Mixing electronic/dance music in untreated rooms (edited)

[_al_]

Note that if properly placed, furniture can provide acoustic treatment to some degree - a bookshelf with assorted sized books can serve as a diffuser, a sofa or folding futon at room boundaries can give some bass trapping. Run frequency sweeps to discover the nodes/resonances of your room, and try working at a calibrated level.

You are on the right track with referencing, awareness of volume levels, switching speakers, etc. To the latter point I'd highly recommend integrating a small sealed single-driver speaker for mono listening with minimal phase issues. It's definitely a humbling process to compare ones' output with the greats, and it's also the best way to learn.

+1 on the furniture thing. I also noticed that on rainy days, my room seems a lot less boomy which is extremely annoying.

On the mono topic, i use a single plugin to turn it to mono and also turn the volume down by -20 db.
It sits bypassed on my master, and at various points i'll just switch it on and listen. then, i'll play a reference track and listen some more.

[ONST (UK)]

EDIT: it was a pointless frustration rant post, but let's try to turn into something more useful.

- Using well-mixed reference tracks. This is probably the most obvious recommendation, but in reality finding a track in the same key, same bpm, with the same kind of groove, similar instruments with similar placement in the mix is not always easy. And obviously the room defects will infulence my perception of the reference track as well (especially the bass and kick which is the most improtant and the most tricky part).


What else?

You're mixing electronic tracks, right? Put all your tracks in rekordbox and analyse them. You'll then come away with an easy way to find the same key (to an extent), track type, genre, bpm then sort by label type if you want to get more detailed with finding a groove type. Obviously the more tracks you have the better.

[recursive one]

One thing that really helped me a lot:
Load up a synth, initialize it, switch the saw to a sine.

Now, grab a pen and paper (or win text doc), sit in your mixing position, and start playing single notes on your keyboard (or piano roll).
I only did this for the bass area (30 - 600hz), but that's your choice. (oh and remember to change analyzer slope to about 4.5db per oct, or you wont see a balanced spectrum. I'm sure you know that, but i'm writing it for other people)

Ok so your analyzer will be telling you that all notes are playing at the same volume, but your ears probably won't agree. So start writing down notes every time one of the keys sounds a little bit louder or quieter.

For the next step, i'll use my own experience to make it easier to explain:
So when playing the sine, i noticed that my room had an extreme resonance at 90hz. That particular key just boomed out so much louder than the others, i was amazed i had actually managed to work in this room. (can't actually remember what key it was though).
So i loaded up an EQ onto the synth's channel, and messed with the EQ curve and depth, until i was able to play the keyboard, and hear a steady volume across that area.
Turns out i had to give it a cut of 6 or 7 db, which seemed extremely scary, considering i was going to mix through this EQ, but then i realized it was either that, or work with the equivalent of a 6db boost at 90hz.

In the end, i kinda chickened out and met the cut half way at 4db, but even with that, i felt much more comfortable in my mixing.

The reason i only did this test up to 600hz is that once i got into midrange territory, there were so many dips and peaks it was just ridiculous. So i decided if i could just get the bass right, i can deal with the rest using reference tracks and headphones.

Hope that's of some use.
I've since fixed my room, but looking back, i think it may have been better to use linear phase, not sure

So basically you did what the automatic room correction systems are supposed to do, but manually? Interesting, thanks a lot for sharing this.

Btw, does someone have any experience with ARCs? For example, this one

https://www.sonarworks.com/reference

Thanks for all the replies, it's very helpful and gives some food for thought.

I've just bought a pack of professionally produced psytrance kick/bass stems. While I'm not going to use them as such in my tracks for obvious reasons, I can use them as a guidance for designing and processing my own basslines.

Psytrance as a genre needs absolute technical perfection, it's much less forgiving to mixing errors than some other genres. I wish I have realized this much earlier.

[_al_]

Yeah i never thought about that, but i guess it is ARC.

About the mixing: when you finally finish a track you're happy with, try using that as a template for your next track. This has saved me so much time and fiddling, i would hate to have to start a new track from scratch.
I just save as new file name, and immediately change the kick and main lead (making sure the random preset i put in, is still sounding good in the mix).
From there i have a perfect starting point, because everything is sounding as it should for that particular instrument.

Enjoyed Safe Travels btw. If that was my track, my next step would be toning down the low mids in some of those leads, as they kinda stick out. I would probably also change the melody of the lead at 3:12, as it doesn't sound right to me. almost has a nursery rhyme quality (IMO).
The rest sounds great. Though i definitely think it needs more compression. Personally i would use a multiband on everything over 10k, just to bring up the lows, and not squash the highs (melda/maximus style).

[recursive one]

About the mixing: when you finally finish a track you're happy with, try using that as a template for your next track. This has saved me so much time and fiddling, i would hate to have to start a new track from scratch.

Yeah, I use templates I've made myself, they typically contain kick, percussion, bass, some submix busses and send effects. Thing is I 'm never actually happy with my mixes so I change my tempaltes all the time

Actually I thought about buying professionally mixed psytrance templates but nobody is making them for my DAW. This would be sort of cheating though, the next step would be just using prefabricated loops.

Enjoyed Safe Travels btw. If that was my track, my next step would be toning down the low mids in some of those leads, as they kinda stick out. I would probably also change the melody of the lead at 3:12, as it doesn't sound right to me. almost has a nursery rhyme quality (IMO).
The rest sounds great. Though i definitely think it needs more compression. Personally i would use a multiband on everything over 10k, just to bring up the lows, and not squash the highs (melda/maximus style).

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. I'm still making some small improvements to this mix and I plan to have it professionally mastered together with a bunch of other tracks of some point. Btw, everybody who had ever commented my mixes in detail noticed that excessive low mids in leads thing. On this particular mix I tried to eq this area especially agressively but either i targeted wrong frequencies or the eqing wasn't agressive enough. The room, i guess ... [sigh]

That lead is weird but psytrance is supposed to have some weirdness I'll work more on the synth timbre but probably won't change the melody itself, i like it in the context.

[Samplecraze]

Recursive, you not funky with headphone mixing? It does alleviate the issue of poor room acoustics. I have tinnitus and use headphones in conjunction with monitors for stereo imaging. Because of my tinnitus I listen at very low volume and things can get lost when you're at whisper levels. I use Sonarworks to audition different cans and speaker modes and between all of the above and some quality ganja I somehow end up with a finished product. Now, whether it's good or not is another issue.