CONNECTION TO YOUR CREATION

Secondly, your too close to the project. You’ve just spent a week creating the track and your ears will be fatigued and accustomed to the sound. Try giving your ears a rest and coming back to the project after a few days of working on something else. Instantly your ears will pick up on something wrong. Another technique is to listen to your mix with someone else present in the room. Everyone is their own worst critic and often with someone else in the room you will realise obvious mistakes or try and listen to the track from another persons non-biased point of view.

REFERENCING

Ensure to A-B your tracks to artists that have a similar style to you. You can learn a lot in terms of EQ, compression, frequency ranges, arrangement, groove, pace and loudness.

Another important factor is the monitoring of your audio. You should be listening back to your audio on as many different sound sources as possible and not just your near-field monitors. this includes iPod headphones, home hifi’s and car speakers. At the end of the day this is how the end user will most likely be listening to your track to it needs to translate on many different playback devices.

ROOM ACOUSTICS

You will also want to make sure your room is set up correctly for monitoring. Your speakers should be the same distance apart from you in an equilateral triangle. Not too wide else you will lose your judgement of the stereo field and away from any corners that may increase the bass response. You will also want speakers that have a flat frequency curve. Finally you will want to treat your room with foam that suppresses audio frequencies and stops them bouncing and reverberating around your room. Pay particular attention to the corners of your room and the ceiling. A cube shaped room is the worst type of room for having an unnatural frequency curve or standing waves from your basses causing frequency cancellation. Rectangular rooms are much preferred.

Get feedback from friends and family that can listen to the track with an objective ear. Be sure to make them aware that you need as much constructive criticism as possible. Being told a track sounds ‘bangin’ or ‘good’ isn’t going to help you improve it.

WIDTH DEPTH AND FREQUENCIES

A common problem in mixes is when there is too many, or not enough things going on at once. This could be in the stereo image panning, the depth using reverb and dynamics or the actual frequency ranges.

Ideally your mixes want to be clear and concise in the low end and gently spread out as the frequency increases so that the high frequencies are nicely spread throughout the spectrum. Poor mixes are often spread too far and lack energy and punch or they are thrown down a narrow beam of audio and lack width and depth. This will cause the mix to sound very muddy if everything is happening on top of one another in one specific area of the stereo field.

With this in mind. Some elements do sit best right in the centre of your mix. It’s advised to keep your drums, bass line and vocals in the centre of the mix. Other elements such as percussion (bongos, shakers and hats) pads, synths, backing vocals pianos and sound effects often sound good when panned across the stereo field or widened. Make sure you spread them out in an even and balanced manor by matching certain instruments with similar frequency content and panning them in opposite directions. This will keep your mix balanced and stop people from thinking that your mix is lopsided or that one of the speakers has broken.

Another issue is having big gaps in the frequency spectrum. For example using a pure sine wave for a bass will give you a nice powerful sound at 60Hz but if your listening back to this mix on a Set of headphones or a docking station there’s a high chance that your speakers won’t be able to reproduce those bass frequencies. To counter this we can use more harmonically rich waveforms that still have a lot of low end energy such as filtered triangle, square and saw waves.

To ensure your listening to your track correctly make sure your monitors are set up to best suit your listening environment.