@@TransistorLSDactually it was inverted phase reveal, since It was the young him and he is old now, if we had a pic of him old we could do a null test to see if it’s really him
@@AL-qj9yh I'm not sure a null test would help much. He's gone through filtering and EQ by this time, after all. Fundamental frequency and the more prominent harmonics would still be the same though, right?
Yes, there's a reason we never have to hear about who mixed for Beethoven, or who Mahler's producer was. The musicians do the work and it comes out right.
@@DanWorrall excellent point everybody thinks that conductors are just waving their stick about in time what they don't realize is the months of rehearsal and communication between every single musician the performance on the night is really just the party.
I can highly recommend going to see and hear an orchestra performance. I recently went to two free events at the Royal Festival Hall and was amazed when I walked in a realised there were no mics and no engineer. Just the musicians and their instruments and how I could hear each instrument clearly. Great experience.
I would, in a heartbeat, happily pay for an ear training course from you Dan. I think that many would, made aware and given access to it, profit enormously from such a thing as this.
You could set up a patreon account which is pretty convenient from what i heard. but a Dan Worral OF sounds hilarious and would be my first and last account Id follow on the platform hahaha
You are really the best recording expert there is on UA-cam, no questions asked man. It's neither just your professional skills, the way you edit your videos or other aspects of your apparent personality. Your whole vibe is just incredible. You bring something relevant to any question we might ask ourselves or any problem we can encouter. A 1000 cheers for that.
I just graduated in Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music. They teach us frequency ear training in the audio classes with boosting and cutting frequencies on white noise and having to figure out the frequency. It was laborious and I hated it while learning it but it truly opened up the EQ for me and all of a sudden I felt I could finally “use my ears” because I finally knew what to listen for
I ALWAYS cut 500Hz at 8:40. Everyone does that. Just kidding I could use the info he's talking about. I'm not as against frequency masking as most people seem to be... but I didn't know what "too much 500Hz in the drums" sounded like. Disclaimer: I don't mix music for other people, so that's not scandalous.
@@GizzyDillespee Regarding masking, there is a introductory lecture from a uni on psychoacoustics. The playlist: Psychoacoustics lessons from Audio Information Processing TUM. It really helped me improve my mixes. Particularly the masking around the 200-800 Hz range, and how it (like any masking) disproportionally affects the high-end. Way further up than you'd expect. Now I handle that range for the culprit, instead of boosting high-ends of the other tracks. Also, whomever your intended audience is (albeit just you), a shitty mix enshittifies even the best songs. The composition, arrangement, execution, might all be perfect. If the mix bad, the song bad.
I've been on and off learning music production for two years as a hobby. Your pragmatic perspective, way of teaching and the knowledge itself is of the highest quality that I find anywhere online. Usually I'll try to search for a specific topic I'm interested in, but in reality it's not what I need. Just browsing through your clips I get to discover userful concepts and skills that bring me the most value. Having a fullly structured course from you on any topic is something i'd 100% buy because it's simply so effective for me
Ear training can indeed be very powerful. About a decade ago I did one that I believe was called "Perfect Pitch Ear Training Supercourse" (it was a series of mp3s and probably a couple of PDFs), and after a couple of months of daily training I was able to play groups of random 8 notes simultaneously and identify each by its "colour" - like people born with perfect pitch are able to do I reckon. I didn't stick to it afterwards but even today I can identify different notes sometimes, with some concentration. There was also a course for relative pitch.
I was five when my distinguished teacher told my dad I had PP. It meant nothing to me until my 50s and started working in music from semi pro to professional. During those years, I told friends and family the pitch of car horns, glasses, cat meows and even farts. I could always prove it by running to the piano which I kept at A-440 , a Bösendorfer tuned 4 times a year. I once failed a choir audition because the tester transposed my line down a 4th meaning I had to sing different notes from the score. I couldn't because it was a lie to my brain. My point? PP is not something you can learn and I'd have preferred to have been more successful at other things but in the end it was like a reverse disease as I was no good at anything else in my life. As Rachmaninov said, Music is enough for a lifetime but a lifetime is not enough for music.
nah in my opinion UA-cam members would be the best but if you really don't want that, Patreon is also an option. it's a great idea for a video series and definitely something people need.
I had a full semester course like this in college for my audio engineering degree. The first half of the semester we trained on boosts/cuts of 12dB with a graphic EQ. The second half was 6dB boosts/cuts. Usually on music. We also assigned a lot of adjectives to these sounds. Now when I train newer engineers both live and in the studio, one of their main questions is “how do I know where that frequency is just by hearing it.” It’s from that training, the adjectives, and EQing thousands of times. So a course like you’re discussing is incredibly useful and helpful!
4:44 A personal hurdle to overcome for me and undoubtedly others too is/was the fact that once you start cutting frequencies something can feel off or weird, you'll think to yourself "this doesn't sound right with this amount of cutting", in reality you only notice this because you'll be hearing the change, anyone else hearing it in a mix might not be able to tell
I would gladly pay for an ear training course from you, Dan! EDIT: proof of my readiness to pay for a course from you was that I posted the above before I even finished listening to this. So to answer your final question: I recommend you create your own site and offer either a one time "lifetime" membership charge at several hundred dollars, or an annual membership fee at a cheaper price point. Two main reasons to make your own site: cut out the middlemen so we're only paying you, and "own" your customers. And by that I mean, you have the data of who wants what you're selling, and no platform is your overlord, at whose discretion you could be completely estranged from your audience at a moment's notice (as we've seen on UA-cam, for instance, through the years.) My two cents! Thanks for your teaching Dan, and I look forward to taking your ear training course.
