Troubleshooting Mixing Environment Calibration

[Wumples]

Hi guys! My mixing environment seems to be ruining my mixes, and it’s driving me crazy.
I spend hours mixing a track through my Yamaha HS8s (with accompanying sub) in a very quiet, reasonably-shaped room with some treatment. It’s not a professional-grade set-up, but it’s probably more conducive to accurate monitoring than your average home studio. (Or at least it should be in theory).

I tinker with a mix until it sounds great in my studio. I burn a copy to test out in other listening environments, such as my car. In those other environments, though, my carefully-crafted mix sounds absolutely terrible – nothing like it does through my monitors. It’s a disheartening feeling.
And this is what’s confusing: commercial mixes sound similarly good through my studio monitors – more clear than they do anywhere else. But… they also sound excellent in my car. And excellent on my office computer. And excellent through a stereo system. The mixes I make ONLY sound great in one place: my studio. Elsewhere, they’re muddy and lifeless.

Clearly I’m missing something very fundamental. I find myself using my car as the ultimate reference point for making EQ adjustments, wishing that I could mix through my lousy car speakers instead of in my dedicated monitoring space. And no one should ever feel that way. I know I’m never going to produce good-sounding tracks until I can cultivate a listening/mixing experience that translates similarly across a variety of listening environments.

I’ve been tempted to put a temporary EQ on my master bus that is configured to simulate how lifeless my mixes sound elsewhere. (The idea being that the EQ will trick me into making a mix that sounds sonically pleasing elsewhere.) That’s how desperate I am.

I’ve never used a spectrum analyzer, and I wonder if it might be insightful to compare the frequency ranges of my mixes with commercial tracks that sound good across all platforms.

Do you guys have any tips for calibrating my mixing space so that my mixes will translate nicely everywhere? And might you have a theory as to what’s going wrong for me currently? Another data point: I can hear reverb nuances much better through my headphones than through my monitors, which may or may not be typical. Anyway, thanks a lot for the help!

- Daniel

[BertKoor]

I get the impression your hs8's sound somewhat bright, and you compensate for that. Also it requires a lot of practice to get it right, fight the mud is really tough. Usually mud is a sign of too much happening in the midrange.

Room should not be the problem, but don't rule it out yet. Can you post an example?

Listening is key. Identify exactly what the problem is, which track of the many contributes to mud, and how. Usually fixed with EQ: scoop out a bit of the offending frequency.
Set midrange band to boost, sweep the freq to find the spot where it sounds worst, then trim it back to dip.

[Spin Boyz]

This changed the way I mix everything and I don't even use Reason. Any DAW should have a mono button. I mix in mono on a single Behringer C50A and switch to my headphone/monitors for panning and such.

https://youtu.be/RNxhfTKIrew

[Wumples]

Thanks for the tips! I think you're right Bert - I bought the HS8s because they sounded "good" to me. I'm now understanding that sounding "good" isn't necessarily the objective of a studio monitor. They do seem to be on the bright end, in any case. And Spin Boyz - I liked that video. I've considered mixing more in mono, and now I think I'll pick up a single, separate monitor to do precisely that. I'll post mix examples once I've corrected these glaring deficiencies and I'm angling to improve more nuanced issues. Thanks for weighing in!

[Wumples]

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9d1d ... bp?retry=1

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9d1d ... bp?retry=1

I’ve posted a couple of photos of my room for forum members to pick apart (and likely be mortified by, haha). It’s an elongated space at least, which is a plus. A few aspects I suspect might be problematic:

1. I don’t have any bass traps.
2. I don’t have a panel overhead.
3. My monitors (mostly out of necessity) are located closer to the back wall than would be ideal. The monitors do feature a setting that supposedly helps in circumstances where they are positioned close to a back wall; I have this engaged.

Presently I’ve just lined the upper walls with giant panels of Owens Corning, roughly 1.5” thick and covered with green fabric.

[RichieWitch]

I have the HS7's and it's not so much that they're bright, as that they don't really translate the low end well. When I had my first track professionally mastered, the engineer mentioned that I had an overwhelming amount of bass in the mix, and I told him I could see it on a spectrum analyzer, but could not hear it in the studio.

Since then, I've learned to start with a standard eq curve on the bass, with the help of a spectrum analyzer, and that helps me start at a reasonable level. My mixes have been a lot more successful since then.

[Wumples]

Thanks Richie! I'll definitely incorporate a spectrum analyzer as well.