[jur] wrote: ↑Thu Dec 16, 2021 6:18 pm
You don't need to mix for every environnement, but get 1 mix that's a good compromise.
Way cheaper than buying more gear is to... use reference tracks. Find tracks that you think sound good on your studio speakers and in your car, and compare your mix balance to these tracks when mixing.
Learning how your speakers sound in your room is fondamental, without this you can't do much.
Also, mixing is a long learning process. Similarly, perfecting your listening abilities/ears takes time and patience.
This.
There is an art to properly referencing tracks namely making sure most likely mastered reference track is the same loudness as mix otherwise you will be fighting an uphill battle of trying to get your mix as aggressive sounding as reference track which is usually a losing battle, but once track is level matched, the elements, arrangement, and mix decisions will start standing out in mix, and you will more clearly hear the steps you need to take. Main thing is to get the levels, EQ, Individual track compression right, but you will learn alot by properly referencing good tracks like how loud elements should be, Tonal balance, Use of compression, reverb etc. Even in great studios with great montioring and great speakers, most engineers will use some references as in mixing it is very easy to stray out in left field in think something sounds great when it can fall apart on other systems or simply is not up to par with already released music. This is probably even more important than room treatment because most people especially newer people have no idea on how to visualize a mix in their head (which is actually very hard to do even for an advanced professional). Kind of similar to artists usings photos of people to draw off of. It is much harder to draw a photo of someone without a picture of them that only a small amount of people can accurately do (even if you see this face everyday). Mixing is much like this.
That said also there are certain things you can do that are relatively affordable that can give you some better monitoring options.
1. Good decent pair of headphones is way more affordable than a good monitoring/room treatment setup. That said it can be hard learning how to adapt to listening in headphones as they can often make most elements sound clearer/better, but if your room treatment is really bad they can help with bass frequencies your room/monitoring setup can't reproduce and hearing subtleties in mix like reverb qualities, send effects more clearly etc. Kind of like the microscopes of speakers.
2. Very bad pair of speakers. Go all out cheap on this one. A $10 pair of PC speakers from a PC store can often tell you things a great pair of speakers can't. Your bass will be most likely be nonexistent, so you can better hear techniques reference mix uses to get their bass to stand out on weak no bass systems. And sometimes bad speakers can highlight bad frequencies that you might be missing on good pair of monitors. Some bad frequency buildups can be hard to hear on a full range system as your ears will be focused on a wider spectrum and certain frequencies might play back great on decent systems but sound really horrilbe on cheaper systems so this is always a good cheap option. Teddy Riley was quoted in using a cheap pair of Radio Shack speakers as an alternate reference pair. This is also one of the reasons the Yamaha NS-10s where a standard pair of monitors. Not because they sounded great but because they were considered a "typical" home stereo setup and they used them to make adjustments that their music sounded great on these typical setups as most people are using them. Nowadays people are using Smartphones, HDTVs/PC monitors, cheap earphones (often with bad speakers) to listen to music. So the best you can get your stuff to sound on these type of systems the better. I wouldn't make this my main monitoring setup but it is a great option if you want to hear how something sounds on a crappy setup (which many people use to listen to music, and many great engineers know how to make stuff sound great on these, and many amateur mixes fall completely apart on.)
3. DIY/cheap room treatment. Proper speaker placement is always something that can be revisited. It might even help to get a referral from a Sound Treatment company who sometimes do free tips in order to sell you a bass trap/room treatment package. Some will ask for pictures of studio, room measurements etc. A good company will usually tell you if your speaker placement is not ideal which is something you can easily correct without equipment. Ableton Live's CPU use simulator is also a nice tool to let you hear your bass issues. Take the sine wave generator, take it down to 40hz and sweep up to about 300hz. If you hear drops and increases in volume, you are hearing the effects of your room's low end response (listen again on headphones to hear how it sounds with minimal change in volume). Clapping your hands is also a good way to hear your high end flutter echo. If you hear a metallic ring or too much reverb, that is often not good but that is more of an artistic decision on how much you want to control this. It is usually not good to eliminate this completely as it will sound unnatural, but controlling it is the key. But if you are good with your hands, Bass traps, and Sound Absorption panels can be made fairly cheaply and there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube on how to do so. But even if you don't want to go full room treatment, Couches can help absorb bass, thick comforters on walls can help tame reflections etc. It won't be as ideal as full room treatment but should most likely help if you have no treatment at all.
