Ears, speakers and mixing
We are in the age of digital audio, but your ears haven’t gotten the memo. Nor has the air, or those moving membranes that push the air that we call speakers. These things remain analog.
To that end, here are some very analog tips and tricks for dealing with mixing using those analog ears dealing with the analog physics of sound.
Get multiple speakers
This is obvious, but it can’t be stressed enough. You want to get a bunch of different speakers, especially different-sized speakers, because your mix will sound different on each of them. You want at least one pair that is accurate (whatever that means), and you want some that sound awful or at least more like the speakers people have knocking about the house, the car, etc.
I used to use the bigs (the big monitors that were soffit mounted in the studio), the bridges (nearfields on the console bridge), a boombox (I had a Panasonic boombox with RCA inputs that I could feed from the console via an adaptor), and a pair of really good headphones (Grado open cup). This gave me a good representation of how things were going to sound in the real world. Everything but the car! For that I had to drive around in the car.
While big soffit-mounted speakers might be hard to get, there are so many great-sounding nearfield monitors, as well as cheap, awful Bluetooth things out there, that you should be able to cobble together a bunch of different speakers to mix on.
Multiple speakers are essential to getting the most mileage out of the next trick:
Barely crack the volume
Turn the volume all the way down so there’s no music heard from your speakers. Then, pick one of your multiple sets of speakers and slowly turn up the volume just a crack until you can just hear something. What’s the first thing you hear? The snare? The vocals? Keep turning up the volume bit by bit until you can hear everything in the mix - but don't turn it up loud: keep it overall as quiet as you can. Then turn the volume down all the way, switch to a different set of speakers and slowly crack the volume up until you hear the first thing you hear. The snare? The vocals? The bass? Again, slowly increase the volume until you can just hear all the elements of the mix.
Do this little test with each set of your speakers and compare. The experience of what comes in first, second, third, etc., should be consistent, but it also might not be, and that might be a cause for concern. Obviously, bass is different on a bigger speaker, but if the bassline is important and it shows up early on the big speakers but later on something smaller, that’s a problem, especially if the bass is a hook element. How about the sit of the vocals? Are they in the same spot on each set, or is it different? What about the feel and the groove? Does it work on the bigs but not on the smalls? How are reverb and ambiance functioning on each set? Consistent or all over the place?
The ONSET of when you hear an element come in is a huge clue as to what needs work.
Resetting your ears
In the previous trick/hack/thing I emphasized that you want to keep the volume low. The why of that has to do with how your ears work.
Two things: 1) Loudness changes the frequency response of your ears and 2) Your ears get used to how things sound at a particular volume very quickly.
This means that if you’re listening to something at one volume, and then lower the volume, the response will sound really different to you. If you increase the volume a bit, your ears will almost instantly get used to that new volume and that becomes the new “normal” for your ears. Also, generally, things appear to sound better to us as volume increases (up to a point).
So, if you’re constantly changing the volume around as you mix, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Start with the volume comfortably low and leave it there. Resist the urge to touch that knob—tape it off.
There’s a good chance that as you work, the volume you're mixing at will creep up, and you’ll also have to listen to your mix at louder volumes because it won’t only be heard quietly. However, once you turn it up, you really can’t go back to a lower volume unless you take a break from the mix and give your ears a bit of time to reset. I needed about half an hour early in the mix, but my reset time would get longer as the mixing process continued.
The point here is this: plan on mixing in chunks, starting at a low volume, checking things at a higher volume at the end of that particular chunk, and then taking a break for a bit to reset your ears.
To reset your ears, sit somewhere quiet. Don’t watch tv. Go outside.
If you’re mixing on your own schedule in your own studio situation, that’s the best. I had to mix while watching the clock to stay within budget, and it sucked.
Working opposites
It’s very tempting to mix the low things on bigger speakers or on headphones (good headphones have good bass response, usually) but the clarity of things in the low end is also about their overtones. Remember, a low E on a bass is 41Hz, and that’s a struggle for most speakers to reproduce. What you’re really hearing on most speakers of that low E are its Octave overtones at 82hz, 164hz, etc., and other overtones such as the Fifth (123Hz, 246Hz, etc) and the Third (103hz, 207Hz). There are also much higher overtones and sounds from the bass that give it articulation, and of course, all this changes on note-by-note basis as the bassline changes.
The point? Mix low-end stuff on smaller speakers. Now, if you’re doing EDM or something that's going to be heard mainly in a club, the upper articulation of the low end won’t be a much of a concern, but if you’re doing pop stuff that’s going to be heard on typical home setups, the problems in your low end won’t be in your low end, they’ll actually be higher up in the mids.
Your mix’s overall upper mids and high-end can also benefit from this sort of opposite thinking. Little speakers might appear to sound bright with lots of high-end, but what they really have, especially if they’re cheap, is a lot of presence, which means they push out a lot of 2kHz to 8kHz. If you’re trying to get cymbals and hi-hats right (whatever that means) on smaller speakers, or on cheap speakers, that might result in a bizarrely dull mix.
Headphones in the picture
As I wrote earlier, headphones can have accurate bass (or perhaps too much bass if they’re things like Beats), but where headphones are all over the place is placement and panning. Things panned to center are generally a bit quieter on headphones, unless the headphones are compensating for that, so vocals might sound low, bass and snares and kicks might sound low, etc. Left and right placement extremes are also weird on headphones. Headphones definitely increase spatial drama—reverbs and ambiance are much more apparent on headphones. There’s not much you can do to adjust to this, but you do need to take it into account in your thinking.
Don’t destroy your ears
My dudes, I can’t emphasize this enough: protect your ears.
Those ears of yours are statistically the most accurate of your five senses.
They’re also wired into your brain differently from vision, touch, smell, etc. They hook into your emotions. Into your limbic system. Into your fight or flight mechanism.
Without hearing, human communication is seriously impaired. Visually impaired people have it much better socially than hearing impaired people.
You don’t want hearing issues. YOU DO NOT WANT TO DEAL WITH TINNITUS. Believe me, you don’t want to deal with tinnitus.
Sorry to end on a bummer, but hearing loss and tinnitus is a bummer of an ending. Take care of yourself.