First Song Mix (Spaced) on the BAHA 5
This is just a quick rundown of my first mix using the BAHA 5, bone anchored hearing aid.
This track is a throwback to the 90s. I really like the Korg M1 stabby keyboard sounds and wanted to write a track that is a little retro, fun, and not too serious.
I think the most noticeable impact of using a BAHA on a mix was that I could hear some bass at the higher end and some stereo on the mid range synths.
The BAHA 5 really picked up transients and I noticed that I should be able to hear a portion of the song in the BAHA 5 which has a limited frequency. If it was missing, it indicated a problem. A bit like mixing on an Auratone. Using the LEFT/RIGHT isolation switch on the Phonitor, flicking back and forth, I could distinguish between missing frequencies in my BAHA and working ear.
For this mix, I mainly used the BAHA 5 to tighten up transients, introduce a little stereo image and for some parallel compression to get the missing frequencies into the BAHA range. The BAHA 5 was particularly good and giving me an idea of whether a song would translate to a poor speaker. If portion of the sound was missing in the BAHA, I nudged it into range.
First Song Mix (My Heart) on the OSIA 2 in dynamic Music Mode.
Okay, first off woooooooooow. This is insanely good after going from zero hearing. I can clearly hear problems with stereo in my mix and this is significantly impacting on the sound stage. It means I now have to question my understanding of stereo and it turned out, I have been so so wrong. All of my judgements habe been made based on one working ear (the mono in monophreak) but now with this Osia 2, I understand something very crucial about the overall sound stage.
As a mono hearing musician, I always thought that if you have a mono signal, duplicated it exactly and then panned one left, one right – that is stereo. How wrong could I be. The sound collapsed into itself and I heard phasing. I had to make a double take and so ran an experiment in Izotope Imager which to my horror, revealed I have completed misunderstood how to make a stereo image. I will add some visuals here to show you what I mean. I combined two mono signals without any variation on a bus and could see a single, crooked mono line.
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The moment one of the channels changed, for example – an Ibanez guitar pedal on one side, nice, wide, stereo image.
The second thing to note is – what has been happening to my ear when I mix in mono? This is really strange. Now that I have two ears, one with bass and one without, I realise I completely got bass wrong. I think what has been happening is that my mono ear fatigues so quickly, I have been turning down bass and cutting out lower/mid range as my ear fatigues, leaving tinny sounds. I then apply saturation as sounds sound tinnier as a I mix. This is a remarkable discovery. The consistency of frequency range in my Osia stabilised my tendency to drop the bass by acting as a contact control. It was incredible and I can finally place bass. I have no idea if this trick would work for musicians with two stereo ears but the cut below 200Hz on my left meant that I no longer had the urge to destroy bass.
I decided to listen a range of my earlier music and sadly can see that the Osia 2 has revealed a remarkable pattern in my music making which thankfully, I am now aware of and can crucially apply to fix to all of my mixes.
I am really excited about the future, this mix and cannot wait to get this out there, on YouTube. Of course, there is always a chance that I have just adjusted my mix to my new ear and I’ll have to spin the wheel again.