newbie question about mixing

[picker17]

Well, i might be jumping the gun (since i've only got 10% of my gear) but i have read replies to my posts from several of yall (thank you!!) and several older posts (i didnt know there were so many archives...new to message boards!!) and I have heard two...i guess you could call them descriptions...of how audio should sound in a mix when comparing actual studio monitors and PC speakers. Those descriptions are sounding "good" (i.e. emphasizing bass frequencies, reverb effects, etc.) and sounding "accurate" (I am assuming this means that everything sounds about even...all tracks with the same perceived volume). My question is: if I am mixing with monitors, am I going to want to make the sound come across as "accurate" or "good"? Eventually I would want it to sound "good" but will home stereos, car stereos, and headphones take care of that, or should that be coming out of my monitors?

 

[Track Rat]

When mixing, the goal is to make it sound as good as possible period. The art of mixing is understanding your playback systems short comings and allowing for those. For instance, if your monitors have 6" woofers and you're mixing something like rap (God forbid!) that has TONS of low frequency content. When you "understand" how your monitors typicly resolve that low freqency stuff, it gets easier to get your mixes to sound good on different systems. What is correct is subjective. My advice always to do a lot of critical listening to commercially released music that's in the genre of the music you want to mix ON THE SYSTEM YOU'LL BE MIXING ON. Listen hard to all the different components of the tunes. Where does the bass sit? The kick/snare? The vocals? Listen and learn your system. You can use that as a bench mark when doing your own stuff. Mixing is an art and a skill just like playing an instrument. You don't become a master at it overnight. It takes a long time and lots of practice to get even half assed at it.

 

[legionserial]

You might be getting confused.

Accuracy isn't as far as I know a description of a mix. Accurate is in reference to your actual monitoring environment. If you have accurate sounding monitors, it means that there are no boosts or cuts of any particular frequency in the monitors. Basically meaning that you are hearing coming out of your monitors exactly what is going into them. Some hi fi systems will tend to do stuff like boost the bass etc, and that what you don't want, because its misleading as to what your music actually sound like, and therefore they aren't accurate.

Monitors are made to be more accurate, pc speakers aren't really. So you will hear things more accurately with monitors.

Basically you need ab accurate monitoring environment to make a good mix. If your monitors are accurately telling you whats going on, then you can act on it in order to get a good mix. If they aren't telling you exactly whats going on then its going to be a lot harder.

However, for your monitoring environment to be completely accurate, it isn't just down to good monitors. The room you are in will also affect what you hear, (ie reverberations from walls etc etc) so room treatment is required.