What the hell is wrong with my mixes

[legionserial]

I have just noticed that every single one of my mixes seems to have an evil amount resonant low frequency drowning everything out when run through my hifi, Its almost as if this is where all the energy in the tune is coming from. yet on my monitors it sounds fine. Now I understand that hifis tend to hype the bass somewhat, but what its doing is highlighting an obvious flaw in my mix, fair enough.

What I don't understand is why monitors are not picking this up at all. I know monitor dont tend to sound quite as bassy, but this is wierd. For 'reference monitors' to not pick up such a blatant flaw in the mix is pretty shitty. I try to compensate on my hifi, it sounds like crap on my monitors.

Worse is I try to tame this low frequency, and it just doesn't work, i seem to have to apply so much cut to actually get it to even go away a bit, yet I don't seem to be able to find a happy medium between horribly bassy and tinny as hell. I have a suspicion that there may not be enough midrange, but don't seem to be able to increase the midrange without it again sounding like shit. I have tried numerous remixes of everything, but to no avail. The ones that sound best to my ears on my monitors are the shitty ones with too much bass on my hifi.

Anyway, I won't embarrass myself by posting a clip. Right now I'm not feeling particularly proud of any of my music lol

I'm hoping my hifi is just a pile of crap lolololol. But I'm pretty sure its telling me something about the lameness of my mixes

Cheers

 

[LemonTree]

Is the room you're mixing in treated acousticaly?

Without propper bass trapping you're never gonna get an acurate mix on any monitors

Your room sounds like it might be overly bright to me so you're compensating by bringing up the bottom end to meet the top end sheen.

Treatment, that's what ya need

 

[LemonTree]

Something else.....

When mixing, don't be afraid to pop in a comercial CD at regular intervals and compare how things are shaping up.

When I built my studio I didn't mix anything in it for a few weeks. I just sat in there listening to all my CDs getting my ears tuned into how the acoustics were working.

 

[pingu]

Something else.....

When mixing, don\'t be afraid to pop in a comercial CD at regular intervals and compare how things are shaping up.

When I built my studio I didn\'t mix anything in it for a few weeks. I just sat in there listening to all my CDs getting my ears tuned into how the acoustics were working.

Thats a good idea.

 

[pingu]

if you can trust your monitoring environment you wont have to worry abour listening to your mixes on various systems.

 

[legionserial]

Thats the thing, commercial CD's sound very nice indeed through my monitors. In fact because my mixing area is where I permanantly am at home, I listen to all my music on my monitors, and very rarely, in fact never, use my hifi. I have become very accustomed to my monitors.

I actually did a test and fiddled around with one of my tunes to get it to sound similar to a commercial CD, and it matches pretty well on my monitors (obviously with that 'amateur' tinge). Ran both the CD and the mix through the hifi, and although there is a little low end resonance on the CD, its not anywhere near as much as my mix. Also the various CD's I have given to friends and workmates have had some good comments. I always ask them if they think theres too much low end resonating or lack of definition on the kick drum/bass, and they are all pretty much like "no it sounds fine, the kick sounds great". Although I'm not sure I always take peoples opinions to the letter, as they may not be looking at it from a technical standpoint.

In any case, I'm not in a position to really treat my mixing area properly as such, I always though it wasn't too bad, but are there any little tweaks I can make to improve things? I am at this point doing lots of searches to find out, as I'm sure that many people have asked this, but while on the subject, just thought I'd ask.

 

[FALKEN]

if you are clipping the final mix or limiting it that might create a "bass resonance" type of sound.

 

[peopleperson]

Don't forget that home hi-fi's will tend to be at least a little hyped on the low end. I wrestled with what you're dealing with for a while. Comparison with other mixes is key. I found that rolling out the extreme lows to an extent was part of the answer. Experimenting with scooping out around 250hz was another solution.

Also, probably before anything else...don't forget that on guitars, vocals and similar instruments, you can pull out the extreme lows pretty much all the time. If you've not done that, you may have some build up down there that's contributing to your problem. If you've got toms on individual tracks, listen closely to those too. The low tom especially can sometimes give off a low ring when it's not being played that will give you issues as well. Gate them or edit out the sections where they're not being played.

