When you become a "pro" can you spot every sound in a song? How often do you recognize how it was produced?

An interesting question to ask would be "What sounds/processes/effects do you often recognize in songs?"

For the top engineers that list could be very long to basically being everything.

Like Serban Ghenea can probably tell how most of a pop song was created without opening the project. Just because he's mixed thousands of pop songs and knows the genre inside out. When he hears a piano track, he likely knows what instrument or sample pack was used to make it because it's the 100th+ time he's heard that piano. (Or if he doesn't know or care about the exact sample pack name, he may just think, "This is that piano sound every other producer has been using the last two years.") Drums, percussion, synths, fx - there's probably not a lot he hasn't heard before many times.

With vocals, if he can't say what exact mic and compressor was used to record a take, he probably can get within the right family. Through repetition and exposure and thousands of hours a year for a couple of decades, one is going to pick those things up.

/r/audioengineering Thread