Monitoring & Listening

What Makes a Good Mix?

The job of a mix is to let the song tell the story. It doesn’t exist to make the song better. It gets the recording and the production out of the song’s way. It’s a technical solution to an emotional problem.

So what makes a good mix? Two things: emotion and translation. A good mix makes you feel something. A great mix makes you feel something on every playback system — laptop speakers, car stereo, earbuds, a club PA. That translation doesn’t come from expensive gear. It comes from knowing your room and your monitors well enough that the decisions you make carry over to everywhere else.

The Room

Acoustic treatment deals with two categories of problems: frequency domain issues and time domain issues. Reflections off walls color what you hear in the time domain. Bass buildup in corners colors what you hear in the frequency domain. You need to address both.

Start with first reflection points — the side walls at ear level, the ceiling above the mix position, the wall behind you. Then bass trapping in the corners.

Not just carpet and egg crates — you need full spectrum treatment. But also: do not overdo it. A dead room is fatiguing and gives you a false picture. You want a controlled room, not a silent one. Diffusion keeps the room alive without letting reflections interfere. You can’t tame all the low frequencies easily, but you can get rid of a lot of the high ones. That can leave your room unbalanced. There need to be some reflections to allow the high end to compete.

Nothing beats a well-designed space and system, but not everyone can have that. Room correction software can help — use it if you need to, but understand it’s a supplement, not a substitute. Your first line of defense is sensible listening levels.

Speaker Setup

Aside from you and your instrument, your monitors are the only thing in your studio that actually makes a sound. Everything you hear comes through that filter. Other than you, they’re possibly the most important thing in your studio.

Symmetry. Your monitors should be placed symmetrically in the room — same distance from side walls, same distance from you. Set up an equilateral triangle with your head at the apex. Tweeters at ear height.

Speaker stands are best — decouple if possible. Speakers on a desk couple with the surface and create resonance. Isolation pads help. Stands are better.

Watch for proximity and boundary effect — monitors too close to walls boost bass. Too close vs too far, height — all of these change what you hear. Experiment, but once you find a position, leave it. The goal is repeatability.

Get the best speakers you can get. Your main monitors are where you make every decision. Use others for what they are good for — same with listening levels. Your alternate monitors, your headphones, your laptop — those are for checking, not for mixing.

Listening Levels

How loud should you mix? Loud enough that you can hear details but not so loud you can’t carry on a conversation with someone. You’ll know it when you hear it.

85 dB SPL is widely considered to be best. That’s where the Fletcher-Munson curves flatten out — your ears hear the most balanced frequency response at that level. But 85 dB in a small room for hours is loud. 76-79 for your room is more realistic for most home studios.

The number matters less than this: consistency is most important. Repeatability. Pick a level. Mark your monitor controller. Mix at that level. Every day. Your ears learn what a balanced mix sounds like at that volume on your system. That’s the foundation of everything.

As you progress, you may start your mix with the control room level a little higher and gradually turn it down as the mix gets louder. This doesn’t mean you’re mixing loud — what you’re actually doing is maintaining the same level in the room throughout the session. As the mix develops and your mix gets hotter, you compensate by pulling the monitor controller down. The key thing here is that the room level stays the same. It takes practice, but it keeps your reference point consistent even as the mix evolves.

Without consistency you end up chasing your own tail — compensating for Fletcher-Munson without knowing it, boosting bass because you’re mixing quiet, cutting highs because you’re mixing loud.

Listening at low levels reveals balance problems. If the vocal disappears when you turn down, it’s not sitting right. Listening at louder volumes checks impact and low end, but don’t live there. You’ll fatigue your ears and overexcite the room.

You don’t just learn your speakers — you learn what a few reference levels sound like. A dim button (generally around -20 dB) gives you a consistent quiet checkpoint. Use it to create level landmarks that you can return to periodically, the same way you’d check on another set of monitors.

Use an SPL meter. Easy to use and on your phone. Calibrate once, then trust your marked position.