 

[legionserial]

Yeah I've noticed that too. Any idea how to remedy this? I know its not part of my problem as I'm not limiting anything in my mix but it would still be interesting to know.

Anyway here's a daig of the room I use. Excuse my crude drawing, I suck at it. And I'm pretty sure its not to scale as I did it at work. I notice the resonance from the hifi speakers most when I'm sitting in the mixing area, obviously this make sense. Anyway is there anything anyone can reccomend that I do. I can move anything I want wherever, but the floor is laminate so I chose to cram everything into the little alcove thing in an attempt to stop reflections from the floor. Also its cosy

 

[Massive Master]

Is the room you're mixing in treated acousticaly?

Without propper bass trapping you're never gonna get an acurate mix on any monitors

Word. You can throw commercial release after commercial release in and listen for months. If the room isn't under control, it may not be physically possible to hear the problem areas in the spectrum.

[EDIT] Oh wow - Just saw the drawing. Yep, I'd expect to have fairly substantial listening problems in that scenario. [/EDIT]

 

[sushi-mon]

You say the bass resonance is a real problem from the hi-fi speakers in the little alcove. Well, yes. You are actually kinda sitting in a bass trap. A lot of bass is getting bounced around in that little cube that is coming from the larger room.

Maybe your set up to listen to translations is just not good. Putting up bass trap panels on all wall and ceiling joints might help tame the problem (in both rooms but especially in your cube).

You could also try finding out which frequencies are causing the most problems. Take a spl meter and run discrete frequency test tones. I would bet that 75 Hz up to 125Hz are causing some serious problems. Move around the entire room and hear where you get phase cancellation and where you get some build up.

Take the spl meter and you will probably find the dBs pick up A LOT in all corners of your little cube. Run these test tones through your monitoring system and through your hi-fi system and compare.

I would agree that you should try rolling off all uneeded low frequencies on tracks. Also, see what a narrow 3-6 db cut at 125 Hz on your bass track does. A lot of 2 and 3rd Harmonics for the low notes are meeting around this point.

 

[chessrock]

[EDIT] Oh wow - Just saw the drawing. Yep, I'd expect to have fairly substantial listening problems in that scenario. [/EDIT]

I was just about to say the same thing.

You probably picked the single worst place to judge bass response in a mix. Smack dab in the corner of the room (more like a room within a room, and a very small, square enclosed one at that), with your speakers right up against the walls, no less.

Your hifi's are probably giving you a more accurate picture of how the bass is sitting in your mixes. Not that those are ideal either, but it's probably much, much more accurate nonetheless. First of all, you've got some space between your hifi speakers and the back wall ... plus you've got more openness / air for the sound to travel since it's in a larger room/area. And you've got the two sofas to help absorb some of the bass.

Can you just do sort of a switch-aroo and mix where your hifi set up is and vice-versa? Seriously, if someone was to give me that drawing of your setup and ask me what would be the absolute worst setup would be for mixing ... I would say, hands-down and without a doubt, right where you're currently set up. And if someone were then to ask me "What would the likely problems be with that setup?" I would promptly say that there is no way one could accurately judge the bass in a mix.
.

 

[mixsit]

... I would say, hands-down and without a doubt, right where you're currently set up. And if someone were then to ask me "What would the likely problems be with that setup?" I would promptly say that there is no way one could accurately judge the bass in a mix.
.

Funny thing is, I'd expect you'd get a ton of low end there and the mix would be thin.
What would be interesting would be to patch your rig into the hifi speakers and pop out into the room to get the general balance.
But that corner is going to mess with you and the monitors.
Wayne

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Funny thing is, I'd expect you'd get a ton of low end there and the mix would be thin.

That depends a bit on the actual dimensions of that space. He could be in certain respects be sitting "inside" one big bass trap (so to speak) in that cove if the dimensions are such where he's getting a lot of LF cancellation.

G.

 

[sushi-mon]

That depends a bit on the actual dimensions of that space. He could be in certain respects be sitting "inside" one big bass trap (so to speak) in that cove if the dimensions are such where he's getting a lot of LF cancellation.

G.