6:10 Can confirm I did do ear training during my studies. We did it once a week during our Mastering lectures. There’s also a noticeable improvement in my mixes before and after that period :)
ooh that does sound interesting, and it's cool to see the idea reinforced of what I've been figuring out on my own - to give "space" to important instruments' main freq range by cutting other instruments in the same range. It sounds weird solo'd, but when everything is playing you don't hear that "missing" cut on those tracks. Forget if it was this channel or another which suggested to not hyperfixate on how each track sounds solo'd, because after all the final mix isn't listening in solo... And if the cut sounds weird solo'd, you can just automate disabling it when the "main" instrument doesn't play and the "cut" instrument becomes more prominent. Another mixing "trick" I've seen, is equating different ranges in the freq spectrum to different vowel sounds... It's very clear when it's band boosted over pink noise, but it can be a lot harder to learn how to listen for that in real use cases/on actual instruments. Maybe that'd be worth touching on in the courses?
I'd love an ear training course from you - please do it! In terms of platform, I don't see anything outside UA-cam that's easy to use for both sides - it needs to be easy for you as well as us
I've described music production to friends as "creating, writing, and performing a symphony all by yourself, just with sounds no one'e ever heard before" many times in the past. It feels good to have a thought about music making similar to Dan's 😅
If I didn't have good ears that I've been training already but doing ok the job work, and also training in a musical context I would definitely consider buying a course from you that would help me train my ears. I don't know if i'd get it if it wasn't you making it, you are a superb educator especially on this platform.
posting it on 0F would be hilarious honestly I wouldn't mind using youtube membership for it, definitely would grab it asap the only issue with youtube is that it'd be subscription based, and for basically an access to videos... it doesn't bring the best feeling It also heavily depends on how you'd want to build the course.... single time payment obviously makes much more sense if you're just gonna create the most comprehensive course from the start, with less emphasis on updates or new content, more emphasis on the first release. And subscription makes more sense for if you're gonna keep adding more and more things to it, more emphasis on updates/new content.
Sound Gym is an AWESOME tool for learning things like the freqency spectrum by ear, and relative gain boosts and reduction numbers, again by ear, as well as panning positions by ear (all for free). Then if you sub to the paid model you get a ton of other exersizes (and they aren't limeted like the free ones) and can learn gain reduction of compressors by ear and all sorts of interesting ear training tit bits!
I've always wondered how, when frequencies resonate in our skulls and jaws, how the proximity to our inner ear effects our ability to determine good tuning or perfect pitch. Great video!
Toughest parts of my mixes are when there is simultaneously overdriven rhythm guitar, overdriven lead guitar, and choir. Those 3 things are so broadband, its impossible to avoid frequency masking if you want each part to maintain it's whole sound and not have any super-filtered effect kinda sound on any of the tracks.
Yes! This is so important. We do it a lot in audio related educations here in Denmark, but not as much as we probably should. It'd be nice if maybe one of the videos from this course were to be made free so that we could see how in depth you go.
Of interest to you might be the Golden Ears ear training course. It used to be distributed on cd, now they have an online version. That being mentioned, I still love the idea of paying for Dan’s Freq’ing Audio Course distributed via OF lol.
This is like when I was reading Cedric Chin's change of mind on note taking, then experimenting with his "Case Library", then finally having the case library be a flagship product of his entire blog. He writes really high quality articles on acquiring skills ("tacit knowledge"), also bringing a bunch of research into more accessible forms of reading. I think his work on burnout, extracting knowledge from experts, and the "vocab point" (how experts end up coining their own terms) can be particularly interesting in this case.
I’ve had a hobby home studio for 20 years. I’m no professional, but not a beginner either. If you created a straightforward, basic mixing course, I’d buy that in a heartbeat. You’ve shared a ton of knowledge on UA-cam, but having a full, no-nonsense course with your teaching skills would be invaluable. A lot of bits of info would fall into place, and it would add things that the super interesting deep dives into plugins and stuff can’t (and don’t try to). It would add an overall perspective and a more complete picture of mixing as a craft, in your view. It would be a gift to humanity. I’d definitely pay for an ear training course as well, though!
I totally agree with you man. when I did the SAE back in '99 i asked where the frequency module was . . . ? I felt like a ghost. I did lose you when you mentioned 'SFW' 😅 Great idea btw, I keep training miself, but its never enough for the brain.
It used to be so simple to just go to a shop and buy the content you wanted on some storage device. Then streaming platforms made that more comforable and now it's like you need an account with all your personal data in yet an other database and a subscription for every single thing you'll ever wanna watch. Point is: I'd be happiest to pay directly to you to just get the videos, excluding subscriptions and accounts and memberships.
Sometimes as a customer. I just want to give someone money because they’ve given me so much good content for free. Beato, for example. I bought the ear training course, and then paid $75 more for everything else. I don’t ever look at it. I made myself some feedback tones in the exact frequencies of a 31-band eq. I burnt them onto a CD and played said CD at random. Then I’d guess the frequency before it was revealed by Stephen Hawkins voice about 8 seconds later. Ai did the same by boosting frequencies in Pink Noise. The also added chords and modes to the mic eventually. Burning longer CDs, and eventually creating mp3 playlists to be played at random, 25 years later, I’m pretty ok at guessing right most of the time. Anyways, I’ll buy your course Dan, just to pay for all the value you’ve already given me. Btw, feedback is so much easier to catch now that RTAs are standard. I use my phone’s RTA and gently say to the sound guy “I need you to take out some 320hz”.
Easy way is to boost the problem frequencies, and if it gets worse, cut it until it sounds better. If you run out of available cut, increase the bandwidth (q) and try the cut again. You do have to know where to begin though, and for that ear training is 100% critical.
I would be interested. As a follow up, though, listening to different compression types and distortion types would make a great course. I find those things aren’t covered well, especially distortion - I haven’t found a really systematic tutorial on identifying and using different distortion types.
Great idea for a course and Patreon would probably be the best for me - not sure I could explain an OF account to my partner, lol! I'm classically-trained and although all that ear-training I did is helpful, audio engineering is slightly different in that you're dealing with concepts like "depth", "imaging", "separation", etc. which are a bit different to musical concepts like "pitches", "parts", etc. So I think a course would be really helpful. Cheers!
