As we all know, aging ears and sustained exposure to high SPL (sound pressure level) can lead to permanent hearing loss, chronic tinnitus, or both. I’m at the point in my music-making endeavors that many of my colleagues and clients are four decades into playing music on stage – often at extreme volumes. Therefore, I’m often working with musicians who hear things differently from me. These discrepancies seem to become most apparent during attended mix sessions. For example, comments that present themselves as aesthetic judgments, such as, “The bass is louder than my guitar,” or, “The percussion needs to come up,” could turn out to be indicators of hearing loss. Perhaps the sound of the guitar leans heavily into higher-order harmonics from exaggerated distortion, or the percussion tracks are comprised of bells and shakers with bright, high-pitched transients – and the commenter can’t hear the high frequencies? And what happens when another band member thinks the opposite? “The guitar is too loud,” or, “The percussion is too piercing”? Several years ago, one musician kept asking for the tambourine to be mixed louder. Everyone else thought the tambourine was overwhelming the mix. That’s when I played back another song that I’d recorded years prior for the same band – a song that also had a tambourine on it. The guitarist couldn’t hear the tambourine in the older song, but absolutely remembered liking how it sounded when we mixed that song. Other times, the solution isn’t so easy, especially when the opinions are more subtle. I had a guitarist point out that the drums and bass had lost definition after the mixes came back from mastering. Meanwhile, the drummer felt that his drum tracks were the best he’d ever heard, and the bass player felt that the bass had gained definition. What would you do as the engineer if you were presented with a similar dilemma? In the earlier case of the tambourine, after we listened to a familiar recording together, I played test tones for everyone in the room. We quickly determined that each of us had different limits to our high-frequency hearing, and that the guitarist couldn’t hear anything above 4 kHz. ••• If you really want to understand the health of your hearing, you should visit an audiologist; and if you’re suffering from tinnitus, consider an otolaryngologist [Tape Op #39]. Meanwhile, there are countless online tests that offer a rough estimation of the extent of any hearing loss. I tried several, and all of them required me to interact with test tones at a self-calibrated level (i.e., not truly calibrated). These tests only use a small set of frequencies, and different ears (as well as different playback systems) may or may not have problems and inaccuracies at those specific frequencies. Caveat aside, I preferred Soundly (soundly.com/hearing-test) on desktop and mobile, and their test can be easily shared with clients who aren't computer savvy. Meanwhile, anyone with a DAW can load their favorite tone-generator plug-in, or run a test program like Room EQ Wizard (roomeqwizard.com), to play sine wave sweeps in order to gain a more detailed understanding of your ear’s frequency-response. Set up a logarithmic sweep from 2 kHz to 20 kHz, at a duration of 20 sec; and if you can, listen at a very low volume on a single nearfield speaker, while blocking one of your ears. Another option is to use headphones, but I’ve found that closed-back headphones have bigger swings in high-frequency volume than nearfield monitors do. Granted, what we perceive in frequency-domain is not the end-all to how we hear sounds in a mix, but it could explain disagreements over mix balance, especially when there’s significant hearing loss involved. Email me your techniques for working with aging musicians while making mix decisions.