Why Your Mix Doesn’t Translate
(And How to Fix It)

[00:00:00] Welcome to the next mix session video blog. Today I would like to talk about a very important topic that troubles many of us. You've been working on a mix forever. Put all your love and heart in, and then eventually you check it in the car. And the results are very underwhelming there. Maybe you also find the same thing when you take it to friend's house or a different playback system.

[00:00:27] This is a problem that a lot of musicians and mix engineers face. And we call this problem translation. That is, it happens when a mix sounds good in one place, and you're very happy there, but suddenly it no longer sounds good in another place. It could be that the kick base balance is completely out of whack.

[00:00:54] It might be that you realize the mix, uh, the vocals don't sit in the mix as you expect it. You might have overdone the reverbs or maybe underdone. Maybe it's the stereo image, but there's something clearly not right when you listen elsewhere. That's when we talk about a mix that has trouble translating, and translating is a very important part of, uh, the quality of a mix.

[00:01:20] There's a few things that I would prioritize personally, very high.

[00:01:28] There are a few things that personally I would prioritize very high, and that is first and foremost, of course, how a mix feels emotionally, how people respond to it on an emotional level. And then mixed translation, uh, needs to come very soon after, and it's the mixes ability to sound good. In the studio or in the car, or in a PA system, or even on a terrible mobile phone on earbuds, what have you.

[00:01:56] We always want to hear a good sounding mix, and that is actually something that is not easily achieved. So let me just start by saying if this is something you experience, you are not alone.

[00:02:09] Let's talk about the problem you're facing. It has to do with your monitoring. monitoring is one of those things that we really want to get right. If your monitoring system doesn't show you what accurately happens, you are actually mixing in the dark, and this is exactly the situation you're probably in if your mix consistently translates badly in other environments.

[00:02:36] What I'm trying to say is that you're not actually hearing how your mix really sounds. But instead you hear a warped or shaped version that is strongly influenced by a playback system and probably also. Very likely by your room itself, so the room acoustics come into play and they shape what you hear.

[00:02:58] So what's my point here? You actually never had a fair chance to get the mix right in the first place because the way it sounded to you in your room. Uh, possibly a bedroom or a domestic living room or so, um, was never an accurate representation that could manifest itself. Uh, typically in base inaccuracies, for example, the kick and base instrument balance, the level between those two, the push and pull is something that we definitely want to get right in the mix, and that's a very good, fun thing to do when it works.

[00:03:34] However, there's a very good chance that your room actually doesn't show you the base response acid really is. Instead, it's like you see your mix through a warped mirror. You've probably seen one of those before where suddenly the hat goes too big and the body gets too small a warped mirror. That's the same thing that can happen with your base.

[00:03:55] Some areas of your base can be over-emphasized or warped, made bigger in your room. While other areas may appear smaller, and this of course is a big thing if you don't get the base and kick right, that's probably because of it. Then of course there's other inaccuracies. So typically speaking, um, we need the very best speakers that we can afford, but the room is of course, equally as important.

[00:04:29] So buying, let's say. Some $5,000 Norman speakers. I love my Norman speakers. Um, is a great idea. But if you put them in an untreated room, that's a little bit like buying some Ferrari tires and putting a bit on my old Mitsubishi four wheel drive. It's not a good match for one another, a high quality device with something rather average.

[00:04:54] So in other words, what you hear is the sum of all of it. So if you buy very expensive speakers, they just won't perform as they theoretically could in an untreated room, and the results might be underwhelming. So it's the room acoustics that need to be in a balance with your speakers. And then once you've got the room acoustics under control, you probably find that, you know, even mid-range speakers can actually sound really, really good.

[00:05:23] And you will also find that very expensive speakers in an untreated room will probably not sound fantastic at all. So this is a very common problem. We need to get this balance right. As a general rule, you always get opposite effects. For example, if your low end is too heavy. Then you hear your mix initially with too much base and your brain will automatically straighten that out and compensate probably by reducing some base so that it sounds normal again, when you now hear it in the car or elsewhere, your base, uh, range will be too light and your mix will lose weight in the bottom end.

