One of the fundamental truths of audio mixing is that human tonal perception is adaptive – in other words, we tend to adjust our perception of any mix tonality we’re hearing to match our preconceptions of how it should sound. This is why referencing is such an important part of the mixing process, because doing A/B comparisons between commercial releases and our own mix work goes a long way to defeating this natural perceptual adaptation, thereby revealing the disappointing truth that our my mix has, for example, waaay too much 4kHz, but that I’ve just not noticed because my ears have adapted to that!

And this aspect of the human listening experience presents mainstream mix engineers with a quandary. What if the track before mine in a playlist is, for example, unusually bright and subby, and therefore makes my mix sound boxy by comparison, simply because listeners to the previous track have gotten used to its skewed frequency profile? After all, I wouldn’t want to make my mix any brighter and subbier than it is, in case it follows a more normal-sounding mix in another playlist, which would then make it sound hollow, woofy and tizzy.

Well, one solution to the problem can be heard in this Lady Gaga song, which starts with the main hook-section texture (always a smart commercial move in itself), but with some kind of band-pass filter over the whole mix, removing effectively all the frequency energy below 200Hz and above 4kHz. Pretty much no matter what precedes this song in a playlist, this song’s intro will always sound boxy (but clearly on purpose), and the seven seconds that the mix tonality stays like this provides ample time for the listeners to forget the tonal profile of the preceding song, but not enough time for their auditory system to make such a middly new tonality into the new normal. So when the band-pass filtering is suddenly removed at 0:08, the unfiltered texture now sounds like it has plenty of exciting-sounding low-end and high-end energy by contrast with the intro section, even if the previous song’s spectrum was actually smilier. Think of it as a kind of audio palate cleanser!

Another nice little production technique is well exemplified here: abruptly muting all the background parts to make some foreground feature suddenly pop out at the listener. The specific moment to listen for is the fill at 0:14, where pretty much the whole texture is muted for the tom fill, and that fill is then itself muted to highlight the following beat’s vocal/synth stab. And the reason why this is such a cool example is that at 0:22 you get to hear exactly the same fill+stab combo, but without the backing mutes, and comparing those two moments really highlights how much more attention-grabbing those musical features become when they’re not having to compete with other backing parts.