Hello Dan! Thank you for all the valuable tutorials you've been making. I don't have any platform suggestions but will be buying the course once it's available.
Sounds amazing, and I would absolutely not be able to give it the time and attention it deserves :D I hope it gets off the ground and adds to better sound in the world and better finances for Dan :)
A youtube membership would be most convenient for me because I already have the app on my phone and I'd always see the notification for your latest uploads. I don't currently have a patreon (or OF) account and don't know if it can send mobile notifications. I'd also hate to have to sign up to a website that I'd have to frequently check and my email is packed with spam that if a notification came there I'd probably miss it. So my vote is on youtube memberships
When I entered college as a Music Composition major, I was essentially tone deaf. Over years of practice, I've developed a pretty solid ear when it comes to identifying intervals, chords and scales. Took a lot of work, but I believe you're right, anyone can learn the ear training required.
I'm relatively new to your channel, but I love your down to earth approach. And I love your musical examples. Im also classicaly trained Double Bass player! Which also means I played a lot of jazz etc...but really my heart and soul is in dub and electronic music (Of course I also play bass guitar...its the same as double bass). Love to do a tutorial with you. Ive been doing audio/music writing and production for 20 years, but no formal training, and I think maybe I need some?
At my school we did ear training. Had a whole semester on hearing and identifying boosts and cuts. But what helped the most was live sound training, both with feedback and with cutting mud and honkiness with vocals.
I would definitely pay for a course, I feel like EQ is actually the biggest thing I want to improve. I’m doing well and can recognise frequency “areas” but I’m not that accurate yet so anything to speed that up would be great
Fabfilter Q3 and a lot of other modern VST plugins allow you to see the overlap of frequencies between different tracks, making it easier to deal with frequency masking.
I'd pay hundreds for an ear training curriculum prepared by Dan. Patreon seems to be a convenient option as far as platforms go, and there's also a lot of people selling these video courses as one-time-purchases.
Here's the thing, whatever you wanna do, I'll be there. Unless it's an actual crime, in which I'll have to check how long is the prison time before committing to it. Jokes aside, I would be happy to see more content from you. Though, I'm not sure if I can commit to it immediately since the exchange rates might be a little too pricey. I like keeping it in a membership tier because UA-cam scales it well for people around the world, though that accessibility means that you would need several people from weaker currencies to cover the price of a single membership in your currency. It's a tricky balance, but I'm sure you'll figure out what works best based on how much you expect to make from it. Either way, I hope to see it happen even if I get to see it a bit later than other people.
I would definitely be interested in paying for that course. I got very valuable ear training / aural skills classes in college, but they were focused on stuff live musicians need, like identifying intervals, rhythms, chords, solfege, etc. It daunts me a bit that ear training for mixing is essentially like learning a crude approximation of perfect pitch, but it's clearly possible and I'd like to learn.
I think that you would have to think about your target demographic for your courses and how you would shape your course around that. Most people who watch your channel probably have a decent amount of experience mixing/producing (the "dj" kind of producing), but there's likely a broad range of experience. You usually do a good job of breaking down a topic in various ways so that both sides of the experience curve can learn something from it, so I would be interested to see if that translates to doing a course. I can say I would consider paying for a course like that, but I wouldn't be chomping at the bit for it. I guess it depends how much value I feel it can give me by honing my skills at mixing.
I would suggest that the release platform (and therefore what we are listening through) is critical in order that the subtlety of critical listening for frequency masking isn’t ruined by compression codecs and such. Perhaps paid downloadable content that can be listened to on one’s own monitoring system?
Not sure about whether I'd pay for a course. I can crank up 500Hz on the drums, on my mixer, and hear what it sounds like. The main thing is, I hadn't thought to try that for that purpose🤣. Though I've done the same thing (exaggerating a narrow Q sweep) many times in the past, in order to try and find the frequency of an annoying ringing sound in a timbre, so that I could cut the right band. I wouldn't be interested in listening to static individual sine waves for very long, I'm afraid. Younger people, on an upward trajectory, should consider it... but they've statistically got the least money to spend. I hope you find the right balance of course material, audience, payment and platform. Good luck.
My vote would be a bundled course you allow people to download for a fee. Or a low-fee monthly subscription. I think it could be cool of the videos were on a private website, not UA-cam. Something that UA-cam can't take down if they feel like it. Or - host the videos from UA-cam and another site. I liked your mixing video with Audio University.
hey Dan! Love your vids. A small note on the sines you played, as someone with severe tinnitus (experiencing it as a resonant high-pitched frequency from 6k and up with a loudness that would put many a festival to shame), a heads-up/warning would have been appreciated, as I'll be hearing it for days to come. Not blaming you, but it is sadly a really painful experience.
@@DanWorrall like I said, no blame. So, no worries! And I'm probably at the point where I'd hear it if its very muffled somewhere in the background. Having said that, the amount of high pitched sine sounds for flashbangs and concussions in movies/games is too darn high, hehe.
Dan, i have 3 engineers here local to me that im "teaching," and i would have every single one of them buy your course. Hell id buy it just for a brush up and sanity check. Maybe theres areas i can improve on i didnt think about! This would be amazing
I'm definitely interested in a course, but (as you're no doubt aware) there are some great ear-training resources available for free already, so you'd need to be clear what people were getting above and beyond those. That said, I presume plenty of people would pay anyway because they trust you and/or just to say thanks for all the free content you put out. In terms of pricing... Personally I find it difficult to sign up for regular subscription payments so I wouldn’t buy it if it was attached to one of those, e.g. UA-cam membership - I would want a one-off price for lifetime access, like most courses I've bought. I'm sure the training would be worth a lot but I'd personally struggle to pay more than around £50 at the moment. I'm no expert on platforms but a lot of the courses I've bought over the years use one called Kajabi, which I have found pretty good from the consumer perspective. Hope that all helps!