Mono

Why mono? Many real-world listening environments are effectively mono: a speaker in a store, a phone on a table, two speakers in a wide room where you’re closer to one than the other.

Check your mix in mono regularly. If things disappear or get thin, you have stereo issues — phase cancellation from stereo processing, or elements that rely on panning instead of level for their place in the mix. Fix those problems. A mix that holds up in mono will work anywhere.

Remember that levels change when you pan. Making your level decisions before setting the soundstage in stereo can help keep you honest about how you’re distributing the space.

Multiple Systems

Check your mix on your main monitors, then on alternate monitors — smaller speakers, a bluetooth speaker, earbuds. Each system tells you something different.

I used to take my mix to the hi-fi store and tell them I was speaker shopping. There was a switch that let you flip between dozens of speakers if you brought in a CD. What’s a CD? Yeah, anyways…

But don’t put too much stock in unfamiliar systems. You don’t know what they sound like with music you know, so you can’t trust what they’re telling you about music you don’t know yet. Solve any problem on your main monitors. That’s where you have the resolution to hear what’s actually happening.

Headphones

Try to get the right listening levels on headphones — match them to your calibrated speaker level. Headphones exaggerate stereo width and eliminate room interaction, so they give you a different picture.

Both are important. Consider it almost like two different mixes. Remember in headphones, anything panned center is -3 dB quieter than it would be in speakers. It’s literally a different mix. But if it can’t hold up on speakers, you aren’t done.

Reference Tracks

Have your reference tracks ready. Find tracks that YOU know and cover your bases. References should be songs you’ve listened to hundreds of times in the genre you’re mixing. Load them into the session so you can A/B at matched loudness. They reset your ears and tell you what “finished” sounds like on your system today.

As you’re learning, you may want to keep the reference track in your mix session. Remember — you can’t make an unfinished mix as loud as a mastered reference, so you’ll have to do your level matching before you can make educated comparisons. That means the reference probably needs to be turned down.

There is no perfect reference track. The only perfect reference for whatever you’re mixing is your finished mix. So be prepared to use more than one. One track may help you with vocal levels. Another may be the key to the snare sound you’re after. You may find that the vocal levels and snare sounds you like are incompatible. Welcome to mixing. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Listening vs Hearing

Listening vs hearing. Two different things. Hearing is passive. Listening is active, focused, intentional.

Mixing is physical. Close your eyes. Don’t just listen with your ears. Listen with your body. You feel the low end in your chest. You feel the transients in your gut. If you’re tense and staring at a screen, you’re hearing but you’re not listening. Use your environment — lean back, close your eyes, listen from across the room. You can’t just be solving problems. You need to be uncovering feelings.

Warming Up and Taking Breaks

You need to be able to hear something a hundred times and still hear it like you’re hearing it for the first time. That means you need to treat repetition as a danger. When someone tells you a lie over and over, it starts to become true. Your speakers will do that to you. You become numb to problems that were obvious an hour ago.

That’s why ears need warm-up time. The first few minutes of a session, don’t make decisions. Listen. Let your ears settle into the room and the material.

Then take breaks. Walk away. When you come back, you’ll hear things you couldn’t hear ten minutes ago. Drink lots of water and don’t smoke in the studio. It will force you to get up to go to the bathroom or go outside every hour, and that’s good for your ears. But seriously, practice good mixing hygiene. Your ears can be thrown off on any day by allergies, lack of sleep, time of day, prior exposure. Respect that.

What to Practice

• Calibrate your monitors to a reference level (76-85 dB SPL) and mark your monitor controller. Mix at that level for a full week.
• Pick three reference tracks you know well. Load them into a session and listen at your calibrated level. What do you notice about the low end, the vocal, the width?
• Check a mix in mono. Note what disappears. Identify the phase or stereo-width problems causing it.
• Listen to your current mix on your main monitors, then on headphones, then on a phone speaker. Write down what each system reveals — and fix everything on your main monitors.