Assessment of my hearing and mixing

[Vurez]

As I've been getting older, I've noticed my ears aren't as sharp as they once were. Sudden loud noises here and there are adding up, plus a ridiculously loud concert from 7 years ago. I need to assess how much my mixing may have suffered from it.

Here's an arrangement I did last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBfbeJbwdug&t=9s

and here's another track I'm finishing up: http://www.vurez.com/mm/Marble30.mp3

How do they sound? I kinda feel like I might have boosted the mids too much in the Gyro Flight mix. The Marble Madness mix was roughly the same though I made some cuts in the 1 to 2 KHz range and it sounds better to me. I'm curious how the levels sound to others.

 

 

[lazygecko]

I wouldn't really be worrying that much. People have a tendency to overestimate how much your "natural" loss of hearing affects your abilitiy to analyze and pick up fine detail in music. These skills sort of belong in a different sphere where it's more something you psychoacoustically train yourself to become better at.

[APZX]

Eh, personally I'm not a fan of either mix from a "stylistic" approach (all completely personal and subjective things). The first one had a certain level of distance to it and the instruments were very carefully placed within that distance. The second one I think might be a bit on the "bright" side, but even then it isn't like overly so. Though if I'm being honest it is mainly the drums and when coupled with the differences in the placement of instruments it is just a different kind of mix all together. 

Don't worry so much about your hearing in this sense. Lazygecko brings up a great point in that listening when mixing is kind of a fickle thing. Like I'm sure many people I know hear "better" than myself, yet they aren't able to detect even half of what I can when I'm listening analytically. There is more to it than just natural hearing loss. Look at the big time mixing engineers or mastering engineers. Most of those guys aren't youngins and they do some good stuff I think. 

[lazygecko]

Just the physical part of replicating vibrations in your eardrums is merely a part of what constitutes your actual hearing. After that it's all up to the brain to turn this sensory input into something you can understand. And this is the part of you that is very malleable. We are really constantly subjected to a lot more sounds than what we actually percieve, because our brains get wired to filter out a whole bunch of information we don't deem relevant to needing our active attention. Training ourselves to overcome this is what mostly constitutes "good ears", rather than what the range of our frequency spectrum covers.