When producing a record one of the main tenets I follow relates to how I get others to use their ears, brains, and – most importantly – their emotions when they listen back to takes.
Something I noticed early on – that became even worse once the computer took over from analog tape – was after an artist or a band would do several takes of a song and then come into the control room to listen and assess what they had done, they tended to spend all of their energy looking only for faults and mistakes. Like the way a copy editor looks for misspellings or poor punctuation. They would only describe to me their favorite takes in terms of what was "wrong" with one versus another. They tended to choose the "best" take using a "lesser of two evils" approach. It used to drive me crazy
So, I adopted a simple set of instructions that I would try and get people to adhere to when they returned to the control room to listen back: