3 Secrets To Making Your Mix Sound Good Everywhere

Your mix sounds perfect in the studio, but it sounds terrible everywhere else. Try this 3-step process to a mix that translates to other speakers.

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00:00 - Introduction
00:13 - Tip #1
04:43 - Tip #2
07:46 - Tip #3

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[HugoArgentina]

Love your format: no annoying clickbait. no annoying Youtuber cliches, concise, to the point, no snarkiness, no cringe jokes. Fantastic video

[paxenimzi]

tip #3 has definitely helped me the most and has become part of my mixing checklist!
to anyone reading this, i recommend making a playlist of very well mixed music & then listen to that for a while before starting a long mixing session :D

[Dharmajazz]

Good tips. I'd like to add one TOTALLY FREE improvement: speaker and listener positions. For typical rooms - the "home" studio (aka bedroom/office), generally rectangular 10-12 x 13-20 rooms - align the monitors and listening position along the long axis of the room. Then placing the monitors near the wall behind your mix desk, and getting the ears at about that standard 38% distance from the front wall along the length of the long axis, (as a starting point) gives you at least a running start at maximizing your listening accuracy. This is a widely recommended set up for spaces of this general dimension. A little experimentation, moving the monitors and listening position a few inches at a time, will lead to the clearest sound picture with your gear. It's still a long way from "flat", but is a simple, cost-free step in the right direction.

[NKBPICTURES]

Hey brother your vocal texture (vocal module) is so professional.

[constantinranis]

The car is always the final boss . If it sounds good in the car, it is good

[run]

I used to focus on soundproofing, but now I've gotten some decent headphones and run them with Sonarworks. I got better results than with studio monitors.

[alexpathiakis]

Using reference has been my go to method for mixing with the worst equipment and I have to say its been the most helpful one. Every sound is translated exactly how its supposed to without owning the top most quality stuff in the market. What a great video👏

[JayTheYTGuy]

You want extra SOUND advice and I mean this will change your LIFE if you don't already do this.

Set an EQ on the master with hp and lp filters from around 250hz to 4-5k
Put everything in mono

I do this at the final stages of my mixes once I have my overal sound and everything panned correctly.
What this will do is help you focus on the most important area of the mix that will be most prominant on most devices including the car.

I LOVE putting a multiband compressor on the master and only compressing the mids to give it a heavy place in the mix.
I usually do this after a VCA compressor but you can do it before.
Also, I like to have a parallel send from my Sub Mix/Pre Master and use tricks like saturation in the mids or an EQ for the mids and dial it into the mix to give it more energy in the center.

BIGGEST TAKE FROM THIS TIP:
If you mix with a happy face approach (Bass boosted and trebble boosted) I PROMISE you your mixes will feel weak and hollow in a vehicle and you will wonder why it was louder in headphones but weak in the car. You can capture brightness and body with harmonics and other tricks. No need to go crazy boosting bass and boosting highs. Most the pros have bass sounding incredibly low and it's not even registering much below 30 hz. Same with highs, they use harmonics to fill the space. Of course you use EQs for this but think about sidechaining an exciter plugin and boosting it with lets say a vocal before you add 6 db of 9k for that sizzle and brightness. Might only need 2-3db of gain and a little harmonics to do the rest. This will help things sit and sit HEAVY.

Hope this helps.

[alf]

I like a mono plugin on the master out for balancing (when things collapse to mono the true volume is revealed since left and right stack on top of each other).

It’s also pretty useful to have a mid focus EQ on the master out to check the tonal balance of the midrange when equalizing. They say the magic is in the midrange and they’re not wrong.

Having multiple different speakers is key (personally I use AirPods, Genelec 8030s, and sennheiser hd 650 headphones). You can use anything tho you just have to know your speakers really well.

Listening to reference tracks is also really helpful. Look on YouTube for your favorite records and search “drums only”, “bass only”, “guitar only” etc. Compare your instrumentation to theirs and see what you might be missing.

