Does my mix sound good? - 5 tips to find out!
Being an artist, you must have made many efforts to make your mix sound really great. Specifically, if you are in music production or are a mixing engineer, you want to take a piece of awesome music to reach the listeners. So, here are five tips you can use to find out if your mix sounds good.
#1. Listen through different headphones and speakers
Begin to check your mix by listening to it on different sets of studio speakers. It can help you get more assurance of your flaws and rectify them beforehand. You can also try to listen to music on your car speakers. Further, MX Studio headphones can be helpful as most people love to hear music on headphones. At the final stages of the mixing process, you can switch from speakers to headphones to ensure that the final output doesn’t sound weird to people. These may be studio headphones, commercial headphones, and dynamic stereo headphones. Finally, you can hear the mix on Bluetooth speakers and laptop speakers.
Here are my favorite studio headphones and speakers:
#2. Refer to another track
You can use referencing technique to refer your mix to some popular song. With the help of a plugin, it will be easy to compare different ranges in the mix, such as low-end, high-end, and mid-range. Alternatively, you can put an “eq” on the mastering track to match different sounds. This technique is essential when matching your mix with some popular song(s) and answering the question, “Does my mix sound good”.
#3. Showcase your mix to a friend in the non-music industry
One of the best ways to check if your mix is a treat for music listeners is to showcase it to someone unrelated to the music industry. They would provide you with feedback that you might not have noticed earlier. With their feedback, you learn if there’s some tune or sound that might hamper the listening experience of a regular listener. The issue can be even related to different volumes or headphones that others may be using.
#4. Verify via a music producer or a mixing engineer
Apart from getting feedback from an average listener, you should not forget to take the advice from a person into music production or the music industry. They can point out where you can improve the quality of your mix. Just ask them, “Does my mix sound good”. But you can't trust them 100% as different music producers may give you wrong feedback due to their assumption of “knowing-it-all”. You should be able to judge the feedback by trusting your instinct.
#5. Don’t forget to take a break from music
The final yet crucial tip is to take a break for two-three weeks or months and come with fresh ears. Hearing your mix after a break can be helpful to check if it sounds great and would be loved by the listeners out there. Being desperate to release the song back to back may ruin the quality of the sound you want to present to the people. So, it’s better to take time, take a break, and then start working on your prepared mix.
Check out my Youtube video here where I go over all these steps: