Knowing Your Limitations

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DeadlySurfer

New member
Hey all,

So I'm in a bit of a rut. It's the old monitor vs headphone debate again, and of course no matter what I read it comes out as monitors on top, as it should. But the problem is when I read this, they never seem to take into consideration people's situation.

My bedroom is my "studio". Now it's not a big room at all, if I soundproofed it I'd be trapped in a cube of foam (Although, that does sound quite fun...). So really, if I stuck monitors on my desk, it wouldn't sound too great. Also, the only place my desk can fit is right in a corner. Bass boost all day. So as you can tell I'm not 100% serious, because I can't really be. Unless I move somewhere and set up a bigger room, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.


So, how many others out there kind of accept that they're not going get good mixes? I feel like I'm the only one having to take a hit, it'd be good to know that I'm not the only one :(
 
In the documentary "It Might Get Loud" Jack White explains how his bedroom was two small for music gear so he moved the bed out, ha ha!

Not that it solves much for you. I have a couple other thoughts though.

Why is it that because your desk must be in a corner, your monitors must be? Get a shelf up on the wall in the appropriate places.

Next sit in the presumed sweet spot and have a friend hold a mirror along the walls at ear level and wherever you see a speaker put foam there instead of the whole room.

Bass traps on the ceilings really shouldn't cramp you.

Turn the volume down. Small rooms naturally reinforce volume more than large ones.

Most studio control rooms aren't all that big. Of course, they get rid of the bed ha ha. Sleep on the couch in the living room.
 
I know where you're coming from and am with you--until your last paragraph.

Having good monitors and good acoustic treatment makes mixing much, much easier--but it's not impossible to get a good mix even in bad conditions.

Even with the best monitors and room, you still need to take some time learning what a good mix sounds like on that combination of gear and room. It'll probably take longer to "learn" a bad room and headphones...but it CAN be done. Spend time listening to commercial mixes you like in your mixing environment. Spend time doing trial mixes then listening to them on lots of different system, in your car, on you iPod etc. to see what you don't like about them outside your studio. Eventually, you'll get there.

Don't just know your limitations. Meet them head on and defeat them!

Okay that sounds like a half time speech by a rather corny football coach. However, even though the advice here on HR is right when it says you must have great monitors, great acoustics etc. etc. sometimes it's a bit strong. Work towards having the gear and studio you want--but, in the meantime, keep mixing. You may be surprised how well you can do in less than ideal conditions.
 
DeadlySurfer said:
I feel like I'm the only one having to take a hit, it'd be good to know that I'm not the only one
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You are not alone. Some people seem to have an innate ability to mix well, others do it well after a heck of alot of hard graft and practice and others still just never seem to get good ones no matter how hard they try.
I start from a hopeful place, that a fair mix is possible and that unless the listener is one of those people that demands perfection, really, how you enjoy a song is subjective.
DeadlySurfer said:
But the problem is when I read this, they never seem to take into consideration people's situation.
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There's alot of truth in that, I've noticed it too. However, that needs to be balanced with the fact that sometimes, when posters lay out their situations, there can be an element of making excuses. You know, "I want this",
"Well you need to try that",
"Oh well, I can't do that because.....".
There is almost always a way if you really want a solution.

DeadlySurfer said:
My bedroom is my "studio". Now it's not a big room at all, if I soundproofed it I'd be trapped in a cube of foam
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Being surrounded by foam would neither soundproof your room, nor do much good to your overall sound.

DeadlySurfer said:
If I stuck monitors on my desk, it wouldn't sound too great. Also, the only place my desk can fit is right in a corner. Bass boost all day.
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This is where I think that a person's degree of making things work starts to shine through or not. It is probably a major pain in the patootie to have to keep on moving your set up each time you want to mix. But if you want to get things done, sometimes you have to take what looks like a fixed situation and move it about a little.
In my house there are two places that I mix from, mine and my wife's room or my kids' room. I use nearfield monitors and I've had to train myself to hear a mix at low levels because there's no room to put bass traps and clouds. It's hard. But do~able. If I mix in my room, I'll be on the bed. I make sure the curtains are drawn, my DAW is right in front of me, the monitors are well away from the walls and I'm as central to an equilateral triangle as I can be.
If I'm in the kids' room, I use my little foldaway table as a mixing surface with my monitors in a similar position to the main bedroom and nowhere close to walls. In both situations, I supplement all I'm doing with headphones but the decisions aren't made with them. Setting up and taking down only takes a few minutes each time.

