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BeatKreatoR
Thoughts And Processes As Relating To Mixing With Headphones
(How Not To Hang Yourself By Mixing With Headphones)
by LXH2
headwize.com
It can be easily demonstrated that doing your final mixes with headphones can produce stellar mixes when the mixing engineer is familiar with the practices of mixing with headphones. But how is this possible? I have heard from so many mixing engineers that you can not mix with headphones for many reasons. The one that most frequently is that things sound too good in headphones to get an accurate mix. How can this be true? If you can hear things better in headphones, then why not mix with them? The answer lies in the familiarity of the environment. Most likely the mixer has always mixed using loudspeakers, and can be rather confident that the mixes produced will sound correct on the largest variety of playback devices.
Then why mix with headphones? For one thing, the loudspeakers react with the room so that you hear the room effects while you are mixing. Sure, most of the best recording engineers can mentally ignore the room sound so that they can create a mix what is not befuddled by room acoustics. For the home studio person, we usually do not have a professionally designed control room to work in. We also do not have luxury of using the best sounding room in ones residence. So we are relegated to a little room that is virtually impossible to mix in. What sounded great when you were mixing it, now sounds anemic when played elsewhere. What happened? All that bass that piles up in such a small room, the inaccuracies if the "monitors", and the total collapse of any likeness of a realistic soundstage. Wow!
Slip on a correctly calibrated pair of high quality headphones, and listen to your favorite CDs for a while. Then listen to your mixes that you made using speakers. Do you notice the difference? Are you mixes lacking clarity and life? Do not start blaming this piece of gear or that piece of gear. Most likely it is the result of mixing with loudspeakers in a bad room. Why not eliminate the room altogether? So lets use the headphones!
Another advantage of mixing with headphones is the clarity of the sonic picture due to perfect time alignment inherent in headphones. You do not have to deal with the room resonances and phase cancellations due to reflections off the walls and the console. The time smear caused by the typical nearfield monitor situation can gloss over things you will want to hear clearly when you are mixing. This is where you can lose control of your mix and run into trouble using speakers.
Mixing with headphones will take some getting used to. You should make a copy of your mix, and play it through various playback systems such as boom boxes and car stereos. Try listening in a variety of environments,and not the same little room. This will keep things in perspective, as a "reality check". If your headphone mix does not sound good in these situations, then you are doing something wrong. But what are you doing wrong? Like any new skill, you must gradually familiarize yourself with different acoustic space that headphones create. This takes some time and practice. You will know when you have it down when your mixes sound correct on a variety of systems.
STEREO PLACEMENT
Good stereo placement in headphones requires that the mikes be placed in such a manner as to facilitate the sonic illusion you desire. There are ways to use stereo reverb to do this. This can be divided into two distinct arenas. One is how to create a convincing stereo image from a signal source that does not occur in real acoustic space, and the other is how to utilize stereo miking techniques to obtain a real stereo image that does not sound annoying in headphones. You would never be able to tell if a particular stereo field sounded really distressing in headphones if you only used the speakers in the control room.
Using a stereo miking technique during your tracking process:
There are several common stereo miking techniques used. some of which are: m-s, spaced pair, ortf, coincident pair and dummy head. For the purpose of this article, I will discuss a binaural "roving mike" method I have used, and have had quite good results. I can record an entire song using only the roving mike system. Each instrument will be recorded separately using two tracks. When mixing this song, I will use no panning or reverb, just the levels of each stereo pair.
(How Not To Hang Yourself By Mixing With Headphones)
by LXH2
headwize.com
It can be easily demonstrated that doing your final mixes with headphones can produce stellar mixes when the mixing engineer is familiar with the practices of mixing with headphones. But how is this possible? I have heard from so many mixing engineers that you can not mix with headphones for many reasons. The one that most frequently is that things sound too good in headphones to get an accurate mix. How can this be true? If you can hear things better in headphones, then why not mix with them? The answer lies in the familiarity of the environment. Most likely the mixer has always mixed using loudspeakers, and can be rather confident that the mixes produced will sound correct on the largest variety of playback devices.
Then why mix with headphones? For one thing, the loudspeakers react with the room so that you hear the room effects while you are mixing. Sure, most of the best recording engineers can mentally ignore the room sound so that they can create a mix what is not befuddled by room acoustics. For the home studio person, we usually do not have a professionally designed control room to work in. We also do not have luxury of using the best sounding room in ones residence. So we are relegated to a little room that is virtually impossible to mix in. What sounded great when you were mixing it, now sounds anemic when played elsewhere. What happened? All that bass that piles up in such a small room, the inaccuracies if the "monitors", and the total collapse of any likeness of a realistic soundstage. Wow!
Slip on a correctly calibrated pair of high quality headphones, and listen to your favorite CDs for a while. Then listen to your mixes that you made using speakers. Do you notice the difference? Are you mixes lacking clarity and life? Do not start blaming this piece of gear or that piece of gear. Most likely it is the result of mixing with loudspeakers in a bad room. Why not eliminate the room altogether? So lets use the headphones!
Another advantage of mixing with headphones is the clarity of the sonic picture due to perfect time alignment inherent in headphones. You do not have to deal with the room resonances and phase cancellations due to reflections off the walls and the console. The time smear caused by the typical nearfield monitor situation can gloss over things you will want to hear clearly when you are mixing. This is where you can lose control of your mix and run into trouble using speakers.
Mixing with headphones will take some getting used to. You should make a copy of your mix, and play it through various playback systems such as boom boxes and car stereos. Try listening in a variety of environments,and not the same little room. This will keep things in perspective, as a "reality check". If your headphone mix does not sound good in these situations, then you are doing something wrong. But what are you doing wrong? Like any new skill, you must gradually familiarize yourself with different acoustic space that headphones create. This takes some time and practice. You will know when you have it down when your mixes sound correct on a variety of systems.
STEREO PLACEMENT
Good stereo placement in headphones requires that the mikes be placed in such a manner as to facilitate the sonic illusion you desire. There are ways to use stereo reverb to do this. This can be divided into two distinct arenas. One is how to create a convincing stereo image from a signal source that does not occur in real acoustic space, and the other is how to utilize stereo miking techniques to obtain a real stereo image that does not sound annoying in headphones. You would never be able to tell if a particular stereo field sounded really distressing in headphones if you only used the speakers in the control room.
Using a stereo miking technique during your tracking process:
There are several common stereo miking techniques used. some of which are: m-s, spaced pair, ortf, coincident pair and dummy head. For the purpose of this article, I will discuss a binaural "roving mike" method I have used, and have had quite good results. I can record an entire song using only the roving mike system. Each instrument will be recorded separately using two tracks. When mixing this song, I will use no panning or reverb, just the levels of each stereo pair.
