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Mixing

Mixing

My first couple of songs were written, and now it was time for doing some proper mixing. During the composing stage I employed rough mixing, adjusting channel faders etc, but only to help in the song writing. Now it was time for doing a proper mix. I quickly realized that I did not quite get the same result from my laptop speakers as I did from one set of headphones, to the next, or the car stereo. Every loudspeaker is different and have a different characteristic. There are plenty of high-end hifi systems around, however that is not compatible with being on a strict budget. The solution; proper headphones with a quantified frequency response. If I know the characteristic of the headphones I use to mix, I can create a custom opposite EQ filter on my master track to balance the headphone’s characteristic. In that way I could do the mixing with an almost flat response characteristic.I got a couple of headphones with a known and quantified frequency response. Here is the response chart from my Shure SRH440s:
graphcompare
And here is the EQ filter that I add to my master output, the same shape but inverted in order to flatten the response:eq-srh-440
This approach turned out to work quite well and I ended up with a balanced mix that sound ok on a number of loudspeakers.Next I added a little bit of subtractibe EQ on some of the tracks, in order to remove unwanted frequency ranges. For instance, limiting the bass to the low end, removing unwanted resonances etc.The final step in the mixing was to add a little bit of compression. Here I tried various settings of settings and ratios until I ended up with a result that I was satisfied with.In the end I ended up with a result that I was happy with. Could it be better if I had let a professional mixing engineer do the mixing? Most certainly, but hey then I wouldn’t learn anything and not have fun working with mixing on my own.