The second exercise that I'd like to give you is called the mixer. Now, I've spent a lot of time in recording studios over the years and indeed, I've sat behind one of these desks many times. And it's always fun to feel that you're in control of the way that a mix sounds. The way it works on these mixing desks is every channel is the same and each channel has a different instrument bass drum, snare drum, bass, guitar, keyboards, vocals, and so forth. They're all individually separated on a channel of their own. As you bring the faders up, you hear them all together and the full band effect is there.

Now what I want you to look at doing is reversing that process and taking what sounds like a mush, a whole bunch of individual sounds and separating them down thinking about it as if you were an engineer behind mixing desk with all of the faders pushed up and then doing what you can do with faders. On the mixing desk, you see those buttons that say solo there, that means you listen to just that channel. And you can do that with your attention. You don't have to wipe everything else out what you can do is pay attention to one thing at a time. This is a tremendous exercise for improving the the acuity, the the the quality of your listening, and also for starting to understand the sound around you and how it's affecting you. You can do it if you're in a noisy place like this.

We probably spent a fair bit of time in places like this. And you can be asking how many individual customers can I hear how many bangs my head wearing? Where are they coming from? Where's that furniture moving coming from? Where's the background? Music usually pretty awful.

Through low quality system coming from and so forth, disentangling the sounds around you. And you can do it in a beautiful place. If you happen to be sitting by a lake like this, where are those birds? Where are they? Which trees are they in? Where all these ripples coming from exactly what's making those and really trying to isolate every channel on the mixing desk, and listen to each sound in turn.

So that's the exercise, the mixer, it helps I find to visualize a mixing desk. It's just imagine it and imagine you're sitting behind it. And you're pushing faders up and down, and asking yourself how many sounds when listening to what are the individual components of this soundscape? It's a powerful exercise. I hope you enjoy it. You can play it absolutely anywhere.