cyberdaniel82
New member
Hi guys! My mixing environment seems to be ruining my mixes, and it’s driving me crazy.
I spend hours mixing a track through my Yamaha HS8s (with accompanying sub) in a very quiet, reasonably-shaped room with some treatment. It’s not a professional-grade set-up, but it’s probably more conducive to accurate monitoring than your average home studio. (Or at least it should be in theory).
I tinker with a mix until it sounds great in my studio. I burn a copy to test out in other listening environments, such as my car. In those other environments, though, my carefully-crafted mix sounds absolutely terrible – nothing like it does through my monitors. It’s a disheartening feeling.
And this is what’s confusing: commercial mixes sound similarly good through my studio monitors – more clear than they do anywhere else. But… they also sound excellent in my car. And excellent on my office computer. And excellent through a stereo system. The mixes I make ONLY sound great in one place: my studio. Elsewhere, they’re muddy and lifeless.
Clearly I’m missing something very fundamental. I find myself using my car as the ultimate reference point for making EQ adjustments, wishing that I could mix through my lousy car speakers instead of in my dedicated monitoring space. And no one should ever feel that way. I know I’m never going to produce good-sounding tracks until I can cultivate a listening/mixing experience that translates similarly across a variety of listening environments.
I’ve been tempted to put a temporary EQ on my master bus that is configured to simulate how lifeless my mixes sound elsewhere. (The idea being that the EQ will trick me into making a mix that sounds sonically pleasing elsewhere.) That’s how desperate I am.
I’ve never used a spectrum analyzer, and I wonder if it might be insightful to compare the frequency ranges of my mixes with commercial tracks that sound good across all platforms.
Do you guys have any tips for calibrating my mixing space so that my mixes will translate nicely everywhere? And might you have a theory as to what’s going wrong for me currently? Another data point: I can hear reverb nuances much better through my headphones than through my monitors, which may or may not be typical. Anyway, thanks a lot for the help!
- Daniel
I spend hours mixing a track through my Yamaha HS8s (with accompanying sub) in a very quiet, reasonably-shaped room with some treatment. It’s not a professional-grade set-up, but it’s probably more conducive to accurate monitoring than your average home studio. (Or at least it should be in theory).
I tinker with a mix until it sounds great in my studio. I burn a copy to test out in other listening environments, such as my car. In those other environments, though, my carefully-crafted mix sounds absolutely terrible – nothing like it does through my monitors. It’s a disheartening feeling.
And this is what’s confusing: commercial mixes sound similarly good through my studio monitors – more clear than they do anywhere else. But… they also sound excellent in my car. And excellent on my office computer. And excellent through a stereo system. The mixes I make ONLY sound great in one place: my studio. Elsewhere, they’re muddy and lifeless.
Clearly I’m missing something very fundamental. I find myself using my car as the ultimate reference point for making EQ adjustments, wishing that I could mix through my lousy car speakers instead of in my dedicated monitoring space. And no one should ever feel that way. I know I’m never going to produce good-sounding tracks until I can cultivate a listening/mixing experience that translates similarly across a variety of listening environments.
I’ve been tempted to put a temporary EQ on my master bus that is configured to simulate how lifeless my mixes sound elsewhere. (The idea being that the EQ will trick me into making a mix that sounds sonically pleasing elsewhere.) That’s how desperate I am.
I’ve never used a spectrum analyzer, and I wonder if it might be insightful to compare the frequency ranges of my mixes with commercial tracks that sound good across all platforms.
Do you guys have any tips for calibrating my mixing space so that my mixes will translate nicely everywhere? And might you have a theory as to what’s going wrong for me currently? Another data point: I can hear reverb nuances much better through my headphones than through my monitors, which may or may not be typical. Anyway, thanks a lot for the help!
- Daniel