Adjustments

I have a friend named Rob.  Rob has two Grammys. When Rob tells me how to make my recording projects sound better…I listen.  You see, Rob is a mixing engineer and his job is to take what people like me record, and make it sound good.  He has a great set of ears.  I’ve never actually seen his ears; since his hair often covers them, but I know that he hears things I don’t hear.   Kind of like a bat.

 

Because I know that he has great ears, and he has two gold gramophones on his mixing console to prove it, when he gives me advice about recording, gear, etc… I try to take it. Recently he sent me to a web site that explained all about acoustics in a mixing environment.  It was for smart people.  I had to look up a lot of words.  Basically, what the site said was that there are rules about how sound bounces around a room and interacts with the walls, sofas, and other bouncing sound waves.  All of that effects what you hear when you listen.  This is important when you mix a record because you need to hear everything.  I don’t know who had the time to figure all this out, but one of the rules was called the “38% rule”.  What it says is that the ideal listening spot in a room is usually about 1/3 into the room (38% to be exact).  Well…since Rob had sent me to that site, and I listen to Rob, I got out a tape measurer to find out where I should be sitting when I listen to stuff in my studio.  I was close but I was about 6 inches off from where that site told me I should be sitting.  So I moved my desk 6 inches.  Not a big adjustment.  I skeptically sat down to listen to something I had been working on, and WOW! I felt like I had just got a new set of monitors!  I could hear things that I hadn’t heard before.

 

The purpose of studio monitors is to tell the truth.  Not to sound pretty.  If they were humans, they would be prophets.  They would say things like, “Repent or God is coming to smite you, sinner.  Oh…and by the way…your recording sounds like garbage.”  So, if the speakers tell the truth and, by making a small adjustment, I could hear them better, this is both good and bad.  It’s good because I can hear it clearly.  It’s bad because I may not like what I hear.  That means I need to fix things, and fixing things takes work and work is…..well…..work.  And I’m lazy.

 

So I have a choice. Fix my mix or move my monitors back to where they were so I can’t hear the truth.  I have the same choice with God.  Make adjustments when He reveals things to me and go further toward intimacy with Him knowing that each step of trust and obedience helps me hear Him better.  Or I can pretend I never heard Him and keep on doing what I was doing.  Seems like an easy decision.  I wish I could say that I always chose the better of these two options.

 

The flip side to all this is that I might hear things I like too.  My mix might be better than I thought and making the adjustments might actually encourage me.  To continue the analogy, I might hear, “Well done!  I’m so proud of you!  Keep fighting.  I’m crazy in love with you and will not rest until I see you face to face. I love you, not what you do for me. I’m faithful.”, and lots of other stuff that absolutely thrills my soul.

 

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”

                                                                                    John 10:27