Originally Posted by SoundGuyDave
Multi-reply....
READ-- A "good" room is going to be one that is neutral in tonal response, and not particularly "lively" in character. Getting that combination (particularly the tonal aspect) is not something that you're going to find very often with home-brew solutions. Look for a professionally-designed and -built studio rather than a converted room if you're paying for the rental. Two main things to look for first, before you audition the room would be proper design and treatment. For the design, you should notice that there are NO two surfaces (walls, ceiling, floor) that are parallel to each other, but the room should maintain symmetry around the mix position laterally. For treatment, look for bass trapping (4" or greater panels or quarter-round tubes) in all the vertical corners, and possibly at the wall/ceiling joints as well. For wall treatment, look for a blend of absorption and diffusion. If you find a place you think you might like, audition the room. When you walk in, clap your hands once, hard. You should hear NO audible slap-echo, nor should it be billowy and echo-y. Then have a conversation with the owner, while you're asking him/her who designed the room and who built it, listen to how the room reacts to his voice. Wander around the room while they're talking. You want as large a "sweet spot" as you can get, but nowhere in the room should sound "odd." You want a room that both sounds spacious, but also sounds tight. Listen specifically for certain tones sticking out louder than others. If it passes all that, throw on a recording or two that you know INTIMATELY, and see if you can pick out details you don't hear in your own room. If the room is "right," you'll hear depth and space that you don't at home, and it will be a LOT easier to judge the left-right positioning of the mix elements. If you find that room, write the check and get mixing! A few tips to save money: 1) Do as MUCH of the work at home as you can, and just go into the studio to check or refine. No sense paying for the time if you're programming automation lanes, or importing and arranging tracks. 2) Ask about discounts for off-hours (2:00AM on a Wednesday will be cheaper than 3:00PM on a Friday), and also ask about discounts for pre-paying for a certain number of hours. If the studio rate is $50/hr, ask what they can do for you if you want 2hrs a day, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2:00AM, if you pre-pay for the month in advance...You'd be surprised at how low they may be willing to go to get a "simple" client. After all, once you get your laptop and sound card wired in, you're all self-service. The studio intern can handle that. Also, if you're mixing "in the box," it really doesn't matter what cool outboard is on-hand, you can do as good a job, or better, in a smaller, cheaper room. A mastering room is actually ideal. Cheaper to rent than the "Studio A" control room with a 72-input SSL G-series desk and 80U of vintage tube outboard, too!
NOOJOYSEY: Respectfully, I have to disagree with you here. It's really all about translation from one playback situation to another. If you mix on earbuds or headphones, you're going to have a VERY different approach to panning and ambience than you would if you mix "in a room." If your untreated room (or earbuds for that matter) have a massive deficiency in the low-end reproduction (for example), you don't hear ANYTHING wrong when mixing, but when you listen to it anywhere else, the bottom end will be mush. If, however, you mix in a "perfect" environment, that WILL translate beautifully to a mono cellphone speaker or cheap earbuds. The reverse is certainly and demonstrably not true.
DVDDOUG: Good tip on the "reference" material, but I still maintain that if you can't hear the note, you've got no hope of mixing it properly in context with the rest... Mixing is a series of critical decisions, and you can only make decisions on the information you have. In this case, the information is what you hear. Monitors with a "bump" in the response will trick you into mixing light in that frequency area. Monitors with a "hole" in the response will trick you into mixing heavy in that frequency area. Headphones with artificial bass and HF boosts will push you into a midrange-heavy mix. The same thing applies to a room. A small bedroom mix room, untreated, will have a series of cancellation and reinforcement nodes scattered throughout the room. That's just pure physics. Your mix will reflect those nodes, since that is what you hear to base your decisions on. That same small, untreated room will also have significant reflections in the mid and high frequencies from the walls, ceiling and floor, not to mention all the "stuff" in the room. Those reflections can alter how you perceive the "proper" amount of reverb within the mix, and can blur the positioning of a signal in the stereo field. RE: Headphones. I agree with you to a point, you don't need to break the bank, BUT the more coloration you have in the cans, the more "effect" they have on the mix. Seems like the "reference standards" these days are the AKG K701/K702 (~$600 list), Sennheiser HD800 ($1800!!!), or Shure SRH-1840 (~$650 list). And yes, don't mix single-source with headphones! You can, however, get quite a bit done on cans, then check your results on proper monitors in a room. There is a difference in how the stereo field interacts in the room that you just can't get on headphones. That said, I understand Andrew Scheps is now mixing exclusively on headphones, so...
GEROGEMICKEL: The Sonarworks stuff does look interesting, but even if you have a PERFECTLY calibrated speaker set, but put them in a boomy echo chamber, how much have you really gained? In a basic treated room, though, that can be the icing on the cake.
AKADEMIE: Agreed 100%. Metering is NEVER a bad thing, but the primary go/no-go decision still needs to be done with your ears. I've seen wayyyyy too many guys get focused on the pretty lines on the screen, obsessing about 0.2dB EQ filters with a Q of 7, while the whole mix is falling apart around them.
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