[00:06:04] Other examples, if your speakers are too bright. Then you will have the tendency to mix a little bit darker to avoid the piercing sound in your ears when you hear it. But, uh, that means everywhere else it's now gonna sound dull. So you always get opposites effect, opposite effects. And this also applies, for example, to the stereo width.

[00:06:28] Mm example, if your speakers are way too far apart. In that case, you actually hear stairway width inflated, or you hear it stronger than it actually is. Which probably makes you happy with the stereo image at a point where it's actually not wide enough quite yet. In other words, you will probably mix two mono and we could turn this on its head.

[00:06:53] If your speakers are too close together, chances are you work really hard and getting some width happening, and on some other systems it will be now way too wide. So I hope you understand the concept of opposites effects of opposite effects really applies here. And that's not on you. You didn't stand a chance in the first place because you actually didn't know what was going on.

[00:07:19] You just reacted correctly and logically to inaccurate information. So that's really where it's coming from. It's not you. A lot of people go through the same thing, so it's really not you. It's the room acoustics more than anything. If we put things into perspective, I would say the room acoustics. That's where the majority comes from.

[00:07:42] And then we could look at the actual quality of the speakers. Yes, that is there and exists in real life, but it's not as severe as the room acoustics. Good. So that's the general problem, and let's look at practical fixes for that. The reason why all of this happens is, uh, caused by two main acoustic effects.

[00:08:07] One is known as standing waves. They're also known as room modes. That's the same thing. And then of course there's also room reflections. That's when sound bounces off a wall and hits back at you. And these two main effects lead to a whole range of problems. What problems you face specifically? Well, that really depends.

[00:08:31] It depends on the room you're in. And no room is just alike, unless, of course they're exactly of the same dimensions and surface materials. So it's a very unique problem that you will face. So let me go into a little bit more detail. Standing waves are the ones, um, where you hear base nodes unevenly loud.

[00:08:55] It goes one step further. It's not only that a certain base node might be louder than it actually is, and another one is quieter. It goes one step further. This pattern depends on where you are in the room. So if you, let's say, move your head backwards by a meter now, or you listen on the other end of the room, the balance of which base frequencies become too loud and which becomes too quiet now shifts in a different place.

[00:09:25] So this is a really tricky thing to work with, and I will give you some strategies a little bit later on to start to assess the situation. The next thing that we then need to talk about is a room reflections. A room reflections happen. For example, if a speaker throw sound into the room, but also backwards.

[00:09:49] Towards the wall behind, then bounces off the wall and moves forward again so that a second wave front. Front follows the initial one a little bit delayed. This is an effect called speaker boundary interference response, or SPIR. That's not something that you need to remember at this point, but what we need to understand is that this effect has a severe effect on bumps and dips in the base of, uh, base range, in the low frequency range, in addition to the remotes that you already have.

[00:10:25] So it becomes trickier and trick. Reflections then span across the entire frequency spectrum, base mids, high mids. Eventually the highs, let me just tell you that you can rest assures the high frequencies are rarely the biggest problem. Most of the time we look at it from the bottom up base, mids, and then eventually highs.

[00:10:48] So if we move on from the base range range to the mid-range. You will find that. Now we get reflections, also known as room tone. That's what you hear when you clap your hands really loud in your room. Give that a try and really focus on how the room echoes through the room and what you hear. Chances are you will actually learn something valuable, uh, about your room.

[00:11:14] What you can do as well is to just record it with a microphone, throw it in your computer, and slap it with a compressor to pull the transient down and pull the tail up to really put it under the microscope and really, really, really here. The room characteristics, but let's not overthink this. That's not what we're here for.

