Hacker News Reader

Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

> This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

It's not just that. It's anything creative, really. It can be a tech startup, it can be a book... you name it. The thing is that creators become blinded by their own perception as they lose the ability to see flaws.

The longer they work on a thing, the less they are able to understand that other people might not understand a lot of things. I experienced it myself few times with my coding projects. It's actually quite bad as you just cannot fix a problem as you do not see it. Even if someone points it out to you, it takes quite some time to admit it is a problem.

This is why having teams of people is useful. Single startup founders, game designers, writers... have inherent blind spots in their entire work.

View on HN

One trick when doing music mixing is to play the mix from some really low-end speakers. In one studio they had a small radio someone could have in their kitchen. There are a lot of reasons to do this but you also get some perspective this way since you become deaf to your own work indeed very quickly.

As a teenager I did odd jobs at a small company that produced studio equipment (rack mounted reverbs and that kind of stuff) and was told this was one of the main features of mastering a CD - ensuring it sounded good on shitty kitchen radios and large stadium sound-systems.

I was told, somewhere, some guy was blasting himself with a giant speaker array tweaking the levels on Hit Me Baby One More Time, before it could be printed to masters. A mental scene that has lived rent free in my mind for decades.

It still blows my mind that consumer grade CDs and LPs were the source for radio broadcasts and such.

Years ago a thing people would do is make an initial mix, dump it to ordinary cassette tape and then just drive around with the cassette playing on an ordinary car stereo, similar thinking.

Not quite a cassette anymore, but in 2013 I was in the studio with some friends and we'd do initial downmixes to MP3 and bring them to the car. World of difference, just getting the less-ideal and more realistic listening experience.

One suprising thing that seems to work with video/footage (a shot) once you've watched it a few hundred times and can't really 'see' it naturally any more, is to 'flip' it (horizontal mirror (or negation)) the result is usually surprising at least and can reveal things you couldn't see before! Or, if flipping has run out of juice too, even flopping (vertical mirror or negation, yes the shot is upside-down now, so not as helpful as flipping) but either/or and their combinations can definitely provide some extremely useful new perspective on the visual content one is trying to produce (VFX day job as Pipeline TD now, FX artist previously and this idea helped me numerous times!)

We did this when I was in a band 25+ years ago. Record the song, quickly burn it to a CD, then drive back to campus in our shitty Honda Civic or band pickup truck and listen to it. It was 90% just to listen to what we made, but hearing it outside of the studio was good as well.

At this same time, this feels like No Speaker Left Behind. Now that I am middle aged and have a nice sound system at home and in my car, I sort of want a mix optimized for THAT! Like, don't hold me back just because we're still mixing for AM radio in a 1983 Pontiac Firebird!

I saw this at Interplay in the early 90s. Our audio director had a range of set ups, from high-end monitors to cheap Radio Shack speakers, and could switch between them with one knob.

(The artists, on the other hand, always worked in dark rooms and with their monitor contrast cranked up. We'd constantly complain about the dark, hard to see graphics.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com