A good trick is to look at old classic EQ's. A lot had fixed frequency bands and what were chosen had to work for every possible source by the engineers who designed them. Once you genuinely get to the limitations of say, a Neve 1073 or 1081 EQ (Remember so many classic albums used these types of EQs, so they are more than adequate for someone in their bedroom), that's when its best to start with a modern EQ plugin with all the bells & whistles. But yeah, separation isn't difficult, just got to not be afraid to get rid of what needs to be removed. The aforementioned 1073 has a 300Hz option on the HPF for a reason. Oh and guitarists, mix engineers will scoop your mids to make space for other aspects of the mix!
As I started to move back to hardware from pure software music, I would definitely buy a comprehensive course about mixing and mastering. Especially as I own a subharmonicon now. This beast is difficult to tame in the context of incorporating its signal with other instruments. So if you do make this course you're talking about, you can count me in 100%.
Hi Dan, Thanks so much for all your amazing content over the years! Responding to your question: yes, I would gladly buy an ear training course from you. I have no idea what would be the best format or delivery. Price wise I would gladly pay $70 USD, knowing I am getting great content. $100 USD I would probably still buy it, because I know any course made by you would be worth far more, but I do tend to be reluctant to pay more. And, on the other end of the spectrum, people would undervalue any course for $20 or less, thinking "How good could it be at that bargain basement price?" Personally, I need the frequency training courses that are useful for a sound engineer. I am a professional musician, so I already understand notes, chords, arrangement, etc. I know a lot about compression and use compressors, but if you had tutorials on those, I would be interested in those as well. Thanks again for all the amazing videos you've created, Dan - I've always learned something from every video!
DW Tutorials. I love this direction for you. UA-cam is your de facto home so you need to at least link content to this platform I feel. Do the math and make your material as reasonably priced as is possible while worthwhile for yourself. And please keep linking the technical lessons to musical ones because I almost jumped out of my seat when you mentioned arrangement concerns. Too few tech experts address compositional skills I feel 🤘🤘
An individual who masters an instrument (i.e. violin) that has a complex feedback loop, for achieving specific frequencies has a leg up. As a child, I learned trombone and found out later that guitar was a piece of cake. Consider the range of the cello (or even the theremin) for starters. Put the targeted frequencies on a wheel and give it a spin? Sixteen (weekly) episodes seems about right for the duration. The rigor you speak of would reach your listeners on UA-cam as well as anywhere. Just thought starters. Thank you for all you do to help others make better sounding music.
Hey Dan, I'm currently applying to a university to pursue a degree in music production. One of the aptitude tests that you need to pass requires you to do exactly what you were talking about, being able to name intervals and such just by hearing. So, yes, an ear training course would be fantastic, because I suck at hearing, and that test is hard. Cheers
I was pretty good at those types of ear tests thanks to my classical training. But training to hear frequencies is a totally different skill, I started at zero there!
I've genuinely been mystified by the fact that most audio schools hardly ever even talk about the importance of training ears. Here in Finland we have Sibelius-Academy which is mostly art/music school, but also has master's degree in sound design and bachelor of music technology which both to my knowledge has requirement for training ears, but that's pretty much the only school I've heard they do that and it's no wonder since it's one of the leading art uni's in the world.
Half of my mixing time is spent on editing/rearranging. Stuff like too early bassguitar eating Snap of a kickdrum, or too early strums of guitars masking snare-attacks. Often times, I completely remove tracks in certain sections to make space for the really important stuff...good editing is (sadly?) really part of crafting a good mix nowadays, so it seems to me.
That would be great! For a training how frekvencies sounds is great soundgym but examples and your knowledge on most (idealy all :D) instruments and how they sound or where to look would be much payable.🎉 Live and studio!
Here to say that the "Face Reveal" in the thumbnail wasn't just clickbait. It's real
Now the real question is... Phase reveal, when?
It's a buildup to the Onlyfans page for sure
@@TransistorLSDactually it was inverted phase reveal, since It was the young him and he is old now, if we had a pic of him old we could do a null test to see if it’s really him
@@AL-qj9yh Makes sense!
@@AL-qj9yh I'm not sure a null test would help much. He's gone through filtering and EQ by this time, after all. Fundamental frequency and the more prominent harmonics would still be the same though, right?
Sitting here thinking "please say arrangement, please say arrangement"
Yess!
Yes, there's a reason we never have to hear about who mixed for Beethoven, or who Mahler's producer was. The musicians do the work and it comes out right.
The 'producer / mixer / engineer' is the conductor, you do hear plenty about them.
@@DanWorrall Good point. Mixed live. :)
@@DanWorrall excellent point everybody thinks that conductors are just waving their stick about in time what they don't realize is the months of rehearsal and communication between every single musician the performance on the night is really just the party.
YOU'VE TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING. THANK YOU DAN. I WISH YOU TAUGHT ME HOW TO FIX KEYBOARDS THOUGH IM HAVING A TOUGH TIME RIGHT NOW.
Too much 1kHz!
"Everything about anything" Damn DW you're good!
my life is the same
I can highly recommend going to see and hear an orchestra performance. I recently went to two free events at the Royal Festival Hall and was amazed when I walked in a realised there were no mics and no engineer. Just the musicians and their instruments and how I could hear each instrument clearly. Great experience.
I would, in a heartbeat, happily pay for an ear training course from you Dan. I think that many would, made aware and given access to it, profit enormously from such a thing as this.
Heavily agree, and wanted to comment so it's extra visible.
I would definetly be into that idea as well!
Count me in!
Yes please
Absofuckinglutely.
You could set up a patreon account which is pretty convenient from what i heard. but a Dan Worral OF sounds hilarious and would be my first and last account Id follow on the platform hahaha
I can imagine trying to explain this to my wife when she sees the bill...
Make it in UA-cam membership please
exactly this!
I'd still have trouble explaining an OF entry on the credit card bill to my wife.
