The Best Mixing Advice I Can Give

The video discusses how room acoustics affect mixing quality and how to improve your mixing environment using room calibration software without expensive acoustic treatment.

• Many people waste money on acoustic foam and panels that don't address the real problem • Mixing tips and tricks don't work properly if you can't hear your music accurately • Mixes that sound good in your room often don't translate well to other listening environments

Use calibration software to create a flat frequency response in your room so you can hear what your speakers actually output without room coloration.

The software discussed is Sonarworks, which uses a calibrated microphone and software to measure and correct your studio monitors' response in your specific listening spot.

Professional studios invest millions in design, layout, and acoustic treatment, resulting in balanced sound where every frequency is heard equally and mixing tips work effectively.

When you create a mix in a properly treated professional studio, it translates well to other environments like cars, clubs, and home systems because you're mixing a flat response.

• Sound waves from speakers hit walls, ceilings, corners, and floors creating peaks and dips across the frequency spectrum • At certain frequencies you'll have big dips (5-10 dB) and spikes (6-7 dB) throughout your room • These problems occur whether you have $100 or $5000 speakers

While acoustic panels and bass traps help reduce echo and reflections, they do almost nothing to address the major peaks and dips across the frequency spectrum in small rooms.

If you can't hear a frequency in your room properly, you can't mix it. You will naturally boost frequencies you perceive as missing, which creates problems when listened to elsewhere.

• If your room has a dip at 80 Hz, you'll boost it during mixing • In another room without that dip, your mix will have excessive bass and sound muddy • This happens across the entire frequency spectrum and affects mix translation

No amount of parallel compression, reference track mixing, or mono mixing will help if you can't actually hear the frequencies that need mixing.

There is a simple way to fix this problem, but instead of just talking about it, the video demonstrates with experiments and measurements.

A tone generator plays about 30 notes across various octaves in the low end, each at exactly the same velocity and amplitude to show how a room colors the response.

In a perfect studio, every note would be heard at the same volume, but this is never possible in real rooms.

• Using a microphone test at the listening spot shows dramatic variation in frequency response • Some notes appear hugely different in volume, others are much smaller • The variation is exaggerated in recordings due to logarithmic scaling but still shows real problems

You can test your own room by playing a synthesizer from low octaves upward and noting which keys sound randomly loud or quiet to identify problem areas.

Sonarworks is a reference microphone and software that measures your studio monitors' response at your listening spot and creates a profile of your room's acoustics.

• Plays lots of test tones and runs measurements • Identifies where peaks and dips occur in the frequency spectrum • Can create multiple profiles for different monitor placements or speaker pairs

Applies incredibly precise filtering and sonic processors to even out the frequency response, creating a completely flat and accurate stereo image with extended bass response.

Without calibration, room response shows significant variation; after applying Sonarworks, the frequency response becomes much closer to the ideal flat response across all frequencies.

Leave Sonarworks on while mixing so you hear the balanced, corrected response. This allows you to apply all standard mixing techniques effectively since you're in a properly treated environment.

• Mixing in mono works better • Reference tracks are more useful • Parallel compression and EQ techniques become effective • The song feels like it's almost mixing itself

Turn Sonarworks off before exporting because the correction is only meant to calibrate your room, not to be applied to your final mix.

Mixes created with Sonarworks correction applied during mixing translate much better to other systems. Clients are more likely to be satisfied without requesting constant bass adjustments.

• Understand how your specific room sounds with your current equipment • Different speakers sound completely different in different rooms • Speaker placement changes the sound dramatically • Your room is not balanced and has issues across the spectrum

Whether you get a subwoofer to hear more low-end or use room correction software like Sonarworks, the goal is to mix in a flat environment so you can hear what's actually happening.

Many people spend thousands on expensive speakers, converters, interfaces, and cables without addressing the critical first step of dealing with their room's acoustics.

You can't change your room's size or shape, but you can change how your speakers sound in that room. Understanding your room allows you to enjoy mixing rather than getting stressed about it.