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Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals
F. Alton Everest
F. Alton Everest's Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals is the standard ear-training course for recording engineers, built to do for the ear what sight-reading does for the eye. Through a graded series of exercises — paired with hours of audio examples on the accompanying disc — it teaches you to name frequencies on hearing them, to catch distortion and reverberation, and to hear the small EQ decisions that separate a clean mix from a muddy one. Everest (1909–2005), also author of the classic Master Handbook of Acoustics, was among the most trusted teachers in professional audio, and the method here is patient and systematic rather than flashy. It's less a book to read than a program to work through, and generations of students have done exactly that.
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The author
F. Alton Everest (1909–2005) was an American acoustician, broadcaster, and educator, best known for the enduringly reprinted Master Handbook of Acoustics. He spent decades teaching auditory perception, and this course distills the training he ran for professional and student engineers into a self-guided form.
The book
Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals is a workbook-and-audio program rather than a monograph. The reissued edition (Cengage/ArtistPro, 2006) pairs the text with a disc carrying nearly five hours of narrated examples, drilling the listener to identify frequency bands, distortion, and processing by ear.
How to read it
Treat it as a gym, not a lecture: the value is in repeating the exercises until recognition becomes reflex. It presumes some familiarity with recording and rewards a working engineer more than a casual reader, but its result — a genuinely trained ear — is hard to get any other way.
For more context
Pairs naturally with Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics and with Bob Katz's Mastering Audio for the technical and aesthetic sides of the craft.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- F. Alton Everest
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Colorado