[00:11:35] Um, what reflections will do is they will smear and the stereo image and the clarity of your mix, especially in the mid range. And again, this can lead to overcompensation. So if there's, let's say a reverberate buildup of. And the low mids, for example, we tend to scoop them out too much in the mix. So again, opposite effects will happen.

[00:12:00] So let's look at practical solutions over here. I've gone back to my notes. So things you can do first and foremost, make yourself aware of what's going on. And there are a couple of tests that are really smart and really worth investigating. So do the following in your DAW load, an empty sampler instrument.

[00:12:27] That could be, you know, whatever DAW it is most simpler instrument when you don't load a patch into it can still be played with a keyboard, in which case they will simply play a sine wave or a pure tone as a replacement. Then take the mouse, make yourself a midi, uh, clip and drop in some notes. And what we wanna do is a staircase up from the very lows, um, maybe two or three octaves and make each one well a little bit longer, maybe a second or so.

[00:13:02] So once the velocity is the same. And, uh, the note length is the same and we have one note playing after another. You can just hit play and listen back in your room. As your speakers now play these sign waves in the room, and of course they will go up and pitch. You should hear that. But very interestingly, you will also hear the volume of them going up and down.

[00:13:27] And that's the effect of a range of different problems, including remotes and of course, our speaker boundary interference. So you will now get a better idea of what's going on. A smart idea is to repeat the same test, why you move to the room of the, uh, back of the room, sit on the couch at the back, for example, and listen to the same thing again in a different place.

[00:13:54] You can also repeat this procedure on the left speaker only and on the right speaker only, and see if that by itself makes a difference that you will definitely learn something very interesting about your room. How it sounds in the low range. So what we are trying to do now is we try to make you aware of the warp that the, now that you hear your mirror or that, that the warp mirror that you hear your music through.

[00:14:21] I hope your this, I hope this analogy makes sense to you.

[00:14:29] Once you get a bit of an idea of what problems you face, you cannot play. Move speakers around the room. I've found that just with a bit of attention to speaker placement, a better listening environment could be created really easily, and that's very simple to do, and most importantly, it's free. So I would typically start the following way, switch one of your speakers off play music only through the other.

[00:14:58] Now play some music that you know quite well and that you're familiar with. And now move the speaker a bit closer to the wall or a bit closer towards you, and focus on instruments, particular bass and kick switch to another song. Try at least two or three. You don't need to listen through 'em start to finish.

[00:15:17] It's okay to just skip through them, but get different sonic textures and see how that responds. There's a very good chance that you might find that one place just doesn't feel right and another one feels, yeah, like more. Better, nicer. Um, yeah, and then experiment with that until you say, yep, that's a sweet spot.

[00:15:38] That's where I like it. Once you have done that, repeat the same procedure with the other speaker and see if you move the speaker the second speaker round, if you also find good patches or bad patches. Lastly, of course, you need to listen to both together, so that's when you want to listen to music in stereo.

[00:16:00] Things to consider. Does the left and the right speaker sound approximately the same? This is when I would stop playing music for a moment and instead play a pink noise. Your DAW should have a signal generator of some sort that can produce a pink noise, and then you pan it to the left and then slowly pan it to the right.

[00:16:20] You can also do it rapidly. Rapidly, will typically show you sonic differences between left and right, even clearer. What you can learn from a slow pan left and right is whether your speakers are too far or too close. Example. So if you play it on this speaker and then you slowly pan it across and it feels like in the middle, the volumes tends to drop and then come back up on the other side.

[00:16:48] Maybe your speakers are too far apart and you're experiencing what we call a hole in the middle means. Sound in the middle is not too quiet. And remember what this does, everything has opposite effects. Everything that you typically place in the mid, uh, in the center section of your, of your mix, like kick and bass and vocals, you will probably try to compensate by bringing them up a bit too much.

[00:17:16] You see where I'm going with that? That's when suddenly it no longer translates elsewhere. Or the other example could be that pan pink noise from one speaker slowly to the other side, and you feel like there's a bump in the middle and it gets louder. If that's the case, it's the opposite, and chances are you wanna bring your speakers a little bit closer.

