Reasons Why Pro Mixes Beat Home Mixes

I realize that most of us usually like to investigate the flip side of this – i.e., how you can make home mixes sound (almost) as good as pro mixes, but for just this one time, indulge me. I think that many of us could learn a lot from a thread like this.

What I am asking for from a poster on this thread is: any factor affecting why a mix created in the home or project studio environment may not sound as good as a professional recording. I am hoping that we can compile a comprehensive list for us home/project studio enthusiasts to keep in mind, and enable us to (hopefully) overcome – as much as we can – these challenges. At the very least, such a list can make us aware of the potential factors that we face.

I’ll start:

Pro mixes:

-often use the highest grade of mic’s and preamps to capture the sound initially
-often use high quality AD converters to store the sound to digital
-are often mixed/mastered by experienced professionals using quality monitors in quality acoustic environments
-often use expensive hardware units for critical mixing effects such as compression, EQ, and reverb
-often utilize actual musical instruments/performances – as opposed to synthesized ones

Chops, ears, talent, experience, raw material. I know you intended this to more about techniques and equipment, but I thought I'd throw these out as being, IMHO, the real keys to a great sounding product. just so we don't lose sight of where professional sound begins.

I think it has to do with producer/engineer with experience and your ears.
I've worked with one who did ALL his final mixes on two Radio Shack 3 in speakers from the 70's. They just blew out about 3 weeks ago and he's been scouring around tyring to find them. he did find 10 sets in (unnamed BIG) Atlanta studio and he offered over $500 for them but the seller would not sell them.

All your lists do apply, but I can't imagine many people spending the big $ if you aren't bringing it in.

A pro arrangement makes a huge difference on a pro recording.

Less is often more.

Amateurs usually try to cover up a lack of talent with lots of "stuff", hoping that no one will notice the crap musicianship or poor songwriting skills.

My favorite is the guy who thinks that the song just needs "mastering"...like that's the root of the problem...

Education and experience!!! Dont forget those intangibles!!

ORIGINAL: KevinD
I think it has to do with producer/engineer with experience and your ears.

KevinD FTW

ORIGINAL: pdarg
...

-often use the highest grade of mic’s and preamps to capture the sound initially
-often use high quality AD converters to store the sound to digital
-are often mixed/mastered by experienced professionals using quality monitors in quality acoustic environments
-often use expensive hardware units for critical mixing effects such as compression, EQ, and reverb
-often utilize actual musical instruments/performances – as opposed to synthesized ones

But, if the talent is equal, your list of gear is almost in the right order.

The room that acoustic instruments get recorded-in and room the mix gets performed-in should top that as the first and most important piece of gear.

After that, the transducers, after that the digital conversion or tape recorder electronics, after that the toys.

I don't agree that acoustic v. electronic should be a part of this list - that's a matter of style and taste, and we'd all be surprised how many things we hear on great sounding recordings are replaced or made with digital equivalents.

If a small home studio, I'd say that, assuming you can actually play the material well and write good songs else nothing else matters, the things you need to worry about are:

1. You aren't going to have good natural accoustics probably, so heavily treat the room with bass traps and use artificial ambience. Good convolution reverbs are excellent these days and can provide quite nice realistic spaces. It's been done for decades on many commercial releases, right?, so it's not like it's a trailer park compromise really.
2. #1 also gives you the required mixing environment to know that you aren't mixing to the room. I you can't mix it accurately, then what's the point?
3. Both good and moderate speakers to mix on. Have a high quality set so that you can really hear what's going and and hear the extended highs and deep lows, and a crappy pair that has bloated lower mids, no lows, and hissy highs. If you get it sounding good on both, then you are a long way towards the goal.
4. Quality source chain. Personally, I like having a tube based, vintage sounding pre-amp that imparts some character and warmth to my stuff, but others go the other way. It'll cost you a bit to have a few nice guitars and bass and microphone(s), but it'll never sound better than what comes out of them so it's worth the expense. And it's probably never been less expensive to have a high quality source chain.
5. Learn to mix. The easy one, right? But so much of it happens in this step. You can put down the warmest, most righteous sounding stuff but if you don't now how to put each instrument into its own place in the mix (along multiple axes), then it won't sound like a professional mix. Knowing what frequencies of a given instrument matter and should be kept/emphasized vs. what can be discarded is so much of it. I spend hours upon hours just playing with the EQ of a track to see what happens. It's the 'leave a monkey alone in a room with a DAW for an infinite amount of time' theory at work.
6. Get some good quality, flexible plugs. You can obviously do good work with what comes with SONAR, but you can also do better with better tools. I'm not trying to be a plugin snob, but there is an art to it and companies that do nothing else do have more resources to concentrate their efforts on just that. And since many plugs do have some sort of purposeful character and are not totally transparent, it does matter which ones you use in many cases.
7. Listen to lots of commercial CDs on your monitoring system. There's a HUGE range of mixing styles out there on commercial CDs. Most of them were probably done by people who really knew what they were doing, but they still came up with vastly different results. Some are quite thin on the bottom and heavier, even screetchily so, on the top and some are very rich and deep and even quite muddy and murky. Some have drums and bass that are these tiny little things and some have heavy, thudding low end. Some, to me, sound pretty dang bad, but the content is good (to me so I bought it) and so it's not something that I notice unless I'm in analytical mode. Anyway, the point being that there's no one best answer, and no matter what you do, someone will think it's not a good mix probably.


Of course, if you write incredibly good songs and perform them with hair raising levels of emotion and skill, you could probalby divide all of that above by half or more and still no one would care. But, if you can do that and master all of the above, the results would be even more impactful.

On the 'less is more' thing, I think that applies sometimes. But it depends on the style of music and the players and the mixer. Often times, there's a lot more going on in various commercial mixes than you really realize until you hear them on a really good pair of speakers in a good room and can really hear all the details. But the trick is not to get precious about every single part being heard all the time (unless they are performed such that they never step on each other.) Some things have to be more important than others and therefore some things may not be heard by anyone except those folks listening on very high quality speakers in a good room.

So maybe the rule is 'progressively less is more', in that you can layer more stuff on, but it has to be pushed to the back more and more and often much more frequency constrained, and you have to commit to which instruments are going to drive the mix and give them the lion's share.

Or, in some cases, it's not that there are more parts, but that a particular part might have been double or triple or quadruple tracked. So it's not adding more instruments but really increasing the body and thickness of a particular instrument, so a lot more tracks but still not a lot of different stuff competing for the listener's ear.

using artists that can actually play!!!!

that's a HUGE factor. imagine getting an excellent recording of a guy with a crappy guitar, whos out of tune and can't keep a tempo to save his life...

I've had plenty of those...and then they ask "why's it sound like crap?"

ME: "'cause you suck"

ORIGINAL: joshhunsaker


the less of these types of issues you have to worry about - the more you can focus on the music and the better the music will be. You walk into a home studio and there's a good chance you'll trip a cord or an airplane will fly by or the dog starts barking as loudly as it can or your computer crashes because of bad drivers or you find a plug suddenly has a serious grounding issue or you realize you forgot your sealed headphones for proper isolation while singing against the track or you have to go buy more patch cables because in the brilliant mess you rigged up you finally used all the supply you had.

a pro studio will always be like any business - they will offer you all the tools you need with really quick access so you can track out all your ideas and get on to the next and on with life. a home studio for me has always been a battle and in the long run my music suffers because i don't have the money that pro studios do to ensure that things go flawlessly 99% of the time.

time is money - and that is why people will always pay for a pro studio at some level or another, even if the only "pro" part is the hugely talented mixing engineer sitting at the desk.

+1 This is why my home studio looks and sounds more like a commercial studio than a home studio. Granted I do hear my share of commercial releases that have bad mixes but when you work in a pro studio, chances are you can't blame the equipment for why your mix sucks.