So, I'd be doing you a favour by forcing you to address the trust issues in your relationship.
I'd buy an OF from Dan no question asked!
Me as well!
☠💀☠
Agree!
You are really the best recording expert there is on UA-cam, no questions asked man. It's neither just your professional skills, the way you edit your videos or other aspects of your apparent personality. Your whole vibe is just incredible. You bring something relevant to any question we might ask ourselves or any problem we can encouter.
A 1000 cheers for that.
I just graduated in Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music. They teach us frequency ear training in the audio classes with boosting and cutting frequencies on white noise and having to figure out the frequency. It was laborious and I hated it while learning it but it truly opened up the EQ for me and all of a sudden I felt I could finally “use my ears” because I finally knew what to listen for
Dude the 500hz cut at 8:40 is genius 😂
I ALWAYS cut 500Hz at 8:40. Everyone does that.
Just kidding I could use the info he's talking about. I'm not as against frequency masking as most people seem to be... but I didn't know what "too much 500Hz in the drums" sounded like.
Disclaimer: I don't mix music for other people, so that's not scandalous.
Came here to say that hahaha
Try Mighty Networks. I like it for this kind of paid learning. Nice platform.
@@GizzyDillespee Regarding masking, there is a introductory lecture from a uni on psychoacoustics. The playlist: Psychoacoustics lessons from Audio Information Processing TUM.
It really helped me improve my mixes. Particularly the masking around the 200-800 Hz range, and how it (like any masking) disproportionally affects the high-end. Way further up than you'd expect. Now I handle that range for the culprit, instead of boosting high-ends of the other tracks.
Also, whomever your intended audience is (albeit just you), a shitty mix enshittifies even the best songs. The composition, arrangement, execution, might all be perfect. If the mix bad, the song bad.
I've been on and off learning music production for two years as a hobby. Your pragmatic perspective, way of teaching and the knowledge itself is of the highest quality that I find anywhere online.
Usually I'll try to search for a specific topic I'm interested in, but in reality it's not what I need. Just browsing through your clips I get to discover userful concepts and skills that bring me the most value.
Having a fullly structured course from you on any topic is something i'd 100% buy because it's simply so effective for me
Dan dropping low effort but high value wisdom. Love it.
Soundgym is a great tool for training you ears...But, i would be interested in a course done by you
It's too expensive for me to pay every month
Ear training can indeed be very powerful. About a decade ago I did one that I believe was called "Perfect Pitch Ear Training Supercourse" (it was a series of mp3s and probably a couple of PDFs), and after a couple of months of daily training I was able to play groups of random 8 notes simultaneously and identify each by its "colour" - like people born with perfect pitch are able to do I reckon. I didn't stick to it afterwards but even today I can identify different notes sometimes, with some concentration. There was also a course for relative pitch.
I was five when my distinguished teacher told my dad I had PP. It meant nothing to me until my 50s and started working in music from semi pro to professional. During those years, I told friends and family the pitch of car horns, glasses, cat meows and even farts. I could always prove it by running to the piano which I kept at A-440 , a Bösendorfer tuned 4 times a year. I once failed a choir audition because the tester transposed my line down a 4th meaning I had to sing different notes from the score. I couldn't because it was a lie to my brain. My point? PP is not something you can learn and I'd have preferred to have been more successful at other things but in the end it was like a reverse disease as I was no good at anything else in my life. As Rachmaninov said, Music is enough for a lifetime but a lifetime is not enough for music.
David Lucas Burge! Highly recommend that course.
nah in my opinion UA-cam members would be the best but if you really don't want that, Patreon is also an option. it's a great idea for a video series and definitely something people need.
To be honest I was thinking Patreon as a platform as well.
I had a full semester course like this in college for my audio engineering degree. The first half of the semester we trained on boosts/cuts of 12dB with a graphic EQ. The second half was 6dB boosts/cuts. Usually on music. We also assigned a lot of adjectives to these sounds.
Now when I train newer engineers both live and in the studio, one of their main questions is “how do I know where that frequency is just by hearing it.” It’s from that training, the adjectives, and EQing thousands of times. So a course like you’re discussing is incredibly useful and helpful!
4:44 A personal hurdle to overcome for me and undoubtedly others too is/was the fact that once you start cutting frequencies something can feel off or weird, you'll think to yourself "this doesn't sound right with this amount of cutting", in reality you only notice this because you'll be hearing the change, anyone else hearing it in a mix might not be able to tell
I would gladly pay for an ear training course from you, Dan!
EDIT: proof of my readiness to pay for a course from you was that I posted the above before I even finished listening to this. So to answer your final question: I recommend you create your own site and offer either a one time "lifetime" membership charge at several hundred dollars, or an annual membership fee at a cheaper price point.
Two main reasons to make your own site: cut out the middlemen so we're only paying you, and "own" your customers. And by that I mean, you have the data of who wants what you're selling, and no platform is your overlord, at whose discretion you could be completely estranged from your audience at a moment's notice (as we've seen on UA-cam, for instance, through the years.) My two cents! Thanks for your teaching Dan, and I look forward to taking your ear training course.
6:10 Can confirm I did do ear training during my studies. We did it once a week during our Mastering lectures. There’s also a noticeable improvement in my mixes before and after that period :)
ooh that does sound interesting, and it's cool to see the idea reinforced of what I've been figuring out on my own - to give "space" to important instruments' main freq range by cutting other instruments in the same range.
It sounds weird solo'd, but when everything is playing you don't hear that "missing" cut on those tracks. Forget if it was this channel or another which suggested to not hyperfixate on how each track sounds solo'd, because after all the final mix isn't listening in solo... And if the cut sounds weird solo'd, you can just automate disabling it when the "main" instrument doesn't play and the "cut" instrument becomes more prominent.
Another mixing "trick" I've seen, is equating different ranges in the freq spectrum to different vowel sounds... It's very clear when it's band boosted over pink noise, but it can be a lot harder to learn how to listen for that in real use cases/on actual instruments. Maybe that'd be worth touching on in the courses?
