The thing that's first is the thing you hear

You know how sometimes you’ll be working on some music, and it can seem like when two things are happening at the same time, it’s weirdly hard to hear one of them?

This happens to me sometimes when a bass note and a kick drum are hitting at the same time, especially on the downbeat of, say, a chorus. For example, sometimes I might want to hear the kick drum more, to help the downbeat hit harder — but the bass note seems to be getting in the way and obscuring the punch I’m hoping to hear. Or vice versa.

There’s an interesting acoustic phenomenon that you can take advantage of that will help with this: our ears think that the thing they hear first is louder.

But I’m not talking about huge increments of time here; I’m talking, like, a millisecond or two.

So what this means is that you can separate out the relevant bit of the waveform on the track you want to hear louder, and scoot it a tiny bit to the left, so that it starts a millisecond or two before the thing that’s masking it — and it will pop right out of the mix!

(Or, conversely, you can move the masking waveform a tiny bit to the right; sometimes one way will work better, sometimes the other.)

In this example, the bass (red waveform) will seem louder than the kick (yellow waveform):

And in this example, the kick will seem louder!

And in both examples, the timing of the bass note and the kick drum will sound unchanged — because human ears can’t process timing differences less than about 3ms, and these are ~1.5ms offsets.

Using our physical limitations to our advantage — jamie