[00:17:38] Excuse me, bring him a bit further apart. This is a good test, uh, to make yourself aware of what's going on in your, uh, um, in your room and how it actually translates. In an ideal world, I would like to hear the signal about equally loud from one speaker from the center and pat dance straight on the middle.

[00:17:59] When pan straight on the middle or from the other speaker, that's often a good starting point. Other considerations. The textbooks say that speakers in the listening position should be arranged in an equilateral triangle. That is generally true, and this is the work of Mr. Allen Blue Line. A well reg regarded engineer from a long, long time ago, the inventor of stereo. He also invented the bloom line stereo technique, which is actually the yeah from, from which actually the Equate Triangle was derived, and it's still true in many studios.

[00:18:42] This said, I typically take that as a starting point, not as a firm law. For example, there are some situations in which I personally feel like the speakers need to be slightly closer together or a little bit further apart. And the panic trick with a, a pink noise that I just spoke about can give you an indication all up.

[00:19:07] It is very straightforward to just quickly take a tape measure. Or maybe a microphone cable and just measure the distance between the speakers. And you wanna measure the tweeters means the high frequency drivers, and of course then your ears. An equilateral triangle is definitely a good starting point, and from there you can slightly adjust, which now means you react to your room and optimize your monitoring.

[00:19:33] That's where the money is. That's really good. Uh, back to my notes, generally speaking. Symmetry helps with good sounds. Means if your speaker setup is a long, I dunno, the long or the short wall of your room, but shifted towards one side. Now the space between the speaker, the speaker and the wall is smaller than between that speaker and that wall.

[00:20:00] You see where I'm going with that? That naturally means that sound traveling to this wall will bounce back and take longer to reach your ear than sound on the other side, in which case the early reflections arrive at different times, and that can lead to a smear washing steria image. So symmetry is generally something that we try to achieve.

[00:20:27] If you have the options to put your speakers across the short wall and throw 'em down the length of the room. Or across the long wall and throw 'em across the short distance of the room. I would definitely typically prefer the first option. So you want to place the speakers near the short wall and throw it down, throw the sound down the length of the room, and then play with the distance.

[00:20:49] That has to do with how BASS develops. This is general advice and those are rubbery figures, so you really need to start playing with this in your own room and learn how your room reacts. So don't take this as gospel here, but it's a good recommendation. You can also look at wall surfaces. So if you, let's say take a speaker, look to your right or your left, and then see what place on the wall the sound would bounce off.

[00:21:20] The wall surface has an effect. So if on one side you have a glass window while on the other side you might have, uh, drapes or curtains, that will influence the reflections quite a bit. And if possible, we wanna see if symmetry can be achieved here. Lastly. Avoid placing speakers in the corners, and this is really a good solution.

[00:21:45] In most situations, that's when you actually make base problems even worse. So that's often not a good thing. So let's just recap the things. You can try play with the placement of one speaker, repeat with the other speaker, then test B, both speakers with music. And also with pink noise. Try to pan that across, get a feeling for how that behaves, and then play with the triangle between the tweeters of your speakers and your own ears or your listening position.

[00:22:21] Typically, you would end up near an equilateral triangle or in a similar ballpark, but if it's really far off from that, chances are you need to rethink it. Okay.

[00:22:37] So let me just sum up a few things here. First and foremost, I want you to really understand that if your mixes frustrate you because they don't translate to the car or other places, you are not alone. This is a common problem. A lot of people experience that, and it's not you. Instead, it's your monitoring system.

[00:23:04] And by raising awareness of how your monitoring system works, it helps your brain to compute what's going on, and chances are next time around you will achieve better results. Of course, one way to take the room out of the equation is to simply jump onto your headphones. However, headphones also have problems by themselves, so that by itself is not.

