The Reference Track

What is a reference track?
It's your favourite song, a song that you know so well that you can recognise the slightest change in it. It can be a song that you have heard a million times from childhood or a song that you're really into now. There could be several reference tracks that you use for different purposes too and it you don't have to limit it to just one.

What do you do with a reference track?
There are several different ways to use the reference tracks depending on which perspective you're looking at it from, either as an audio engineer or musician.

The reference track from the engineer's perspective
Recording and mixing engineers use reference tracks to achieve a certain tone that is very specific to what the artiste wants or a general direction as to how the album they are working on should sound like. For example, an artiste can say, "I want my guitar tone to sound exactly like John Mayer's Fender Strat" or "I want my album to have an American pop rock kind of sound, similar to the feel of the latest David Cook album".

Live engineers however would use it to tune a PA System. Because they know how the reference track "should" sound like, they can tune the PA till the song sounds the way it ought to sound. Usually, a song that covers the whole frequency spectrum will do the trick. However, if you're tuning a room for a jazz gig, use a jazz song that you know best and likewise for other genres.

The reference track from the musician's perspective
They give you an idea of what you want so you can communicate that to the engineer. Communication is crucial in a recording and mixing process. The better you get your ideas across, the better the results will turn out. This will help you shape your tone too during the writing process and during the demo recording process. Sound is such a dynamic thing that it might sound good to you today when you record the track and when you listen to it tomorrow, it may sound terrible. Why does that happen? Because there isn't a track that the recording was referenced to, during the actual recording process. For example, the guitar tone from the amp sounds nice and warm during recording but when you review it the next day, it sounds too harsh. This happens because you would have spent hours in the studio and your ears would have gotten used to the harshness of the higher frequencies. Your ears are probably fatigued too. So the best way is to have a reference track, that you can directly compare the tone too and ask yourself questions like, "is it too harsh?" or "is it bright enough?"

I will share my current list of reference tracks in the next post perhaps as this is getting a bit too long already. Please share your thoughts. Let's make a forum out of this.