You mixed it in headphones
for three hours
and it sounded enormous.
You sent it to a friend.
She played it on her phone
in a kitchen,
and there was no low end,
the vocal sat behind the guitars,
and the thing you spent
the whole evening on
was inaudible.
Nothing went wrong.
You mixed for a room
that only you were ever in.
Small speakers cannot reproduce
the bottom of your mix.
Phones, laptops,
the thing on a kitchen counter,
they all give up somewhere
below the part you were proud of,
and that is where
most of your listeners live,
doing something else,
at a volume you would call quiet.
So check it there.
Not at the end.
Halfway through,
while there is still time
to change the arrangement
rather than nudge a fader.
Listen quiet.
Loud flatters everything.
At low volume you hear balance,
and balance is the only thing
a mix actually is.
Walk out of the room
and leave it playing.
From the hallway
you stop hearing your decisions
and start hearing the song,
and you will know in four seconds
whether the vocal is loud enough.
Check it in mono.
One speaker sums your channels,
and two things you carefully placed
on opposite sides
can cancel each other
into nothing at all.
Then put on a record you know,
on the same speakers,
at the same volume.
Your memory of how music sounds
is not a reference.
The record is.
And respect the clock.
Your ears adapt in twenty minutes.
After two hours
you are no longer judging the mix.
You are following it,
which is why everything creeps upward,
and why the version
you loved at midnight
is embarrassing at nine.
Come back to it cold.
The lesson is not about audio.
You always build in the good room,
on the fast machine,
with the whole thing already
loaded in your head.
Nobody else is standing there.
Go and listen
where they are listening.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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