Best thing I've heard, "recognize where the arrangement was trying to get to...." Now that's audio engineering at its best.
I'd love an ear training course from you - please do it! In terms of platform, I don't see anything outside UA-cam that's easy to use for both sides - it needs to be easy for you as well as us
I've described music production to friends as "creating, writing, and performing a symphony all by yourself, just with sounds no one'e ever heard before" many times in the past. It feels good to have a thought about music making similar to Dan's 😅
The best help/info/training on the internet is always free. You’re a prime example of that, my friend.
If I didn't have good ears that I've been training already but doing ok the job work, and also training in a musical context I would definitely consider buying a course from you that would help me train my ears. I don't know if i'd get it if it wasn't you making it, you are a superb educator especially on this platform.
Yes please Dan - make the course. I’m in.
yes the "shut up and take my money" meme is an older meme, but it checks out, especially in this case.
posting it on 0F would be hilarious
honestly I wouldn't mind using youtube membership for it, definitely would grab it asap
the only issue with youtube is that it'd be subscription based, and for basically an access to videos... it doesn't bring the best feeling
It also heavily depends on how you'd want to build the course.... single time payment obviously makes much more sense if you're just gonna create the most comprehensive course from the start, with less emphasis on updates or new content, more emphasis on the first release. And subscription makes more sense for if you're gonna keep adding more and more things to it, more emphasis on updates/new content.
Would 100% pay for that course!
Sound Gym is an AWESOME tool for learning things like the freqency spectrum by ear, and relative gain boosts and reduction numbers, again by ear, as well as panning positions by ear (all for free). Then if you sub to the paid model you get a ton of other exersizes (and they aren't limeted like the free ones) and can learn gain reduction of compressors by ear and all sorts of interesting ear training tit bits!
Would definitely pay for a course as you describe. Put it on whatever platform doesn't take a huge cut from you - you deserve it all.
I've always wondered how, when frequencies resonate in our skulls and jaws, how the proximity to our inner ear effects our ability to determine good tuning or perfect pitch. Great video!
I would happily pay for a course by you Dan. I am also a fan of some kind of an interactive class.
Toughest parts of my mixes are when there is simultaneously overdriven rhythm guitar, overdriven lead guitar, and choir. Those 3 things are so broadband, its impossible to avoid frequency masking if you want each part to maintain it's whole sound and not have any super-filtered effect kinda sound on any of the tracks.
Yes! This is so important. We do it a lot in audio related educations here in Denmark, but not as much as we probably should. It'd be nice if maybe one of the videos from this course were to be made free so that we could see how in depth you go.
Well, that's a mandatory purchase if I even seen one 😄
Of interest to you might be the Golden Ears ear training course. It used to be distributed on cd, now they have an online version. That being mentioned, I still love the idea of paying for Dan’s Freq’ing Audio Course distributed via OF lol.
An ear training course sounds like a great idea, according to my ears!
This is like when I was reading Cedric Chin's change of mind on note taking, then experimenting with his "Case Library", then finally having the case library be a flagship product of his entire blog.
He writes really high quality articles on acquiring skills ("tacit knowledge"), also bringing a bunch of research into more accessible forms of reading.
I think his work on burnout, extracting knowledge from experts, and the "vocab point" (how experts end up coining their own terms) can be particularly interesting in this case.
I’ve had a hobby home studio for 20 years. I’m no professional, but not a beginner either. If you created a straightforward, basic mixing course, I’d buy that in a heartbeat. You’ve shared a ton of knowledge on UA-cam, but having a full, no-nonsense course with your teaching skills would be invaluable. A lot of bits of info would fall into place, and it would add things that the super interesting deep dives into plugins and stuff can’t (and don’t try to). It would add an overall perspective and a more complete picture of mixing as a craft, in your view. It would be a gift to humanity.
I’d definitely pay for an ear training course as well, though!
Hi Dan, i strictly only operate on OF these days so would be nice to have the vids there… Looking forward to it
I totally agree with you man.
when I did the SAE back in '99 i asked where the frequency module was . . . ?
I felt like a ghost.
I did lose you when you mentioned 'SFW' 😅
Great idea btw,
I keep training miself, but its never enough for the brain.
I wanna write "Shut up and take my money!" but it feels so inpolite to say that to you! 🤣
It used to be so simple to just go to a shop and buy the content you wanted on some storage device. Then streaming platforms made that more comforable and now it's like you need an account with all your personal data in yet an other database and a subscription for every single thing you'll ever wanna watch.
Point is: I'd be happiest to pay directly to you to just get the videos, excluding subscriptions and accounts and memberships.
I would absolutely pay for an ear training course from you
Sometimes as a customer. I just want to give someone money because they’ve given me so much good content for free. Beato, for example. I bought the ear training course, and then paid $75 more for everything else. I don’t ever look at it. I made myself some feedback tones in the exact frequencies of a 31-band eq. I burnt them onto a CD and played said CD at random. Then I’d guess the frequency before it was revealed by Stephen Hawkins voice about 8 seconds later. Ai did the same by boosting frequencies in Pink Noise. The also added chords and modes to the mic eventually. Burning longer CDs, and eventually creating mp3 playlists to be played at random, 25 years later, I’m pretty ok at guessing right most of the time. Anyways, I’ll buy your course Dan, just to pay for all the value you’ve already given me.
Btw, feedback is so much easier to catch now that RTAs are standard. I use my phone’s RTA and gently say to the sound guy “I need you to take out some 320hz”.
Easy way is to boost the problem frequencies, and if it gets worse, cut it until it sounds better. If you run out of available cut, increase the bandwidth (q) and try the cut again. You do have to know where to begin though, and for that ear training is 100% critical.
I would be interested. As a follow up, though, listening to different compression types and distortion types would make a great course. I find those things aren’t covered well, especially distortion - I haven’t found a really systematic tutorial on identifying and using different distortion types.
Great idea for a course and Patreon would probably be the best for me - not sure I could explain an OF account to my partner, lol! I'm classically-trained and although all that ear-training I did is helpful, audio engineering is slightly different in that you're dealing with concepts like "depth", "imaging", "separation", etc. which are a bit different to musical concepts like "pitches", "parts", etc. So I think a course would be really helpful. Cheers!
Had this course for my masters. Changed my life forever
Hello Dan! Thank you for all the valuable tutorials you've been making. I don't have any platform suggestions but will be buying the course once it's available.
Very good. I was classically trained and played the Trumpet from11 and played in the Kent Youth Orchestra at 14.
Sounds amazing, and I would absolutely not be able to give it the time and attention it deserves :D I hope it gets off the ground and adds to better sound in the world and better finances for Dan :)
A youtube membership would be most convenient for me because I already have the app on my phone and I'd always see the notification for your latest uploads. I don't currently have a patreon (or OF) account and don't know if it can send mobile notifications. I'd also hate to have to sign up to a website that I'd have to frequently check and my email is packed with spam that if a notification came there I'd probably miss it. So my vote is on youtube memberships
When I entered college as a Music Composition major, I was essentially tone deaf. Over years of practice, I've developed a pretty solid ear when it comes to identifying intervals, chords and scales. Took a lot of work, but I believe you're right, anyone can learn the ear training required.
I'm relatively new to your channel, but I love your down to earth approach. And I love your musical examples. Im also classicaly trained Double Bass player! Which also means I played a lot of jazz etc...but really my heart and soul is in dub and electronic music (Of course I also play bass guitar...its the same as double bass).
Love to do a tutorial with you. Ive been doing audio/music writing and production for 20 years, but no formal training, and I think maybe I need some?
I'd 100% pay for an ear training course from you!
Yes and yes, please! I'd be happy with either youtube channel membership paywalled or patreon with unlisted youtube videos as a delivery mechanism.
6:45 Yes. We want it.
I really hope you create that course!
At my school we did ear training. Had a whole semester on hearing and identifying boosts and cuts. But what helped the most was live sound training, both with feedback and with cutting mud and honkiness with vocals.
I would definitely pay for a course, I feel like EQ is actually the biggest thing I want to improve. I’m doing well and can recognise frequency “areas” but I’m not that accurate yet so anything to speed that up would be great
I would absolutely pay for an ear training course!
Fabfilter Q3 and a lot of other modern VST plugins allow you to see the overlap of frequencies between different tracks, making it easier to deal with frequency masking.
In theory. In practise I've yet to find one that agrees with what my ears tell me.
I'd pay hundreds for an ear training curriculum prepared by Dan. Patreon seems to be a convenient option as far as platforms go, and there's also a lot of people selling these video courses as one-time-purchases.
Your videos on UA-cam are perfect for HIspanic America, automatic captions and translations are important to us.
You create a course I immediately buy it. period.
Here's the thing, whatever you wanna do, I'll be there. Unless it's an actual crime, in which I'll have to check how long is the prison time before committing to it.
Jokes aside, I would be happy to see more content from you. Though, I'm not sure if I can commit to it immediately since the exchange rates might be a little too pricey. I like keeping it in a membership tier because UA-cam scales it well for people around the world, though that accessibility means that you would need several people from weaker currencies to cover the price of a single membership in your currency. It's a tricky balance, but I'm sure you'll figure out what works best based on how much you expect to make from it. Either way, I hope to see it happen even if I get to see it a bit later than other people.
I’m positive you would make hugely beneficial and top quality ear training course.
I would definitely be interested in paying for that course. I got very valuable ear training / aural skills classes in college, but they were focused on stuff live musicians need, like identifying intervals, rhythms, chords, solfege, etc. It daunts me a bit that ear training for mixing is essentially like learning a crude approximation of perfect pitch, but it's clearly possible and I'd like to learn.
I would absolutely pay for a course by you
I think that you would have to think about your target demographic for your courses and how you would shape your course around that. Most people who watch your channel probably have a decent amount of experience mixing/producing (the "dj" kind of producing), but there's likely a broad range of experience. You usually do a good job of breaking down a topic in various ways so that both sides of the experience curve can learn something from it, so I would be interested to see if that translates to doing a course. I can say I would consider paying for a course like that, but I wouldn't be chomping at the bit for it. I guess it depends how much value I feel it can give me by honing my skills at mixing.
I would suggest that the release platform (and therefore what we are listening through) is critical in order that the subtlety of critical listening for frequency masking isn’t ruined by compression codecs and such. Perhaps paid downloadable content that can be listened to on one’s own monitoring system?
Not sure about whether I'd pay for a course. I can crank up 500Hz on the drums, on my mixer, and hear what it sounds like. The main thing is, I hadn't thought to try that for that purpose🤣. Though I've done the same thing (exaggerating a narrow Q sweep) many times in the past, in order to try and find the frequency of an annoying ringing sound in a timbre, so that I could cut the right band.
I wouldn't be interested in listening to static individual sine waves for very long, I'm afraid. Younger people, on an upward trajectory, should consider it... but they've statistically got the least money to spend. I hope you find the right balance of course material, audience, payment and platform. Good luck.
My vote would be a bundled course you allow people to download for a fee. Or a low-fee monthly subscription.
I think it could be cool of the videos were on a private website, not UA-cam. Something that UA-cam can't take down if they feel like it. Or - host the videos from UA-cam and another site.
I liked your mixing video with Audio University.
I like that green visualization is basically hand showing FU sign
Lol. In fact the logo is a stylised "dw" and the animation is a spectrum analyser, 100Hz on the left up to 8k on the right, RMS levels.
An ear training course from DW: That sounds intriguing. Its difficult, challenging and boring at the same time, ithink you could make it engaging.😊
I'd love to hear your 31 bands for a while :)
I'd absolutely love an ear training course, no question I'd buy it, the thing is I don't know what price to suggest lmao
hey Dan! Love your vids.
