Interesting thread! Thanks for all the tips provided so far!
In my current mixing philosophy I'm heavily focused on working with sound characteristics and automating these sound characteristics. This includes working not only with wanted sound characteristics but also with unwanted sound characteristics, because those can be removed in conjunction with adding wanted character, for a twice as powerful shifting towards the beautiful sound. This means that effects like the EQ really become tools that bring a desired sound.
Just like mjbphotos pointed out, removing some of the low frequencies can help in making the mix clearer and brighter, in my world however this is done in parallel all the way and balanced to taste using volume faders. This means that when you want the sound characteristics "brightness", you probably want to shift the frequencies higher using the EQ on all instruments separately in parallel, then adjust exactly what kind of brightness you want, by then adjusting the individual wetness of that on each sound source. This you can do in many ways, I like low Q bells in small amounts, but shelving and high pass filters works too. It is also good to pay attention to what kind of frequency impact various non-EQ effects have, since these can give the same impact and also help bringing out other additional characteristics as well, for instance "brighter and more natural", which can help lowering the system resource usage foot print. An example would be the UBK Clariphonic plug-in, which is great!
mjbphotos mentioned several very good points, it's very important in mixing to ensure that low frequency sound sources such as the bass guitar, does not ruin the mid range clearity. That happens when you have too much frequency fighting in that frequency range, which happens easily with the bass guitar because of how prominent you typically want it in order to create depth and size. These days, I actually mix the bass guitar rather late, because by establishing a really awesome mid range clearity first, once you add the bass guitar you are immediately going to notice when it eats up the mid range clearity you have created, hence you can avoid potential mud you otherwise would never notice.
I also think that the low mids and lows, do not necessarily need to be statically removed. By making it dynamically removed you can kind of preserve overall mix characteristics you get from a lot of frequencies in that frequency range, yet remove the overall mud it brings. This is done using frequency band side chaining and using the release time to adjust the amount of mud you want removed.
In my mixing philosophy, the sooner in the process that you root the desired sound characteristics, the better. In my case it is simple to understand why: A certain % comes out to the listener's ears precisely as was recorded (minus some noise/bleed editing and similar), because in parallel I route these frequencies untouched. This also means that in the end, the less wetness I need to dial in, typically the better because I can preserve more resonance and a more natural vibe, which is desired for a more natural/non-artificial sound.
An EQ trick I often use is high q peaks at desired frequencies on each sound source quite aggressively. Imagine what that does to the use of the mix signal. By making those nice frequencies much more audible, you can lower the volume on that sound source without losing the perception of the nice portions of it, meaning the volume of the less important frequencies become lower, this in turn helps bringing out "air" to other sound sources in the mix, simply by having much more mix signal available. This can be surprisingly useful. For instance when you do it in the sub range, like between 50 to 90Hz, you have heart punch left although you might also have shelved it. So it's quite useful. Likewise, when you do not manage the loudest transients of the loudest sound sources in the mix, like kick, snare, vocals, bass, the whole mix will suffer, because you'll have to drop the resolution of each instrument in the mix. Why is this so damaging? Remember that the Voltage RMS is cumulative, most of the resolution is found at the end of the volume register. This is also why it is so important to use high Voltage RMS input and output stages, simply because it's at the end of the volume register where everything happens. If you do not have access to it, you can't dial in the kind of character you hear on hit mixes. You'll lose character relatively speaking, your mixes will sound muddy, harsh and weak in comparison.
To then anchor this stuff to your questions:
Hey folks!
Till some time ago I was totally convinced to forget about mix my own tunes and give it to someone that really knows what is doing. However I was catch again by this idea on try to do it myself. I have those questions though.
1) Beside the obvious objective of balance the tracks levels, how critical is the frequency equalization of each instruments? It seems to be the hardest part of the mixing task to me.
2) Being a self home recorder I don't have a proper enviroment (acoustic treatment) and also I can't afford ALL the pro aparatus (I have at the time a pair of small Edifier monitors RCT1000). Would it be possible to make a minimally decent mixing by using only headphones?
3) IF the answer for the prior question is 'yes' what quality headphone I should buy without to break the bank of the poor man here? Would be the ATH-M30 an option to consider?
Thanks!
1) It is very critical, because it is your tool for determining what frequencies you keep, what frequencies you do not keep, what characters you keep, what characters you don't keep. What characters you create because they were not created in the recording, what characters you remove from the recording and so on. The EQ effect is probably my most important tool, without that I would be extremely limited in creating the kind of sound I want.
2) Using headphones requires a lot of experience both in terms of what headphones to use and how to use them. But that's also the case about speakers. The speakers have the advantage of being able to monitor against multiple sets at the same time, hence you can tailor your mix sound towards the average frequencies all at the same time, which is very efficient. Generally speaking, headphones and monitors are two separate dimensions, if you remove either one, the result will suffer. Just like mjbphotos pointed out, key is to learn what kind of sound characteristics your particular headphones have, so that you can count for certain characteristics. In my experience, speakers tend to amplify everything compared to headphones. For instance a muddy low end mixed on headphones can become extremely muddy on speakers. Loud high frequencies mixed on headphones might turn very loud on speakers. You do get the best result by using several very expensive speaker sets in a very expensive room, but again that is both expensive and practically challenging/demanding too. So sometimes engineers need to build their sound quality using their experience and skills with less efficient gear.
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3) The Sennheiser HD-650 are kind of good for their price. Unlike many cans they are quite comfortable and they provide you a rather big picture of your sound when considering multiple balancing dimensions such as frequency balance and stereo balance. They are of course far off compared to speakers but by becoming an expert on how they impact the sound, you can do certain compensations and land at a pretty good result. At first I found it difficult to use them, but over time I have learned their sound and then know what to be careful with - not to add too much low or high end, stay gentle. You can go very cheap with both speakers and headphones, the art is to find some speakers/cans that have their cutoff points exactly where most speakers/cans have their cutoff points. A friend of mine came out first on a pop hit mix mixing competition with more than 400 engineers involved including ones with 10 000 USD+ monitoring solutions, only by using his Apple Macbook Pro speakers. I listened to his mix, it was great. This is because those speakers probably cutoff exactly where they need to. When that's the case you get a pretty good average frequency window, hence it kind of never gets in the way. The worst you can have is speakers/headphones with a huge unbalanced frequency window. With such headphones/speakers, everything you do becomes never right in any other speakers but the ones you mixed on.
