1.3 Have You Got the Gear?
You can’t mix to your full potential if you’re using rubbish equipment.
Kind: concept (reamix-section) Chapter: 1 Before We Begin …. Source: ReaMix (October 2009)
You can’t mix to your full potential if you’re using rubbish equipment. Period. This doesn’t mean that you need to have a six figure budget for your studio equipment, but it does mean that you should be sure to do your homework and spend wisely what money you do have. At the very least, you should get a good pair of well positioned nearfield monitors and a decent pair of headphones. Headphones? Mixing? Heresy?
Not really. Of course you’ll primarily be using your speakers for mixing, but there will be times when headphones can help you, especially when you want to check panning, or when you are trying to identify quite subtle audio glitches.
Assuming you have a pro sound card with multiple pairs of outputs, a budget price (and quality) set of speakers can also be handy. These will enable you to test your mixes (frequently and at all stages of development) on the type of speakers that most people will be using to listen to your final product. Happily, REAPER’s Routing Matrix makes it easy to switch back and forth between different speakers.
If your budget will stretch to it, a pair of big wall speakers can also be handy, especially for judging the bass response.
In summary:
Item Comment
A Pro Quality PCI, USB or Firewire Soundcard with multiple pairs of outlets
Essential to allow more than one set of monitors to be used when testing your mixes.
Good Quality Nearfield Monitors, correctly positioned
Essential to produce a good quality mix.
Additional Budget Nearfield Monitors
Will assist in testing how your mixes will sound on the kind of systems they are most likely to be heard on most often.
A Good Pair of Headphones
Assists in checking panning and identifying subtle audio glitches.
Plus … Good wall mounted Speakers
If you can afford them!
I have deliberately refrained from mentioning or recommending any specific brand names. Do your research according to your own particular needs. Find out what other people are using and what they like and what they don’t like, especially for your musical genre.
While we’re talking about equipment, just one more word about headphones.
Mixing through headphones alone is not recommended for a number of reasons (not the least of which is potential damage to your ears). From a sound engineering point of view, headphones seriously distort the integrity of the mix.
This is because headphones will give you 100% separation between left and right ears. This of course is totally different from the effect that you get when listening through speakers. To make matters worse, the quality and dynamic characteristics of headphones vary so enormously from model to model that it is all but impossible to get a good representation of your sound.
If you absolutely have no choice other than to mix through headphones, then at least do what you can to maximise your chances of doing a half decent job. Two pieces of advice:
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Get a good pair which seem to give you as accurate a representation of your musical genre as you can find. This is one area where if you’re going to skimp on cost you might as well just give up before you start.
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Insert a plug-in such as VnoPhones in your Master, at the end of the FX chain. This allows you to make adjustments so that the sound scape that you hear in your headphones will more closely resemble that which you would hear through speakers.
In the end, of course, you’ll have to do the best you can with whatever you can afford. That’s fine, so long as you don’t expect to produce a million dollar mix using $50 headphones or $100 speakers alone.