Tips To Help Your Mix Translate

Linearising your headphones with tools like dSoniq’s Realphones or Sonarworks’ SoundID can be valuable in its own right, but what’s often even more useful is the instant change in perspective you get from toggling correction on and off.

Subtle issues with the frequency balance can stop mixes from translating well to different listening systems. We offer a couple of suggestions that can help.

Mixing was once called ‘balancing’, and there are at least two senses in which a mix needs to be balanced. The obvious one concerns the level of each individual source or instrument. We want the vocal to be clearly audible. We want the drums to be powerful but not overwhelming. We want the guitars to drive the song along without overshadowing the vocals. And so on.

Less obviously, a mix also needs to contain a satisfying balance across the frequency spectrum. Some low bass is often desirable, but too much low bass causes all sorts of problems. We want the midrange to be full and punchy, but we want to avoid pushing it so far that the mix sounds boxy or tinny. We want to retain detail and excitement at the top end without taking the listener’s head off.

The two goals are, to some extent, interconnected; fading up the bass guitar or the kick drum will mean more low bass in the mix, and so on. But it’s still very possible to end up with a mix that is ‘balanced’ in the first sense yet not in the second. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that this is the single biggest problem I hear in mixes not done by professional engineers. It’s also one of the challenges I find hardest to overcome in my own work. Familiar techniques such as A/B’ing with level‑matched reference tracks can be a big help, but in this article, I thought I’d share a couple of less obvious strategies I’ve developed.

Light & Dark

A word you’ll hear a lot in articles about mixing is ‘translation’. One of the mix engineer’s key skills is to make the song sound good not only on their own playback system, but to anticipate how it will work on other systems, including consumer devices. To this end, many engineers employ secondary monitoring systems, including ‘grotboxes’ deliberately chosen for their low fidelity. However, in my experience, these are more useful...