Lastly you shouldn’t blast the volume. I’m not saying listen at a whisper quiet volume level, but just don’t blast the volume like you’re listening recreationally. That’s a great way to lose objectivity fast. Only blast if you’re checking for harsh frequencies that keep you from being able to turn things up loud (like around 4k for guitars) and even then, don’t blast it for long.

[kelvinfunkner]

wow! that last bit on the vowel sounds was absolutely amazing...I've been in the pro audio industry for 30 years and can't believe I've never seen that before! I'm running FOH next weekend for a big music festival and definitely gonna keep this in mind to see if it changes my mixes at all!

[OfficialPinkaMenaX]

One INCREDIBILY important thing you forgot to mention is almost all laptops and computers these days come with built in "audio enhancement" software which is on by default which do things like widen the sound, add a small amount of reverb, and boost bass and highs.

Always check all your audio settings and sound card settings and make sure none of these effects are applied and that any EQs are either turned off or flat. It also wouldn't hurt to Google if your computer has any third-party "audio enhancement" software pre-installed that isn't directly accessed through the audio settings. On gaming laptops in particular, there are often audio settings hidden in the performance apps such as Alienware Command Center.

I only found this out when I noticed a pure sine wave sounded distorted even through it wasn't clipping and found my computer had a built in bass boost, low frequency saturation, boosted high shelf, and stereo widening running by default which were absolutely ruining the sound.

[rome]

I'd rather deal with some of the drawbacks of headphones than spend thousands of dollars on acoustic treatment and STILL not get it right. I use a couple pairs of headphones I know incredibly well. Then at the end, I play the mix on my laptop speakers. I haven't had any translation problems. I have a lot of problems with decision making and getting a good mix to begin with. But it's sounds exactly like what I expected. It sounds equally bad everywhere, lol.

[Marines]

I have a pair of Adam’s and avantones cubes. I hear the mix back through my monitors, but I only mix with my seinheisser 680 open back headphones. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper to get a set of headphones than great studio monitors and acoustic treatment.

[calumrife]

It's so nice to revisit topics I've had problems with for years and then get a concise explanation, complete with demonstrations. Love your channel dude, thank you!

[macronencer]

I'm so glad I subscribed to this channel. I don't work in audio but I do produce my own music and I'm interested in doing the best job I can on a budget. The ear training aspects of this topic have always been something I struggle with, and I was amazed by your simple tip for relating frequencies to vowel sounds. I'm definitely going to start practising that. Thank you!

[DubFreakuencies]

Love this channel.One thing that I see often overlooked is the monitoring level, to take into account the Fletcher Munson curves.If your speakers and room are the flattest possible, but your listening at a level where your ears are not flat then you see where it goes.

Monitoring must be done at specific level to make good decisions.

[DonLuca]

There is one topic which is, for some reason, eluded or never spoken of when talking about mixing or mastering.
Granted that Spotify has taken over and the majority of people listen to either their own phone's speakers or cheap chinese earbuds, you MUST be sure that your mix sounds good on those devices.

I generally start adjusting the mix in very little steps because there's a threshold where the "main mix" (the one made on monitor speakers and which generally sounds good as well on my home hi-fi system) will start to suffer and sound worse and worse, while it will obviously keep improving as you move further and further away on low end devices.

So the 1 billion dollar question is: how far do you go compromising your "main mix" to make it sound "good" on low end devices, since 90% of your listeners will be using those, a 9% with decent headphones and maybe a 1% on actually good audio system?

[MirzaRedzepagic]

One of the best channels. Very concise, concrete and always to the point! Keep on with such a good work, i am a fan! :)

[shorerocks]

I bought toneboosters 'Morphit' years ago to compensate the headphone frequency response. It was about 40 EUR (not sure what it is today) and until today it is one of the most useful tools in music production.

[iamjshep]

From what I’ve been learning, I’ll say, if you guys are mastering on your own, be careful with your mid-frequencies. If you feel the need to make big changes in any frequency range, you prolly need to go back to your mix and see what you can do. Mastering is all about tweaking little things to make everything mesh better together and for it to SOUND better.