made in the processor. You can do this with any combination of instruments up to an entire mix; to see where clipping is happening, where something could use a boost...etc.
Hope that helps, and if you want some screencaps to see what I mean, I can certainly do that.
