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Monitoring level is your main point of reference

  • Published: 2022-03-29 11:57
  • Updated: 2023-03-27 18:59

What I’m getting at is a little bit like watching a movie with a bag of chips. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably enjoy the first chunks of salt and flavor. And as the movie progresses, all of a sudden, the bag is empty.

It’s very similar in music production with monitoring levels. As a session progresses, there have been times at which, all of a sudden, I ended up blasting the music into my brain. Without having really noticed how I got there.

And: along the way made countless mixing decisions, which - at the point where I decreased the level again cause my ears were fatigued, didn’t sound very good.

In the worst cases, I would start re-adjusting a ton of things. Then, along the way, keep cranking up the levels again. Reverse engineering my edits again. Until, eventually my ears said no - AGAIN - and everything would be right where I lifted off two hours earlier.

Sounds familiar?

Why is changing monitoring levels a problem, if attended without control?

We change levels with an intention.

I guess that, most often when we crank up the levels, we want more bass. And get a better impression of the overall drive of a track. Get more encased, right?

And, of course, this works very well. Which has something to do with how bass is inherently different from the rest of frequency spectrum. Our ears don’t hear bass very well. It’s literally too slow to be picked up by our eardrums. Up to around 100 cycles, Bass is something we first and foremost pick up with our body, not our ears. Think of bass as airborne energy.

During the early last century, two guys named Harvey Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson studied how humans perceive the loudness of different frequencies. And condensed their findings into the Fletcher-Munson curve. Which looks like this:

I guess many of you have seen this curve already in one way or another. If you’re not sure what to take away from it:

If you start your producing session at around 60db SPL, everything below 500hz needs to be significantly boosted in order to be perceived as equally loud as everything between 500hz and roughly 4khz.

As soon as you crank up your monitoring level to 80db SPL or above, the curve flattens very fast. Still, everything below roughly 150hz doesn’t appear as loud as the midrange.

Which is, why in Dance Music, the bass usually sits above the rest of the spectrum.

To make things a bit worse, especially on headphones, there’s another pecularity about bass affecting our perception:

Bass is hard to locate. If you ever tried locating the source of a 50hz hum in your flat, eventually realizing it’s the neighbors washing machine, you can probably relate. In order to find orientation through sound, our brain needs more information than the few cycles bass delivers. If you think about it, Bass has a shitty data rate. That’s why it makes sense to keep it mono in the first place.

And so we put lots of bass in our tracks and our brain says “that’s mono anyway”. Great.

So what happens if I crank up the monitoring level from 60 to 80db or above?

There it is: ALL THAT BASS! THE DRIVE! GREAT!

However, that’s not everything yet. As we drive the monitoring level up, perception of width and depth slowly start decreasing. What sounded deep and wide before, now feels much closer now.

And this effect is even worse on headphones, due to the close proximity of the source and our ears. To not be affected by this, you’d need a well treated studio with properly overdosed monitors.

On top of that, the biggest flaw is our perception itself. If we crank of the levels for the sake of getting more bass without being aware of how our perception changes, every single mix decision from that moment on is basically garbage. And traps us in the loop of going back and forth and never arriving at a satisfactory conclusion.

To ice the cake: start every production session at a different monitoring level. To really confuse the shit out of your poor brain - EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. I can assure you: it works really well.

What can I do to craft better sounding mixes more consistently?

The answer is very simple: consistent mixes need consistent monitoring levels.

No, I don’t mean that from now on you should only produce at the same level.

I suggest choosing three level settings and sticking to them - no matter what. From highest to lowest:

  1. “Ultra-violence” - the level you need to really feel raw energy.
  2. “Hurt me plenty” - medium setting you can listen to for a long period of time without fatiguing your ears.
  3. “I’m too young to die” - a high altitude, low level setting for overview. You still get an impression of what you’ve done so far. Use this when throwing anything on your master, when you’re compressing busses or adjust your spacial effects.

This isn’t meant to be perfect, in case of doubt: make the medium setting a 3rd lower than the loudest, the lowest setting a 3rd lower than the medium one. If you’re using a software driven level control, memorize its values. In case you adjust volume with a knob: add markers to your positions.

Then, from now on: use only these three settings when producing. Also, when listening to music. You’ll have to train your brain to get used to this new consistency. It might need weeks for you to even start noticing how often you actually alter your monitoring level.

If you want to maximize this practice:

Take a break every time before you switch the setting. Stop the music, go to the toilet, the kitchen, or stick your head out of a window for 5 minutes. Whatever you do: listen to a different space. And pay attention to it.

Then go back to your studio space, change the level, put on your headphones again. I guarantee you, you’ll hear your production differently. Simply because you stepped out of whatever you focused on and gave your brain a break.

The benefit of using controlled levels for listening

At which level are you listening to the music of others? If you’re like me, it’s probably at medium volume.

And if it’s your own production sessions you bang out the loudest: you might be giving every piece of music you’re listening to, that’s not your own, a competitive advantage. For sounding more  spacious. Simply because you listen to it on a level where it indeed does sound more spacious.

So - stop bumming yourself. Please. And keep in mind that whatever music you’re listening to, probably has been mastered by a skilled and seasoned engineer.