2. Buy an SPL Meter: When you are mixing can be useful to take into account the Fletcher Munson equal loudness contours. The ears’ internal frequency response flattens as the monitored audio reaches 85-90 dB SPL.Do you know what 90 dB SPL sounds like? I thought not. You can buy an SPL meter for around £30-40.00 (US$60.00 / AUD 60) and it will allow you to measure this all important level. You do not need to mix at this volume all the time but it is recommended to check your mix balance and bass content at this volume for at least a portion of the mix down duration.
3. Add a Single Driver Speaker to Your Set-up: A single driver speaker can help you make more effective mid range balance decisions. Often there are a lot of sound sources fighting to be heard in the mid range and a single driver mid range speaker can provide a clear insight into the instrumental balance in this all important region. Main studio monitors are great for checking stereo image and the details of your mix, but sometimes less is more and a single driver clarifies and makes decisions on important aspects like vocals and snare level easier for the ear to discern.
4. Use 12 AWG Gauge Cable to Your Speakers: Have you checked your speaker wire lately? If not I recommend using 12 AWG gauge cable as the minimum thickness cable to driver your speakers with. This will provide a low resistance connection and ensure all the power from your amplifier is delivered to your speakers.
There is no need to purchase extremely expensive hi-fi cable but a good standard oxygen free copper cable is a good way to keep your system sounding tip top. OFC copper strands mean that the ends connected to the amplifier and speakers will not oxidize as rapidly as standard copper and keep a clean connection for longer.
5. Go Passive to Avoid Distortion: Passive volume controllers can in some situations improve the sound quality of your monitoring. You can bypass hi-fi amplifier pre-amps and go “direct” into the power amplifier section (assuming that connection is available on your amp) avoiding the distortion inducing tone and pre-amp controls.
You can also avoid using an active monitor controllers circuits which are often based on cheap low grade materials. You can avoid this ambiguity by using a passive volume controller. A PVC is a simple box with a high quality passive volume control (Variable resistor) in it and often a mute switch. These tend not to colour the sound as they are passive in nature and do not use any electricity. They are simply installed between your DAC (digital to analogue converter) or sound card and amplifier.
6. Use a Headphone Amp: Do you use headphones a lot? If so you could benefit from buying a good quality headphone amplifier. You can find various DAC/headphone amplifiers on our favourite auction website. These DAC/headphone amplifiers often use much higher quality components and power supplies than are found in a typical project studio sound card headphone output (often based on one single and possibly underpowered budget opamp). The differences in headphone monitoring quality can be startling.
Research which headphone amplifiers are popular from lower cost manufacturers and you could easily improve the quality of your headphone listening fidelity. There are headphone enthusiast specific forums online where you can get a lot of information, so check them out and research. This is especially good for those who have to mix on headphones and a good £100.00-£200.00 headphone amplifier can make a big difference to the clarity of what you hear.
7. Use a Headphone Cross Feed Plugin: Search your favourite search engine for “headphone cross feed”. A cross feed is a software plug in or electronic device that your headphones plug into and it can emulate the sound of loudspeakers in a room more accurately. Judging the stereo image is one of the down sides to mixing with headphones and a cross feed introduces some of the signal from the left transducer into the right and vice versa.
This allows for a monitoring experience that is a perceptually a little closer to listening to loudspeakers in a room. When you think about it the sound coming from your left speaker never exclusively goes only into your left ear and vice versa. If you are handy with a soldering iron they are a reasonably easy DIY electronics project if you wish to make the electronic version otherwise a software plug in is the easy solution. Always take care to monitor at no more than moderate volumes with headphones.
8. Buy a Computer Keyboard You Can See in Low Light:
The sun is going down and your studio is dimly lit, time to change that black keyboard! We have all been there, squinting and angling our head to read the keys, keyboards used to be beige allowing you to see the keys much easier, we tend to think of working with music as being strictly auditory but we use the mouse and keyboard a lot. I have lost count of the times I cannot see the keys properly on a black keyboard. It’s a cheap and easy tweak to get a beige or white keyboard back in the studio
How To Improve Mix Translation
One of the goals of mixing is to ensure that the final mix plays as well as possible across a wide number of reproduction systems. Music is listened to on a very wide variety of systems such as MP3 players, laptops, radio transmissions, in store and club PA systems to name a few. As such it is important that the mix you are creating works effectively on any of the types of reproduction system it might encounter.
Monitoring and monitoring environment: The first thing to consider is your monitoring and listening environment. I will assume that you are using a set of near field, 2 way studio monitors with bass reflex ports. (as would be the most common small studio monitor in use today). Ideally your loudspeakers should be 6 feet (2meters) apart from each other and your ears should be aligned at tweeter height. The position of your head relative to the 2 speakers should create an isosceles triangle.