A small note on the sines you played, as someone with severe tinnitus (experiencing it as a resonant high-pitched frequency from 6k and up with a loudness that would put many a festival to shame), a heads-up/warning would have been appreciated, as I'll be hearing it for days to come.
Not blaming you, but it is sadly a really painful experience.
Really sorry. I thought I'd mixed it too quiet in all honesty...
@@DanWorrall like I said, no blame. So, no worries!
And I'm probably at the point where I'd hear it if its very muffled somewhere in the background.
Having said that, the amount of high pitched sine sounds for flashbangs and concussions in movies/games is too darn high, hehe.
Dan, i have 3 engineers here local to me that im "teaching," and i would have every single one of them buy your course. Hell id buy it just for a brush up and sanity check. Maybe theres areas i can improve on i didnt think about! This would be amazing
Dan. You are the best at this on YT. cheers. j.
Dan worrall OF ! 🗣
Any kind of interactivity whatsoever would be a huge benefit in my opinion, I feel that's blatantly missing from most online master classes
I'm definitely interested in a course, but (as you're no doubt aware) there are some great ear-training resources available for free already, so you'd need to be clear what people were getting above and beyond those. That said, I presume plenty of people would pay anyway because they trust you and/or just to say thanks for all the free content you put out.
In terms of pricing... Personally I find it difficult to sign up for regular subscription payments so I wouldn’t buy it if it was attached to one of those, e.g. UA-cam membership - I would want a one-off price for lifetime access, like most courses I've bought. I'm sure the training would be worth a lot but I'd personally struggle to pay more than around £50 at the moment.
I'm no expert on platforms but a lot of the courses I've bought over the years use one called Kajabi, which I have found pretty good from the consumer perspective.
Hope that all helps!
A good trick is to look at old classic EQ's. A lot had fixed frequency bands and what were chosen had to work for every possible source by the engineers who designed them.
Once you genuinely get to the limitations of say, a Neve 1073 or 1081 EQ (Remember so many classic albums used these types of EQs, so they are more than adequate for someone in their bedroom), that's when its best to start with a modern EQ plugin with all the bells & whistles.
But yeah, separation isn't difficult, just got to not be afraid to get rid of what needs to be removed. The aforementioned 1073 has a 300Hz option on the HPF for a reason. Oh and guitarists, mix engineers will scoop your mids to make space for other aspects of the mix!
I would definitely pay for the ear training course, as long as the price is reasonable.
As I started to move back to hardware from pure software music, I would definitely buy a comprehensive course about mixing and mastering. Especially as I own a subharmonicon now. This beast is difficult to tame in the context of incorporating its signal with other instruments. So if you do make this course you're talking about, you can count me in 100%.
Hi Dan,
Thanks so much for all your amazing content over the years!
Responding to your question: yes, I would gladly buy an ear training course from you. I have no idea what would be the best format or delivery. Price wise I would gladly pay $70 USD, knowing I am getting great content. $100 USD I would probably still buy it, because I know any course made by you would be worth far more, but I do tend to be reluctant to pay more. And, on the other end of the spectrum, people would undervalue any course for $20 or less, thinking "How good could it be at that bargain basement price?"
Personally, I need the frequency training courses that are useful for a sound engineer. I am a professional musician, so I already understand notes, chords, arrangement, etc. I know a lot about compression and use compressors, but if you had tutorials on those, I would be interested in those as well.
Thanks again for all the amazing videos you've created, Dan - I've always learned something from every video!
DW Tutorials. I love this direction for you. UA-cam is your de facto home so you need to at least link content to this platform I feel. Do the math and make your material as reasonably priced as is possible while worthwhile for yourself. And please keep linking the technical lessons to musical ones because I almost jumped out of my seat when you mentioned arrangement concerns. Too few tech experts address compositional skills I feel 🤘🤘
I like how most of the time it all comes back to "Sh#t in, Sh#t out"
I'm honestly not interested in subscriptions, but I'd love a one time purchase of any course you'd offer!
An individual who masters an instrument (i.e. violin) that has a complex feedback loop, for achieving specific frequencies has a leg up. As a child, I learned trombone and found out later that guitar was a piece of cake. Consider the range of the cello (or even the theremin) for starters. Put the targeted frequencies on a wheel and give it a spin? Sixteen (weekly) episodes seems about right for the duration. The rigor you speak of would reach your listeners on UA-cam as well as anywhere. Just thought starters. Thank you for all you do to help others make better sounding music.
Hey Dan,
I'm currently applying to a university to pursue a degree in music production. One of the aptitude tests that you need to pass requires you to do exactly what you were talking about, being able to name intervals and such just by hearing. So, yes, an ear training course would be fantastic, because I suck at hearing, and that test is hard.
Cheers
I was pretty good at those types of ear tests thanks to my classical training. But training to hear frequencies is a totally different skill, I started at zero there!
I would gladly pay for the ear training program from you!
Thanks, musical Father.
I've genuinely been mystified by the fact that most audio schools hardly ever even talk about the importance of training ears. Here in Finland we have Sibelius-Academy which is mostly art/music school, but also has master's degree in sound design and bachelor of music technology which both to my knowledge has requirement for training ears, but that's pretty much the only school I've heard they do that and it's no wonder since it's one of the leading art uni's in the world.
I would be happy to pay for such a formation from you.
I don't mind the platform.
Half of my mixing time is spent on editing/rearranging. Stuff like too early bassguitar eating Snap of a kickdrum, or too early strums of guitars masking snare-attacks. Often times, I completely remove tracks in certain sections to make space for the really important stuff...good editing is (sadly?) really part of crafting a good mix nowadays, so it seems to me.
That would be great!
For a training how frekvencies sounds is great soundgym but examples and your knowledge on most (idealy all :D) instruments and how they sound or where to look would be much payable.🎉
Live and studio!