5 Easy Tips to Instantly Improve Your Mixes \\ Home Recording Studio

There is definitely a lot of skill and experience behind being able to create great mixes for your mixes, either in a home studio or in a professional environment. However there are many advantages that professional audio engineers have that us DIY musicians aren't always aware of. I've been a musician for about 14 years and i've been recording my own music for almost that entire time period, i've had music recorded by other people, and I have friends who have worked in professional studios (either as an audio engineer, tech, or as the musician paying the studio).

To try to help other musicians who want to do the DIY approach, i've compiled my top 5 tips that can instantly improve your home mixes / recordings. The bottom of this blog post has my video on this topic if you prefer that format, or you can click here to watch it.

1. Use Studio Monitors (not headphones)

Most people will agree that studio monitors are better for mixing/mastering music than headphones. I'm sure there are people who swear by mixing on headphones but they are definitely the minority, and they probably had a large learning curve to make that system work. I would recommend spending a minimum of $300 to purchase new studio monitors that are made for mixing. The key with studio monitors is you want them to have a flat frequency response, meaning that they don't emphasize certain frequency bands for listening purposes. You can probably get by with cheap 'listening' speakers, but this is the most important investment you can make if you want to create great mixes (aside from having a computer and DAW).

Common speakers in the $300 price range are KRK Rokit 5's, JBL LSR305's, or JBL LSR308's.

KRK Rokit 5 Monitors

Here are some links:

KRK Rokit 5's: https://amzn.to/2KCKYgj

JBL LSR305P's: https://amzn.to/2LfSdLf

JBL LSR308's: https://amzn.to/2keV36Q

Be sure that the package you purchase either includes two monitors, or you make sure to purchase Qty two. Sometimes they are sold as a pair, other times as single speakers.

I use Mackie MKII monitors which originally went for about $450/speaker. I caught them at a discount when Mackie was introducing the MKIII monitors and got a great deal, so keep that in mind if you have a bigger budget. Also don't be afraid to buy used through Reverb.com as they will often have some kind of buyer protection.

2. Use Acoustic Treatment In Your Room

The next big important thing to keep in mind is room acoustics. Depending on your setup you may not require any acoustic treatment to get by, but almost every room will benefit from some treatment. From my research on room acoustics, there are some key factors you want to keep in mind.

• Your speakers should be aiming roughly directly at your head (ideally aim the spot between the tweeter and the woofer to a location a couple inches behind your ears)

• Keep your speakers at least 6 inches away from the wall if possible

• You want to form an equilateral triangle from the three points that comprise your two monitors, and your head. So the distance between your speakers is equal to the distance from each speaker to your listening position

• Don't sit in the dead center of your room, but also don't sit directly next to a wall.

• Decouple your speakers from your desk (you can get foam risers for this, but they also sell fixtures that decouple the speakers from the desk). This prevents the vibration of your monitors from vibrating your desk and turning it into one giant speaker

The easiest way to tell if you need some kind of acoustic treatment is the clap test. To perform the clap test: sit where you would mix your music and clap a couple times. Do you hear a high pitched, almost metallic ringing slightly after your clap? Do you hear a very quick echo? If yes, then you have some high frequency resonances in your room and could benefit from some acoustic treatment.

There are two classes of acoustic treatment for damping resonances in your room: high frequency acoustic foam, and bass traps. Acoustic foam is typically made up of 2-3" thick square wedges you adhesive to your wall to suppress high frequency (kHz range) sound waves. These wedge panels are typically placed along parallel walls, ideally behind your head and behind your computer on the wall. Bass traps are either sold as thicker foam, or as larger wall mounted panels that you mount along the edges or corners of your room.

Here are some links to acoustic treatment I actually use:

Good cheap acoustic foam: https://amzn.to/2wmUyAX

Good cheap corner bass trap foam: https://amzn.to/2JUNyx0

Higher end bass traps: https://amzn.to/2wcHj5s

3. Take Breaks and Use Reference Mixes (reset your ear)

This tip requires no purchases and is very easy to implement. Every 30 minutes or so of mixing or mastering, take a 5 minute break. It can also be beneficial in mixing sessions to take a break to listen to professionally produced music. This can help reset your ear so you don't go down a rabbit hole.

4. Check Your Mix On Everything (car speakers, headphones, phone speakers)

Not everyone has great studio monitors and is listening in a acoustically treated room. So it can be a great habit to check your mix on every platform your listen might use. When i'm done mixing for the day I usually export my song to Dropbox and then the next day I listen to it in the car on the way to work. I'll also listen to the mix on my phone speakers, and in headphones.

You can't optimize your mix for every listening platform, but you can weed out any obvious issues on the most common listening devices. Use your studio monitors as the gold standard, but if your mix sound awful in phone speakers you likely have a problem in your mix. Often you can get your mix to sound great on everything without sacrificing anything on how the mix sounds in studio monitors, just let your ear be the guide.

5. Consolidate Your Tracks

It is very easy for projects to get up to 200+ tracks in your DAW. This can be a mixing nightmare as you can't really keep track of each track as efficiently as if you had 30 tracks. The production of a great mix of a great song is really a collection of hundreds or thousands of small decisions, and the goal with consolidating is to reduce the amount of decisions in the mixing phase.

When i'm writing a song and recording the parts, I can end up with 50+ vocal tracks (as shown in the image below). Typically by the time i'm done consolidating i'll have this down to 3-5 vocal tracks, and they'll usually be routed to an overall vocal bus.

Do you really want to deal with mixing a song with 50 vocal tracks?

It can be helpful to think of your mixing process in 3 steps:

1. Bouncing takes, and editing

First you should decide which takes are the best, and bounce them down to a single track. Do any editing here such as trimming audio clips, pitch correcting vocals, or quantizing instruments to the grid.

2. Mixing groups of like-sounds

The next major task involves getting your major instrument sections and creating busses to group them together. If you have a track with 2 rhythm guitars, and 4 lead guitars, you can generally get all of the volumes between these instruments ironed out before balancing them to the overall track. You can route the two rhythm guitars to a bus, and the 4 lead guitars to a bus, and have most of the dynamic and effects processing from your plugins planned out ahead of time. This reduces that set of 6 tracks to 2 sliders with most of the settings already decided. Drums is another area that can easily be pre-mixed to a bus, which can reduce 12 drum tracks to a single slider.

3. Master Mix

This is where you mix everything together. You already have decided on which takes your using, you've done your editing, and you've mixed all the sub-groups of instruments where it made sense. Here you want to focus on the relative volume of each instrument or group, and how these instruments interact with each other. During this process you may decide to go back and tweak the sub-mixing you've done earlier, but at least 75% of the decisions have been made ahead of time so you can focus your attention on the master mix without going into too many details. Since you've already routed groups to a bus, you can apply dynamic processes to groups such as having a drum bus compressor. This can help the individual tracks 'glue' together.

Questions?

I hope this blog post helped you improve your home mixes. DIY home recordings can be a big challenge, but I take pride in knowing that my recordings are 100% me (or me and my band members). Nobody cares about your music more than you do, so once you build up your skills you'll be able to use mixing as another way to express your art. The recording of a song can drastically impact how people feel the song, so its important to have that level of control.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments, or on my video on YouTube.