Almost a year ago I published this video on YouTube, making it private because I wanted to start publishing one per week once all of them were completed. Unfortunately, due to work reasons, I haven't found the time to create the subsequent series, but I thought I would make it public anyway since it contains a general overview of mixing and mastering techniques in a recording studio.
Perhaps over time I will manage to find the space to create the following chapters. I hope that in the meantime this introduction can be interesting and break some ground...
Great Simone, if I have managed to assimilate anything, even though I don't know what concentration is, it means that (and it is so) you explained some basic concepts in a direct way that in another context would have been less clear (this despite the fact that, as you insisted on specifying and is understandable, listening alone is not enough to make certain arguments your own).
Many points of interest, but given the time and the sleepiness that has been gripping me for some time, I would like to bring a parallel example to what you did when you explained the reason for the standard arrangement of orchestral instruments, citing the relative standard position with which people position themselves before a photograph: those with greater height behind those with a few cm less, precisely because taller people stand out more, even at first glance.
In photography, if I'm not mistaken, one speaks of depth of field when attempting to establish the coverage range of a lens at a certain focal length; in music, one could mean the timing (although perhaps we are, but it is a hypothesis, and I am very likely wrong, in the order of milliseconds) within which we manage to perceive a sound produced at a certain distance from us, but sound is faster than focusing, so this last one is not exactly a pertinent example.
Sorry Maurizio, but I am only just reading your message; I must have missed it. You have to imagine different sounds starting at the same instant but with different attacks. If, hypothetically, we placed a violin and a drum on the same line at a certain distance from a listener and asked the musicians to play a note perfectly together, the sound of the drum would reach the listener's ear first, and then, after a handful of deciseconds, the sound of the violin. This happens not so much because one of them played late compared to the other, but because the attack times of the instruments are different. A drum, as soon as it is struck, produces its loudest sound almost instantaneously, whereas the friction of the bow on the violin strings takes time to set them in vibration and thus develop the sound. How do I overcome this problem? Simply by moving the drum away from the listening point so that the delay in the violin's attack corresponds to the time it takes for the drum's sound to travel the distance separating it from the violin. In this way, wavefront coherence will be achieved.
Psychoacoustically, this goes unnoticed when everything works well—that is, when the wavefront is coherent, no one notices that everything is okay; conversely, everyone notices when the wavefront is off because it produces on a small scale the same sensation as when playing an organ and the sound reaches you with a delay. The entire listening experience becomes cumbersome and incoherent.
