+ 1 on the Focusrite VRM box. I use a pair of Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro's with it. Me Gusto Mucho!!!
My other reference is a pair of Dynaudio BM5a's with the IK Multimedia ARC in my partially treated room.

Rocky

sharke


It's perfectly possible to mix great sounding music on headphones. But you need a pair of good quality headphones that have as little color as possible - I have a pair of ATH-M50's and they're fantastic for mixing. 

But what makes all the difference is if you mix through a speaker simulator like the Focusrite VRM Box. They recreate the tonal characteristics of various studio monitors and home speakers (e.g. laptop, desktop, TV, home hi-fi etc) so that you can hear how your mix is going to sound on a variety of systems. What they don't do is fully recreate the experience of listening on speakers, but they do offer a diversity of sonic perspectives to check your mix against. If it sounds good on every simulation on the VRM Box, there's a very good chance it's going to translate well to a variety of real world speakers as well. Probably one of the most useful purchases I ever made. But you have to pair them with a good quality pair of cans. 

The AT's are great. I love them very much!!

Good to hear positive comments about the VRM box.

I just checked out the VRM box and that seems really cool. I believe i gotta have one! Thanks for everyone's help. Im still getting some new headphones too! That's why i love this forum!

Dude Ivey


Thats one of the problems. When i put a mix on my ipod and play it in my truck which has a really good system it doesnt sound at all as good as it does through the headphones that i now have. What sounds good through my headphone has major eq problems through my truck system. I seem to be going in circles tryin to mix and eq audio hoping its gonna sound good on a good sound system. of course when i play commercial released music in my truck it sounds great.

I feel your pain. It's a debacle that takes quite a bit of research and patience, the latter more than the former. I have an Acura TL '06 model car, and a Chevy Astrovan, both with very different sounding systems. However, I spend lots of time in them both, so my brain starts to simply "know" if something is weak or off about one of my masters. I do find myself burning CD-Rs to audition in each. Neither currently support an AUX input, so that's something to deal with, as well.

What you have to do is figure out what seems to really focus the most on what is wrong with your mix. For example, what is wrong with the mix in your truck? Kick drum too weak, vocals buried, lead guitar too ear-piercing? Find out what's the most wrong with your mix on each listening device (i.e. headphones, your truck, your ear-buds, etc.), then work on taming each one of those in your mix. There's nothing wrong with using speakers you know for reference.

Yamaha NS-10's are still widely used in many big studios, but they sound horrible. The thing is, they are used, mainly because if you can get a mix sounding good on those, you're doing something right, and the mix will likely sound good on nearly anything. Although that's an old-school method, it still applies largely today. It's all about "translation".

With that said, I highly recommend getting a great set of headphones like the ATH-M50's Sharke mentioned here, for example, and listen to everything you can. Grab a parametric EQ and have fun with it, but find what frequencies work for "their" mix vs. yours. Also, realize that the recording itself may not be good enough. That happens. 

Now, If you want good masters, you really need a great audio-chain, clean power, Class A "True" amplifier, and some great speakers in a great room. For example, I use an Apogee S/PDIF DAC, XLR Star Quad cables, a Pass Labs X-350 power amp, Monster Power Voltage Stabilizer and Pro Power Center (both Signature models) and a set of Polk Audio 2.3TL speakers with SonicCraft Crossover film caps, mil-spec resistors, some updated coils, and Alpha-core speaker cables. The cost adds up, but your ears can hunt down and destroy bad things much faster. Point-being, you're not alone in the quest to get it right. It's not an easy thing to simply "get".  

So, enjoy those truck speakers! They are valuable, too! Keep trying, and you'll get it! 

Best of luck!!

I think the difficulty of mixing is also very dependent on the genre of music you're making as well. If your tracks are all comprised of live instrument recordings, some or all of which have not been recorded in the most perfect of conditions or with the best equipment, you're going to have a much harder time and this is where a properly treated room with good monitors become essential in order to correct problems and create a good sounding mix. 

However, if your genre consists mainly of synthesized parts (or professionally recorded commercial samples) then a lot of the work has already been done for you. It's far easier to create a good mix of synthesized parts than live instruments, because the sounds you start with are pretty much perfect to begin with. The task of mixing becomes one of arrangement, i.e. selecting sounds which compliment each other, and removing unnecessary frequencies from those sounds (synth presets usually cover a larger range of the frequency spectrum than required for your mix, because they're designed to sound good when soloed). 

For instance, my preferred genre at present is EDM and electronica. I recently purchased the Driven Machine Drums Strikes Back package of analog/digital drum samples. They're recorded and processed so well, that they sit in virtually any EDM mix and sound great right off the bat. I can quite happily drop them in a mix and feel confident that they're going to sound great without me having to sit in an acoustically treated room messing around with EQ and compression for hours. In fact all I have to worry about is their relative levels, and I can do that on headphones with the VRM box. Same with many synth sounds from a good quality synth like Z3TA or Absynth. I might cut or boost frequencies here and there in order to make synth sounds sit well with each other, but it's almost a mechanical, logical task that I can sometimes do with a freeware frequency spectrum analyzer like Vonexgo Span. For instance, if I have a synth part that I've decided is the most important element part of the mix, I will look at Span and see that, for example, most of its energy is happening between 400 and 600kHz. So I will cut those frequencies a little in the other synth parts, to stop them from clashing. Of course the final judge must always be your ears, but I can obtain good results working this way, on headphones, that I wouldn't even begin to hope for if I was mixing a live band.  

In my opinion you really need to get a good book on mixing. Something like Mike Senior's "Mixing Secrets." Or take the Brian Lee White courses in mixing, EQ and compression on Lynda.com. Even though they're done in Pro Tools, what you learn in those courses will translate to any DAW. 

My preferred genre is big drums and slap u upside the head guitars!! Ive always been a Hard Rock/ Metal guy. Not that screamo crazy stuff though, that makes my throat hurt every time i hear it!!lol
Ive recently been working on a mix i got from the guy's website u mentioned Mike Senior. I think its cambridge.com or something like that. The song is called Ambition. The drums are recorded live and theyve been the hardest to get to sound good for me, especially the snare. I know i couldve replaced it with a sample but i wanted to see how good i could make it sound just like i got it. Ive always used Steven Slate Drums and Superior Drummer and when i started mixing this song i thought to myself these drums sound horrible! Hopefully this song is teaching me something!

I've said this before but I'll say it again (and get one more post in today 


I mix mostly on headphones (since My Lovely Lady's office is right next door to my studio). I have 4 sets of phone I verify on (before I take it to the car and the phone/mp3 player and there I technically add a 5th pair of phones).


1. AT M_50s
2. Sennheiser HD-600
3. Sennhesider IE6 buds
4. Ultimate Ears In Ear Reference Monitors
5. phone/mp3 -> cheap phones provided with the phone (est value $10)


Of course I use my Mackie HR 824 monitors with ARC when I think the mix more or less passes all the above tests and it will not disturb The Lovely Lady.

After i get a mix pretty near complete I'll reference some other music I think has good mix for a comparison. A lot of times I'm way off. Comparing to a mix I know sounds good helps me at least get in the ball park with over all EQ of mix. Wish I had done that for older stuff link which is way off. 

+ Several for VRM Box.