This will ensure you have a good starting point for an accurate stereo image. It is highly preferable that the speakers are placed on purpose built monitor stands with some form of foam isolation between the monitors and their resting plinth. Acoustic treatment is not a particularly interesting audio equipment purchase but the benefits or lack thereof will be audible on every single mix down you make. If a rooms frequency response is skewed by standing waves, reflections and comb filtering correct equalization decisions will be impossible.
There are 3 important places to treat as a minimum to ensure improved mix decisions and therefore better mix translation.
1) Side walls should be treated with fairly large panels of absorptive acoustic foam or RW3 Rockwool slabs. This greatly reduces reflections at the sweet spot causing comb filtering and inaccurate monitoring conditions.
2) The ceiling above and in front of the monitoring position (between yourself and the monitors) should be treated with absorptive acoustic foam or RW3 slabs. This provides a significant benefit to the accuracy and focus of stereo imaging.
3) Room corners should be bass trapped, the only material recommended for bass traps is Rockwool/Rocksilk RW3 or for those in the USA Owens Corning. (fibre glass)
It is beyond the scope of the post to go into the detail of the acoustic treatment above. However once researched and in place you have seriously improved your chances of making a mix that translates well.
Loudspeaker specifics: Try and isolate your loudspeakers from the stands or table on which they rest, this will reduce the chances of the stands or table top resonating in sympathy with the speakers and causing inaccurate reproduction of the music. In addition try and get the speakers out of the corners of the room which will artificially boost the low end response. Bass reflex speakers have a curious design trait in that they have a resonant “hump” around the tuning frequency of the port in the speakers cabinet. As such they give a fuller bass sound but also a more inaccurate low frequency response.
You can experiment by bunging the ports temporarily to get a different take on the low end balance of your mix. By bunging the port with some suitable soft material you have effectively created a sealed box enclosure which now has a more gradual low frequency roll off. This allows potentially more accurate decisions to be made. A side effect of reflex port bunging is that there will be an overall reduced bass output from the speaker. Arguably the lowered bass output is a small loss relative to the enhanced accuracy of bass note balance.
Checking that your mix is mono compatible is also a very important thing to do as you balance the sounds. In weak signal areas an FM radio receiver will sometimes sum stereo broadcast stations into mono. (along with pirate radio stations which are important in the dance music scene and invariably transmit in mono). Not all PA systems will operate in stereo, so ensuring that there are not overly wide stereo elements (that may be close to being out of phase) is important.This protects against sounds dropping significantly in level or in the worst case vanishing altogether when mono summed.
Where possible it is advisable to have a secondary single driver monitor like an Aurotone or Avantone which will allow you to check for all important mid range translation. Such loudspeakers allow up front presentation of the critical mid range band. A single driver means there is no crossover to complicate the reproduction and you can perceive a new perspective on the balance of the mid range of the mix. Finally you can try playing your mix on a number of other typical playback devices and see how your mix sounds to the ear. Try listening on a car radio and also on a laptop or mobile device to see how the music sounds. You may find this enlightening and wish to make minor tweaks to the mix based on what you hear.
Referencing commercially released music. - When mixing I have always found it beneficial to import a well produced track into my mix session for comparison. It is important to reduce the level of the track so it matches the same perceived volume as the mix that you are working on. You can listen and compare critical elements of you mix down with the commercially released track. Listen to vocal levels, bass, mid range and high frequency balances and adjust your mix to sound similar. Your music mix is unique unto itself but this does serve as a useful reference to getting the mix in the right ball park before either self finalizing or professional mastering.
Five Things You Can do to Improve your Mix
1. Make sure your audio tracks: are free from, hiss, hums, crackles, pops or any other unwanted noise. Spend some time taking care of any non-creative editing tasks so that the mixing process is creative and musical. Seperating creative and non-creative tasks helps you stay focused for longer.
2. Monitor quietly: find a reasonable listening level that’s not too loud and stick with it. This way you’ll avoid ear fatigue and will remain objective about your mix for longer. It’s important to take periodic breaks. Have a cup of tea, go for a walk, get some lunch etc. When you get back to your mix you’ll hear things you missed when you were doing that 8 hour stretch.
3. Monitor in mono: from a single source point. It’s much easier to balance instrument and effect levels when they are superimposed on top of each other rather than spread between your speakers. Press the mono switch on your audio interface and turn one of your speakers off. Now balance your levels.
4. Use compression: Compression, when used properly, will put a limit on the maximum output of the audio signal. This can help maintain an even balance throughout an audio track. For example, you may have recorded a particularly dynamic vocalist who jumps from singing quietly on one word to very loud on the next. Compression will reduce the gain of the louder word making it’s volume level the same as the quieter one.
5. Use reference material: Periodically refer to a commercial recording in the same style as the track you’re mixing. If you are mixing an electro pop track for example, switch to a track that’s current and in the same style. Listen carefully to the levels and eq of the various instruments and voices. Listen to how effects such as reverb, delay and modulation are used and generally try to get a feel for how the overall picture was painted.
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