Regular audio ear training is one way to initiate yourself into the subtle art of critical listening, a skill fundamental to your long-term success and survival as an audio engineer or music producer.

This is one of my favorite tools out there. When I was in audio school I spent five or 10 minutes every day using this tool, and it made a significant impact on my mixing skills. The second app is Dave Moulton’s Golden Ears. This engineer, Dave Moulton, basically put together this program.
GOLDEN EAR TRAINING If your business is about sound, then you need everything that can help you capture and manipulate better sounds.
An audio ear-training course for recording engineers, producers and musicians. Moulton started doing such training as an educational exercise for students back in 1969, and has since used it everywhere. In 1992, KIQ Productions asked Moulton to make it commercially available, and the rest is.

Golden Ears provided me with an understanding of the audio post and sweetening needs. To work on the sound design for the world's largest Omnimax theater. After working at the eartraining course, mixing, synth programming and sound design just became second nature. I will request that it be a required text for all students. Get advanced audio ear training, improve your listening skills and get better results in the studio. Train your ears daily and develop golden ears.

'Hello, Cloth Ears!'...

My first intro into audio ear training all started back when my Sound Engineering lecturer back in the first year of college, a giant named Ari who is about 100 times my size, would often jokingly greet me with a smack on my skinny shoulder and a loud 'Hello, Cloth Ears!'. This did however, apart from sending me flying over the cheap Behringer desk in the Pro Tools studio, make me realize - he had a point. I couldn't tell 1kHz from 100Hz if my life depended on it back then. That had to change!

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Fast forward to three years later and, at the end of my studies, I was of course much better and more confident at recognizing and adjusting frequencies. What was the difference? I had some training behind me. That's all.
Yes, we got the obvious frequency charts with classical instruments broken down but this made little difference to my practical tracking and mixing skills. You see, a chart is a nice way to get an idea of which frequencies are prominent in the sound of various instruments but it does not help you recognize specific frequencies in different contexts. What I needed was on-the-job and deliberate training!

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Good critical listening skills are difficult to develop for the simple reason that your nervous system can and will play tricks on your conscious mind. You don't have to be an expert in psycho-acoustics to know this. Ever gone to bed safe in the knowledge that the mix is pretty much nailed, only to experience utter shock and horror when you first play it back the next morning?

Your nervous system can and will adjust the way you perceive sounds. It's your job to train your mind to compensate for this with various frequency ear training techniques. This includes audio ear training on a regular basis because it helps you tune your hearing to a correct frame of reference.

Meet Mr. Golden Ears...

A top-class engineer such as Tony Maserati or Bob Clearmountain sits between the speakers and listens with a deep look of focus, then reaches over and twists one pot on the mix console 5mm to the left, listens again and grins lightly with satisfaction. The uninitiated person standing right next to him sees this but cannot hear any difference in the mix.

What's going on here? The experienced mix engineer has a complex reference structure built up in their psyche that allows them to hear subtle differences most people would be hard-pressed to notice. Mr Golden Ears has the ability to recognize frequency changes, subtle distortion, level changes and noise often inaudible to the ordinary layperson.

This ability to discriminate was built up over many experiences which helped the brain to refine the way it notices and pays attention to sound and music. Day in and day out and year after year the engineer trains their ears with countless tiny adjustments to sounds they worked with in different mixes.

You'll notice an improvement in your critical listening skills as you mix more and more records. This is on-the-job training and it's great because it also means you get some actual production work done! There are however more intense training options available that allow you to improve your critical listening skills much faster than you would with on-the-job ear training alone.

Why is ear training important for audio engineers and producers?

The main benefits of frequency ear training for audio engineers and music producers include:

You get to know the audio frequency spectrum. This improves your ability to spot issues and helps you make more effective mixing decisions, faster.
You become better with using your equalizers and balancing your mix levels.
You learn to hone in on frequency imbalances by ear. This speeds up your sound design and mixing workflow by reducing the need to sweep your EQ.

What's the best way to ear train as a producer or audio engineer?

The best way to train one's nervous system to recognize frequencies is to work with test tones, noise or music and use various EQ tools to alter the sound. You need to adjust your sources and take note of what you hear. You have to learn how to really listen and then connect what you hear to what you know about frequencies and EQ.
This takes time. It never stops in fact. Ear training of course happens every time you mix or design sounds. You will however get much better at critical listening when you add deliberate audio ear training exercises to your list of habits.
I mean if the mix engineering legend that is Dave Pensado does it, who are we mere mortals to argue?...

Golden Ears Audio Ear Training Program

Where does this training method come from? Did you make it up?

No, we didn’t! The Guess Method has been used for over 40 years. There were exercises on cassettes, CD’s or it was done manually by teachers. We know it works and it has proven its efficiency over the years with thousands of successful engineers.

The new Correct Method comes from a suggestion Bob Katz (the mastering guru) made to us:

I suggest presenting a piece of recorded music which needs 'help' in some frequency range and see if the student can not only identify the problem, but also correct for it in a musically satisfying way.

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So that is what we did: correct instead of guess. We tested it and we loved it. It turned out to be both funny and instructive. Both methods complement each other really well.

Besides, we have designed the software to turn these methods into a limitless tool, way better than any cassette or CD, because you can feed it with any music or sound and configure the exercises to a level of diversity and detail which wasn’t imaginable before.

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We can’t place more emphasis on this way of training the ear: IT WORKS!

Golden Ears Audio Eartraining Program