Yes, I think that is it exactly. He is sitting inside the cube which has a bunch of LF bouncing around inside of it from the hi-fi system. which is why he still gets resonacne with commerical CDs, just not as bad. Thus, he can't acurately judge the LF of his mixes inside that cube using the Hi-Fi sys.

Have you ever opened a closet in your mixing room and stuck your head inside of it ? You can hear the low frequency resonance for sure. That is kinda his situation.

However, the guy is most likely getting a lot of LF cancellation in the cube when mixing, thus leading to having too much bass.

 

[legionserial]

Bear in mind that I actually stand in the middle of the room to check on my hifi. I just sit in the alcove to listen to the monitors. And in fact I don't often use it to check my stuff because I don't like standing in the middle of the room, then runing across the room, making tweaks.

I'm not too worried about setting up my room so my hifi sounds good. Its a piece of shit anyway and I never use it. And I know for a fact it massively hypes the bass anyway. Having checked on car stereos and other peoples home stereos my mix comes across pretty well.

I can tell that there is a noticably big differnce from the sound in my alcove and in the rest of the room just from talking. Lots of reverberation in the open space, laminate floors don't help. But none much in alcove. Theres lots of fluffy things like cusions and a sofa in the alcove and a rug on the floor, not that theres much floor space.

Is there anything I can do to my litle box to make it better? I mean the house is mine so I can pretty much divide it off from the rest of the room if needs be. I do have the option of taking one of my empty upstairs rooms and converting it entirely, but concerned about the neighbours above me, and an empty room in my house is always a potential source of revenue

Edit: I do roll off uneccessary low end frequencies on stuff like guitars habitually. I can usually hear pretty clearly what I'm doing when I'm doing it. So I don't know if I'm getting too much lf cancellation. Going to try run a sine wave now.

 

[legionserial]

Well I used a sine wave to do a frequency sweep. Wish I'd done this ages ago. It was a learning experience hearing all those frequencies and seeing what they were. And from this I deduced that there was too much going on in my bass guitars around 125hz by the way i immediately recognised that frequency as being the one that makes me want to curl up and die when played really loud..

Surprisingly I didn't notice a lot of cancellation. And this in fact became more noticeable on my monitors to me once I knew what it was. Still learning so theres a lot of "something just ain't right, but its hard to pin it down" moments. But I made the a little dip in my bass guitars eq and it sounds a bit clearer.

I'm sure this is by no means problem solved, but learning something new is a bonus. Cheers for the helpful responses to my rather noobish question

God I suck

 

[sushi-mon]

We all suck to varying degress

Have you thought about rotating your alcove room 90 degrees to the right, so your monitors are facing out into the room ? This should help cut down on reflections from the wall right behind your mix sofa.

Glad you found the bass cut at 125 useful. I was mixing a bass track the other day (my first by the way), and man the woofers really woofed on certain notes. I starting sweeping around with an eq and the narrow cut at 125 really helped even it all out.

I was seriously concered that it had something to do with my room, but the bass mix translates well to to other systems. I will have to see if it happens on more bass mixes in the future. Theoretically, I believe it has to do with all the low note harmonics meeting around the 125 point for a bass guitar.

 

[legionserial]

I would rotate everything, but to my right is a hatchway to my kitchen (very very useful )

I was thinking of maybe hanging some curtains? Or just pinning one to the wall behind me?

Also found a really useful tool for checking if the bass is too much, incase I can't pick it up. My DAW controller is sitting on a big cardboard box. Obviously it vibrates a bit from the bass as standard, but not much. But when I'm playing stuff thats got those whacked out bass resonances, through my monitors , I can tell just by putting my foot on the box. Lots of vibrations. (thankfully not enough to screw with the faders) Odd but useful. Obviously this is assuming I'm not severly cranking the volume. And I wouldn't rely solely on it (that would just be plain dumb) but at a normal listening volume it works pretty well as a 'bass alert'. If its vibrating, too much bass.

..aahhh...nice cheap makeshift toys..

 

[FALKEN]

that's a really interesting idea.

Anyway, if there are problems with the bass response in your room, you should have peaks AND valleys, not just valleys. some notes will stand out and others will be lost. I'm starting to think eq is overrated.