DeadlySurfer said:
So as you can tell I'm not 100% serious, because I can't really be.
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That's the one sentence that I dispute. Why can't you be 100% serious ?

DeadlySurfer said:
So, how many others out there kind of accept that they're not going get good mixes?
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In a way, to accept that you're not going to get good mixes defeats the object of trying in the first place. Good mixes have come from not ideal situations. Heatmiser and Kcearl don't have treated spaces, yet their mixes are generally good. Stick them on the stereo and I don't hear lack. Similarly, some not very good mixes can come from great spaces.
It is rare that there is absolutely no way at all when it comes to mixing.
 
I agree with a lot of the above sentiments- The mix room' isn't all that. The work and challenge is 80-90% everything else. :p
Does a room's sound destroy the chance of hearing music played in it? Play CDs for reference.
The bigger challenge with room effects would be on the tracking -acoustic inst and voice.
The same bumps, rings' and chatter gets imprinted on them. But even little bit of soft stuff around helps- at least from low mid up.
One thing on the bass/upper bass end, if you have a source, a bass D/I or a song for example that you suspect has fairly even energy in the notes, it can help to listen (and learn) moving around in your room. That plus listening in other places, can help you to know to not chase your worst room effects with eq.
 
DeadlySurfer said:
if I soundproofed it I'd be trapped in a cube of foam
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Just to re-iterate what Grimtraveller already pointed out, you can neither sound-proof nor sound-treat (2 completely different things) your room with any amount of foam.

Proper room treatment has nothing to do with foam and has less to do with making a room ridiculously small. Other than taking away the corners, 90% of proper room treatment happens on the walls and ceiling.
 
DeadlySurfer said:
So, how many others out there kind of accept that they're not going get good mixes? I feel like I'm the only one having to take a hit, it'd be good to know that I'm not the only one :(
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I get a good mix (for what it's worth) by hand picking old and affordable audio solutions for monitoring. The room of course will make a difference but too much bass and sloppy bass are two different things. I use a vintage NAD amplifier which was designed for small living rooms back in the 70s, with a pair of passive speakers which mate well with it's age and capabilities. These old things are quite tight and give out what I'd call a fairly neutral response. They have a well defined mid-range and the bass is tight, rather than big - which I believe is what really counts in my mixes. The older things were designed to extract the best out of vinyl - which most modern systems no longer have to deal with. I do not believe audio monitoring carries the same criteria as an entertainment system. I think ideally, you want transparency and clarity in the mid range - something a lot of modern sound systems lack, until you start spending serious money. I've never thought it was a good idea to use active monitors unless you can afford to spend a lot, because at the end of the day, what you gain on features in the lower price bracket, you tend to lose in sound quality.

Having not two happenies to rub together, I've learned to use my instincts. Generally, I'll know I've got a decent mix when the bass is quite light though detailed and punchy. I then test it out on other systems around my home, which I know will give a more cloudy response due to their frequency range limitations, such as the i-pod dock, computer desktop speakers, etc. Then I try the mix on my prized living room system, which consists of my more modern NAD unit with Gale speakers and finally give it to a few friends to try out on their home systems and car stereos.

Usually it's what a listener doesn't say that tells you the most. Basically, if there's anything truly nasty in there, they'll notice it and tell you straight away. If their comments centre more about the content, then there's every chance the mix was fairly unobtrusive and transparent. Of course you can always mix better in better listening conditions, but you don't have that, so you do your best with what you have.

So my motto is to always march at the pace of your slowest man. That is to say, design for the crappiest system and use a more transparent system to diagnose and correct the obvious faults in your mix.

Finally, yes - it's good to be aware of your limitations but on the other hand, don't stress it. As long as you're still having fun while you're dealing with the imperfections, then you're not doing anything wrong, as long as you're learning something new with each project. I believe you're only doing wrong if you don't learn from it.
 
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Your only limitation is yourself. You can make great mixes in a concrete bathroom with laptop speakers if you learn how those mixes translate onto legit systems. It takes trial and error and lots of time. But it can be done.
 
You can get a great mix with your situation but it will take you longer. It will take trial and error on your part. You will need to get to know your headphones very well so you can know what you are and aren't able to hear. This way, you can compensate for the low end or whatever your headphones aren't giving you.

Once you make a mix in headphones, you will want to try and listen to it in your car, stereo, a mono speaker, etc. and make adjustments as you hear what you are missing or need to change.

Again, I don't think it's impossible to get a good mix by using headphones as your main listening system. Of course, you won't be able to make a mix as fast as you would if you had a good monitoring setup, but it is doable and may be frustrating at times.
 
While I agree with the people here saying that it's possible to do in a horrible environment it's very difficult, it's like learning to play guitar on a cheap guitar, it's just so hard to stick with it since it doesn't sound right, so be prepared for a bunch of work.
 
Pahtcub said:
it's very difficult, it's like learning to play guitar on a cheap guitar, it's just so hard to stick with it since it doesn't sound right, so be prepared for a bunch of work.
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Virtually every major and minor guitarist of the popular genres {rock, pop, blues, soul, jazz, folk, reggae etc} of the 20th century learned on a cheap guitar.
The bottom of the food chain isn't always as perilous as it seems.
 
grimtraveller said:
Virtually every major and minor guitarist of the popular genres {rock, pop, blues, soul, jazz, folk, reggae etc} of the 20th century learned on a cheap guitar.
The bottom of the food chain isn't always as perilous as it seems.
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And their tenacity shows, my point was that it will be harder so be ready for more work to get the same results. I learned on a cheap guitar and my experience is that a lot of frustration would've been saved if I had a decent guitar to start rather than learning bad habbits from shoddy equipment.
 
Pahtcub said:
And their tenacity shows, my point was that it will be harder so be ready for more work to get the same results. I learned on a cheap guitar and my experience is that a lot of frustration would've been saved if I had a decent guitar to start rather than learning bad habbits from shoddy equipment.
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Yeah, point taken.
But in reality, you didn't have a decent guitar and that's probably why you are the guitarist you are. Also, having a cheap guitar enabled you to know when it was time to move up to a better guitar.
I'm not arguing though. I just believe so wholeheartedly in progressing from nothing !
 
Actually my first guitar was from toys r us and completely unplayable when I was about 6, I tried a few times but never picked it up until I turned 12 and got a somewhat decent "jam pack" from the music store. I'm not saying that you need the best of the best but I believe there are musical products of all kinds that are actually so poorly designed and constructed that they're actually a hinderance to progress.
 
DeadlySurfer said:
...they never seem to take into consideration people's situation.
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Rules of audio, acoustics, the laws of physics...etc....never take into account people's situations. :)

As others have said, there are ways to "bend" those rules...but it's always a trade-off or an uphill battle.
That said, there aren't that many *perfect* studios. It takes a LOT of money to build them. Also, some of the greatest music was recorded in less than stellar environments...and even in non-studio environments.

So...there's always possibilities, but the more you improve your studio environment, the easier it is.
For small rooms I think it's best to go for dead, with lots of absorption...and then just learn to work with what you have.
 
Now, I know what you're thinking. 'Is the standing wave at 100Hz or only 50?' To tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a Lab Gruppen, the most powerful amplifier in the world, and too much bass would blow your head clean off, you have to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky?...Well? Do ya, punk?
 
You should be mixing at about 70-80dB SPL, which is pretty much the sound of a passenger car driving by from about 10 meters. Any louder than that for long periods of time can result in permanent hearing damage. EPA recommends 70dB SPL max before using hearing protection.

You shouldn't need soundproofing for proper mixing listening levels. Treatment, yes, but that is to tame room modes and not meant to be used for isolation.
 
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