Skip links

5 Exercises to Help You Become a Better Audio Engineer!

5 Exercises to Help You Become a Better Audio Engineer

To become a good mixing engineer, you need patience. In this article I want to show you which methods you can use to strengthen your mixing skills.

Analyze Songs

Listen to as many songs as possible and pay attention to the mixing. It is important that you listen to these songs as often as possible on your studio monitors or headphones. This will give you another advantage. You calibrate your ear perfectly to your listening situation.:

When analyzing songs, it’s even more worth it if you leave your comfort zone once in a while. At least once in a while, you should listen to songs that you don’t normally deal with. From genre foreign songs expand their own horizons immensely.

The mixing analysis should include the following points:

  • Instruments
  • Volume ratios
  • Room
  • Effects

First, it makes sense to define each instrument in the mix. This can sometimes be hard enough.

The volume ratios describe the mixing ratios to each other. For example, how loud is the kick compared to the snare or the voice compared to the guitar. The ability to analyze and evaluate mixing volumes in a song is of course extremely important for a sound engineer.

Spatiality is about describing the panorama. Which instrument sits on the left, which on the right and which in the middle. The depth of the song is another point. Which element is “in your face” and which is far back in the mix.

The item Effects is self-explanatory. Which effects are used. These include delay, auto-tune, distortion or even telephone effects and “underwater effects”.

To do the mixing analysis, I recommend writing down the points described.

Golden Ear Exercises

A so-called Golden Ear exercise trains the ear immensely. In the beginning, very simple noise is raised or lowered to different frequencies with the equalizer. The listener then has to find out which frequencies are involved. The exercises have a certain charm. Especially beginners can learn extremely well to estimate frequencies and to listen to them.

If you want to make the exercise a bit more difficult you can do the same with whole songs or raise or lower less dB with the equalizer.

You can easily create such songs yourself. As already described, all you need is suitable audio material and an equalizer. The edited audio file is exported, labeled with the answer and then played in a random order.

Get To Know Your Tools

The tip is as simple as it is good. Learn your tools inside and out. It’s no use having all the plugins or hardware in the world if you don’t know how they work.

Therefore, look at tutorial to determine devices. Read the manual to get everything out of it.

Optimize Your Studio Apartment

The room is your control center. The mix can only be as good as your room is. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but the fact is that a good mix wants to be heard down to the smallest detail. In bad or not acoustically optimized rooms there will be cancellations and exaggerations of certain frequencies. Both types are a great threat to the neutral evaluation of a song.

In addition to optimizing the room, it helps to choose the right studio monitors for the room. Excessively large speakers may be beautiful and sound massive, but are probably the absolute wrong choice in a 12sqm studio. At a concert, you wouldn’t set up large PC speakers to fill a hall with sound. The opposite is also true.

Exchange With Other Mixing Engineers

No one can take the experience away from you. That’s why you should benefit from the experience of your colleagues. Everyone makes individual progress and learns different things over time. The exchange with other sound engineers can help you enormously to recognize problems in your own mixing and then also to find solutions.

Especially valuable is the exchange of tips and tricks as well as looking over the shoulder while working. I am sure that even experienced sound engineers can learn something from beginners. And be it which new plugins appear on the market.

Leave a comment


The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.