Get away from the speaker, sir....

As a mix engineer who has spent way too many hours in front of a pair of near field speakers, it wasn't until maybe twenty years into my career that I started "getting away" from the speakers and going to other parts of the control room , or better out in the hall to listen to the record. You might think that that's crazy, given you can't hear right from left, or even localize anything. But the amazing thing about getting away from the speakers is that you hear things in the mix you'd never notice sitting in front of the monitors, like the fact that the lead vocal is not really speaking...little things like that. When I was a bit younger a tech told me a story about an engineer that put a pir of ns-10 speakers on the floor in front of the ssl, pointing out towards the studio glass. I thoght that was totally crazy, so I immediately copied it...

It was amazing the things I heard on those speakers on the floor, much like the badly setup dorm speakers from my college room mate. I could tell if certain bass notes were too loud, I could tell the vocal was still dark, and too soft. For a couple years I did that NS-10 trick on the floor. Then when I built my mix facility in 1998 I discovered that there was an anomaly in the control that I couldn't really hear true bass sitting right in front of the console, so my partner Yaron Fuchs and I got into the habit of having one of our assistants "run" pro tools from the front so we could listen from behind the producers desk. It had a big impact on me, my mixes got better, and when I felt my attention fading or my ears get tired, I would go out in the hallway and listen form there on the couch. It was so easy for me to hear things that were impossible for me to process sitting in front of the speakers. Give it a try sometime, you'll be surprised the things you hear when you're in the next room, out in the studio, or just on the other side of the room.