We have mentioned so many times how beautiful and creative is to work in your home studio. There are so many advantages but surely are disadvantages also. You may have heard me saying in my videos or in my blog posts that gear doesn’t matter at all. You just have to start recording. You have read in many websites about mixing or you have watched video tutorials for mixing and even you do exactly what you have learned, you don’t have the same results. You have to understand that you work in a home studio, in your bedroom, in your living room or even in a spare bedroom in your house and you use it as a home studio. You may also have put an acoustic treatment in your studio, but still there will be always some problems that will affect your mixes.
If you have studio monitors, you have to understand, that what you hear is not exactly what the speakers “give” you, because of your room. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you have a song you are working on and what you hear of your mix is too much low end and you decide to cut some frequencies or just turn the bass fader down. This extra low end is because of your room.
Why am I saying all these to you? I want to ask you something simple. Have you ever finished a song and you say “That’s great!”. You export your mix and you are very proud for this mix. But things aren’t like they seem, or they are heard to be more exact. Once you listen to another sound source, you get disappointed because what you hear has nothing to do with this mix that you were so proud of. Where is the bass? You lost all the mid-range from your mix. And here comes what I want to say. You’ve got to listen your mix on different sound sources. To another cd player, in your car, or even in your hands-free headphones, or ear pods. Can we talk about it?
You are working on a song and you think that your mix is at a very good level and it’s almost ready! So you have to do some steps to know if you are right. All you have to do is to export your song and listen to several speakers as I told you earlier. In your car ,on your mobile phone and everywhere you can think. Take notes for everything you may want to improve and you fix it.This is the only way you can improve on mixing ,you can learn better your speakers and of course the room you are working in!
There is no secret for success! You have to take these steps, that are often skipped ,and you will become much better in your mixes and home recording. I would like to remind you a very useful tip that I have written in a previous blog post. If you want to know if your mix is good you have to compare it with another song,so you have to use reference tracks. You import into your project a song that you like from Spotify ,or YouTube,that is similar genre with your song. You turn the volume fader down because this song is mastered nad yours not. You compare these two songs and you can tell what is missing from your song and you keep working until you have a match as possible as it can be with the reference track.