We spend an awful lot of time with a track when producing, pouring over each detail, honing every sound. But after hours of listening to a snare that is too loud, our ears simply become accustomed to that imbalance. When played back with other songs later, however, the imbalance becomes painfully obvious. The irony is that our attention to detail can lead to a worse mix as we begin to lose an objective perspective the more we listen.

In psychology, this is known as the mere-exposure effect, the tendency to develop a preference for things simply because we are familiar with them. In production, we have to find ways to accommodate this psychological quirk. One common and convenient way to not lose an objective perspective is to regularly compare your mix to a reference track - a professional song in the same genre with a similar sonic makeup.

The goal here is not to copy the sound and balance of the reference track, but rather it’s to provides a benchmark so we can say "ah, my snare is louder than a normal track in the genre" and decide whether or not that's what we’re going for. In this way, comparing your work-in-progress to a finished song can take a lot of the guesswork out of mixing. In this article, we'll go over how to set up your default template in Ableton Live to incorporate reference tracks.