Tech Note #3: Evaluating Your Mixes

Ok, so you’ve done your first batch of final mixes on your project, we’ve put them on a CD for you and you are starting to play them outside the highly controlled listening environment of the studio. Now what? How do you really know that you’ve “nailed it”?

Well the first thing you’re going to notice is that the mixes sound frustratingly different every place you play them. Don’t worry about this, it’s absolutely normal and when you think about it, totally expected. There are literally thousands of kinds and brands of speakers in the world from stupendously horrible to amazingly good, as well as a huge variation in listening environments that your music will be played in so don’t expect your music to sound the same everywhere it gets played.

Here is a plan you can follow that will add some structure to your evaluations and give you some peace of mind that you are making the right decisions regarding remixes.

Choose a Control CD
The first thing you need to do is go through your own personal CD library and pick out a CD  that are by major label, big budget artists that play in a similar style to your CD. This would be a disc that always sounds great to you, no matter where you play it. A word of caution here: we are talking about sound quality and balance, not musical content, so make your choice of control CD based on those, not how much you like the songs. This CD should be one that if you could say “If my CD sounded that good, I’d be completely happy”

First Evaluation

In a controlled environment with reasonably high-quality playback play first your control CD for 30 sec or so and then switch as fast as possible to your CD. The longer the time that elapses during the switch, the harder it will be to make an effective evaluation. If you can rig it so that each disc is playing simultaneously in two different CD players and can use your stereo’s source select buttons to instantly switch over, that is a best effort!

Keep switching back and forth listening for key issues. The main things that I listen for are:

Overall amount of lows and highs on the control CD and my recording

The relative balance of lows to highs on the control disc and on my disc

How far above (or below) the music is the lead vocal on the control CD vs. my disc

If these three key issues are ok, you are ready to start playing your CD around in the outside world. If these three issues are not ok, before you panic choose another control CD and do the above three comparisons again. If things are still not ok, then you are probably looking at refining your mixing approach back at the studio. Bring your control CDs to your next mix session and be prepared to tell your engineer what it is that you particularly like about the sound of those recordings.

Moving On

Ok so your mixes pass the first test: good compatibility with your control CD; now it’s time to play it around. The five main playback environments are:

• Home stereos
• Boom Boxes
• Cars
• iPods (mp3 players)
• Computer speakers

The frustrating thing is that your mixes will sound different in all of these systems. The trick is to look for a tendency that is consistent across many of the playback environments. For instance if the recording sounds bass-heavy in your car but fine everywhere else, you probably wouldn’t want to change anything because decent quality car systems are bass enhanced on purpose to compensate for the rumble of the road noise while driving.

However, if the lead vocals are too out-front on your home stereo, your iPod and your computer speakers but acceptable on a boom box and in your car, then you might want to think about shading it down a notch. The trick is to have agreement about a mix element in at least 3 of the 5 playback environments to be sure that you need to do something substantial.

You should repeat this process for all songs on the CD until you have mixes of all songs that sound good in a majority of playback environments.

Final Mix

Once you have all your tunes on disc, mixed well, there is still one final step before you’re ready to send it to the duplicator: the overall loudness check. This test should be done in a moving car since the road noise actually helps to reveal problems. The goal is to be able to play your entire CD in a moving car without feeling like you have to reach for the volume knob on certain cuts as they come around. If your CD passes this test, has consistently good bass/midrange/treble balances from song to song and is mixed to your satisfaction, you are done! Congratulations!!!