REFERENCE LISTENING
Pick a direction. Keep your identity.
A reference is a way to communicate what you like: the vocal position, the weight of the bass, or how open the chorus feels. It is most useful when you turn that impression into a specific listening goal.
Choose a comparable moment
Compare passages with a similar musical role. A quiet verse and a dense final chorus may have very different tone and energy for good reasons. In the prototype, select the reference passage you want to analyze instead of assuming the whole song is one target.
Name one thing you hear
Try a concrete goal such as ‘I want more space around the lead vocal.’ That gives you something to evaluate after a change. A frequency curve on its own cannot tell you whether a performance feels right.
Compare at a similar listening level
A level difference can distract from the change you are trying to hear. Use the prototype’s level comparison where suitable, then alternate between the original and processed version at a comfortable volume.
Keep the song’s own character
A different arrangement does not need an identical spectrum. Listen for whether the change serves your song, and use Undo when it does not. The current reference analysis proposes limited tone adjustments; it does not recreate the original engineer’s settings.
Explore how these ideas are shaping Jam Maven.
Meet the prototype