Problems in mix

[Pughbert]

I been working on this mix for far to long! - its a basic mix of acoustic and electric guitar, vox, piano and drum click (midi) with a few guitar overdubs just adding colour here and there.

The problem ive been having is the mix sounding good on my monitiors and headphones (good not great!) but really muddy and muffled, (the vocal especially) on bog standard hi-fi systems. Ive played with tweaking the eq to get a compromise but with no success, its just ends up sounding very artificial.

any advice anyone can offer?

[Blue Bear Sound]

Mixing 101

[dgatwood]

My first thought is to pay attention to what part of the mix sounds muffled. Different instruments come forward as the most important thing in the mix, depending on the chracteristics of a particular sound system. Psychologically, whatever instrument you focus on is going to color your perception of the entire mix. Thus, what sounds good on one system can sound completely awful on another if different tracks achieve greater or lesser prominence on that system.

What I've found works well when this happens is to go back and audition each track individually on the problematic sound system. If one or more tracks sound unnatural (muffled, hollow, strident, whatever), the mix may sound bad on that system. Tweak the EQ on any tracks that sound bad until each track sounds good on that second system.

Now, audition each track in the original environment and make sure that what made the track sound natural in one environment doesn't make it sound awful in another. In the rare cases where it does, try to find a happy medium where it at least sounds reasonable in both.

Finally, go back and listen to the entire mix on both systems. It will sound different on both systems, but if all goes well, it should still sound good on the first system, and should sound fantastic on the second.

Of course, if each track sounds good individually on the second system, more drastic measures may be needed.

[Blue Bear Sound]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

What I've found works well when this happens is to go back and audition each track individually on the problematic sound system. If one or more tracks sound unnatural (muffled, hollow, strident, whatever), the mix may sound bad on that system. Tweak the EQ on any tracks that sound bad until each track sounds good on that second system.

That, friend, is a recipe for disaster.... it's also a very common (and very mistaken) approach that novices tend to make... you NEVER adjust a track based on how it sounds solo'd, whether on one system or another. The tracks have to sit in their own space - in the context of all the other tracks -- so getting them to sound good on their own is almost certainly not going to be the way you want the track to sit in a mix (unless it's an extremely sparse arrangement to begin with). Often - when a track sits properly in a mix, it sounds quite bad when solo'd....

[Rickson Gracie]

sounds to me that you need to fix your monitoring situation. and as ive learned from this forum, never "mix" with the headphones.

[ecktronic]

Headphones are what i use sometimes. I use headphones for mastering as its all i have except for bad pc speakers that have no bottom end on them. The nasty speakers can be good in one way though, cause if i manage to get my songs sounding good through shity small pc speakers then the mix or master usually sounds good on all other systems.