[00:23:31] A hundred percent a solution. However, working on both in a good balance can actually help you to see your mix from different angles already and achieve a mix that translates better. Since headphones don't have any room sound takes the room out entirely. Typically, opposites happen again. We tend to overdo the reverbs and the stairway width.

[00:23:57] Possibly we might not get that right on. Um. On headphones. So this is definitely something that I recommend switching between. So if you only mix on speakers, you are, uh, fully, um, subject to the room acoustics and you might get things wrong. Putting on headphones allows you to take at least this one effect the room sound out of it.

[00:24:23] That can really help. However you will get other things wrong, so to toggling between the two is a very good way forward. This said, I'm sure you've seen pictures of big studios, or you've been to one like this one. Most studios have at least two sets of speakers. Guess why? It helps us to mix in a way that translates better.

[00:24:48] In my case, I've got my Normans here, I've got one, my Walmart, general X, and of course my headphones, which are also used. And who knows, I might even invest in even more speakers in the future. I have a long wishlist of things I would like to buy, but you know what? I'm getting things right here. So it's really not that important.

[00:25:08] Okay, let's get back to it. It's not you, it's your environment that made. Your mix translates poorly. So it's important to understand that, and hopefully by learning more about your listening environment, you will gain more confidence and a better understanding of what's going on. Of course, this alone is not a guarantee to mix.

[00:25:33] Number one, hit record mixes straight away. This might still be a long way to go because there are also other things that we want to talk about. So for example. In our next episode, I would like to go deeper into acoustic treatments, things you can do to tame the acoustics of the room and balance them out even more.

[00:25:56] And therefore, making or straightening out that a warped mirror that, uh, typically showed you mi your mix in a disproportionate way. That's a really good starting point, so a little recommendation here. If you consider your budgets, a little bit of acoustic treatment and a decent pair of speakers is really where the money is that's worth it, and most importantly, it holds its value and it will last you a very long time.

[00:26:25] I've had my Norman speakers for about 10 years, and they still go strong. Surprisingly, they don't have an easy life. Other things. Are not so good in investment. Let's talk about plugins. So there are some software solutions that promise to fix your acoustic, um, issues by superimposing any queues somehow across your outputs or your mix, which then is intended to counteract your acoustics.

[00:26:57] Well, let me be honest. Yes, they do achieve a step in the right direction in general. But let me repeat this one more time. Do you remember how our base problems are actually placement dependent? So if you're in your listening spot, you hear base problems in one way. If you're at the back of the couch, you hear a different base problem.

[00:27:22] I don't think that some kind of a room correction, EQ can straighten that out. So I take those with a huge pinch of salt. This is not something I typically recommend to start with. So my recommendation, hold your money there and first work on decent speakers. Save up for a little bit of acoustic treatment.

[00:27:46] That's a better investment. Also software has no resale value, and it's generally not a really good investment. If you ever try to pass it on speakers, they hold their value if you look well after 'em. Okay. I hope this all helped you a, uh, today to understand your problems and look at 'em from a different light.

[00:28:11] We are getting to the end of this mixed session. Let me just say thank you for hanging out with me today and I really hope that there was something valuable in here today for you and if that was the case, I really hope I earned a subscription today. If you want to subscribe on the Mix Artist Academy website, just leave your email to get a notification every time a new episode comes out next week, for example, room acoustics.

[00:28:37] And then the week after, we're going a little bit deeper into mix workflows that help me to translate my mixes better. Of course you can also check my content out on social channels. There's lots of different options, Facebook, Insta, what have you, LinkedIn, uh, TikTok and so on. But I typically only show the highlights there, so you can please like and subscribe to my channels if you enjoy those highlights.

[00:29:04] To watch the whole thing, please come back to Mix Artist Academy and leave your email so you get notifications. That's all for today. I really hope you had a great time and you took something valuable out for yourselves. And if you did, please recommend this episode to one of your friends .

[00:29:21] Thank you.