As stated above - "It's not the gear, it's the ear."

I frequently get better results in people's home studios than they do and the owner says "dang! how'd you do that?!?"
I say - "Go spend 15 years recording and mixing around the clock in pro studios and you'll know."

That's half of it.

The other half is "What sound is the musician creating?"

CASE: Sgt. Pepper.
The individual tracks are low fidelity by today's standards. And the mixes are crazy - all unbalanced weird left and right etc... YET...
It's phenomenal because "That's how they laid it down."
You and I will probably never create anything near as cool as that. Especially not with all our super advanced ultra-high tech gizmos.

~Dane

Lots of good suggestions.

I think you need to subtract OUT the talent, since mediocre players can sound their best in a great studio.

The big differentiators for me:

-Pro quality A/D *and* D/A conversion. This can clean up so much mud and fuzz from recordings and mixes.
-Speakers that are deadly accurate and image tightly. Panning, EQ, balance decisions can't be made when you can't hear the "difference that makes a difference."
-(closely related to the above) Room acoustics. Almost all home studios and many project studios I have ever seen have extreme problems with uneven room response and weird resonances. For tracking, this can be sometimes dealt with by close-miking - although that is one of the hallmarks of a home recording (everything sounds like it was overdubbed). For mixing, it's a lot harder to overcome.

All three of these interrelate. IT does no good to have great speakers if the D/A is mushy, or the room response is a Coney Island ride.

With these handled, I think great things can happen in a home studio!

It's the experience of tracking and mixing, that's it. Yes room acoustics play a vital role in your sound, but the bottom line is that the end user has to know what the heck they are doing, that's just the bottom line here.

Knowledge and experience will allow one to record with an SM 58 as their mic, basic Audio I/O gear and still sound better than a lot of us with pro-sumer gear.

Peace.

Boston produced they're first album in a basement in Watertown, MA. I believe the budget was just a few thousand dollars. Look what they did.

It takes talent from start to finish.

hahaha, it's a riddle trapped inside an enigma....

I think maybe you're packing more weight in the word "professional" and that's exactly what we're trying to demystify. Just because someone is in a big studio and gets paid to do something doesn't mean you can't do the same level of work in your basement.

But the other half of the definition, the technique and experience, is really the secret sauce. Daniel Lanois recorded in a frickin' castle with U2, but he also recorded Luscious Jackson in their NYC apartment and that record has many of the same hallmarks as, say, Achtung Baby.

Sheesh Tchad Blake recorded Tom Waits IN A TOOL SHED.

Funny. A few days ago I was archiving stuff and fell on early versions of songs for a current project, stuff that I recorded and mixed precisely 1 year ago. Of course, those were not final versions but I could see the progress sound-wise.

I then considered what had changed in order to try to figure out what were the next steps to take to keep on improving.

First: Those early versions were mixed before I have had a chance to watch and study Mix it Like a Record. That's knowledge and skills. Learn and practice.

Second: Arrangements. Learning to mix helped me in this regard, and getting better at arranging certainly makes mixing "easier" for me. Knowledge and skills once again. Learn and practice.

Third: Equiment. Unfortunate for me, but there was virtually NO change in my equipment list - even my PC hasn't been upgraded - so I've been working on the exact same rig, using the exact same set of tools. But in this context, it only goes to show that my progress has got nothing to do w/ equipment - it's still all the same "average" M-Audio stuff. Which doesn't mean I don't intend to buy a few nice pieces of equipment in the future. But it brings me to my next point...

Fourth: Room. Once again no change. Starting w/ the very first mixes all the way to the most recent ones, I can see that I've learned to compensate for some things. There are certain problematic frequency ranges which, w/ time, I've learned to identify as specific to this room - of course some could argue that this is also due to monitors, but I've been using these for 5 years, so I'm starting to know them.

So, to me, considering the quality of what we now call "average" equipment, it's a matter of skills and room before anything else. These are the two areas I'll be focusing on improving before I invest into more gear.