Why Your Mix Decisions Drift Over Time (And How to Fix It)

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the next episode of Mix Sessions. Today I would like to shift our focus on calibrating our ears with reference music, and that's a big subject that I have a lot to say about. In the last couple of episodes, we looked further into why mixing can be so hard. What works against you when your mix doesn't translate well and sounds terrible in the car.

Why is that? And remember, it wasn't you. Instead, the acoustics are stacked against you and it's your room. That needs some work. So in the last episode, we spoke about concepts to improve the room, get it to an acceptable stage for mixing, and we calibrated our room and our speakers and got everything right.

So in this episode, we are going to calibrate our ears, which is the next big leap forward towards a mix that translates really well everywhere. Good. So, [00:01:00] referencing, with music is not a new feature, so let me just quickly sum this up in just a few words. The idea is that we have a library of songs that we know intimately well, and we reference those, at certain intervals during the mix.

Sounds so easy. But it's actually not so easy. There's a lot that can go wrong, pitfalls and wrong workflows. So let's dive into, the problems.

Step number one, of course, if you don't have a reference library, well. Then you are actually mixing in the dark to some degree. You are missing out on a great opportunity to keep your ears on track when they tend to drift in a certain direction, that actually may not lead to good results.

So the corrective factor that reference music can bring to the table is what you're missing out if you don't have a reference library yet.[00:02:00]

Um, then the next thing is your reference music might not have the right songs in there. So not every song qualifies to be in a reference library. So let's come up with a couple of general, um, criteria.

First and foremost, it must be a production of absolutely outstanding quality, and I mean something completely unachievable. If you can easily, easily outmix your reference music, then you don't have the right reference music. Make it something that is so good that you are not gonna get there, but it's gonna drive you in the right direction.

Okay. I have more to say about this later. We'll get back to that as well. Good.

Then of course, the choice of music is important. Um. Generally speaking, we should use music that we are intimately familiar with. So stuff that we really now well like, and one of my favourite bands in the world. AC/DC. well.

There's [00:03:00] lots of other things in my reference library, and I want to talk about that in a few, a few moments and really get into detail. But my point is that, um, the reference library must not contain identical sonic qualities, and that's somehow rules out making a reference library of the same genre. So if you choose reference music of the genre that you're mixing and you use, let's say, 10 songs of the same genre, you are actually missing out on a really important aspect of it, which I'm going to get you in a few moments.

But just hold onto the, this thought. Your reference library can, of course. Contain a song of the same genre that you're currently mixing, but it doesn't have to. And most importantly, it needs to give you a large variety of different sonic flavours. Oh, I've got so much more to say about that and I will steer back [00:04:00] to it, I promise.

Let's stick with the problems first. Um. The next problem is the wrong use of a reference library, and that leads me to what I would call the copy paste mindset. Um, we spoke about the mindset earlier in episode one and also in two, and I introduced the concept of zooming in, focusing on details or zooming out, ignoring the details and looking at the big picture.

Referencing to, um, to your reference library works best in the zoomed out state. So you don't want to zoom into a detail and apply the exact sound to your production. That is not a good way, and I will again explain why that is not a good idea. later on, and you probably know this already, so the goal of a reference library is really to keep us calibrated, and a zoomed in mindset really doesn't help here.

So there [00:05:00] are different, things that can go wrong. So just double check your existing library and see if all of these boxes are ticked. Couple of problems. Have I got any other, um, points here? Yes, of course. Referencing the wrong aspect in music is also a big mistake that we need to avoid. There are a few things we can learn from our reference music.

But there are also a couple of differences between our work and progress mix and the mastered reference music that we must deliberately ignore. And this is one of the biggest points, I guess, that I wanna start with. Um, so.

But before we get there, a couple of extra thoughts that I wanna share with you. Um, I've met some amazing mix engineers over the course of my life and also know, watched amazing videos of, of some of the best in the business. [00:06:00] And when it comes to reference music, there are some around to say, I don't use them.

So what does that mean for you? Um, should you also not use a reference library? Well, just because one of the best, mix engineers in the world doesn't need a reference library anymore. It doesn't mean that it's not a benefit for you. So that would be too far steps. So I find that when you are a mix engineer on a learning curve, if you still feel like there is more, I haven't fully developed my, my entire potential yet, then a reference library is an amazing tool.

To cut through it quicker and don't invest the 10,000 hours, but maybe find a shortcut here to get your mixing to a higher level quicker. So they're very effective for that, especially if you're on a learning curve. Once you are very seasoned professional, and if you are one and you're watching this, then great to have you on board as well.

Uh, but if you're a very seasoned professional who [00:07:00] does this in and out every single day, there comes the point where in the end, you know it intuitively, and your ears are so calibrated that a reference library becomes optional or not as important anymore. But for the time being, I definitely think we should stick with that.

So why is a reference library necessary? It has to do with a variety of different things, and one of them that I would like to mention first up is psychoacoustics. Psychoacoustics is a phenomenon that we can't explain with physics, for example, there are certain phenomenon that, um, are only interpreted when the brain adds something to the sound that the ear heard.

There's the cocktail party effect and other, effects. Filter effects. And psychoacoustics are of course, also happening without me and you knowing or being aware consciously when we [00:08:00] mix, it's happening in the background. So what's going on there? Um, lemme just explain an example of the filtering capabilities of our ear.

Our ear picks up sound all the time whether we are awake and whether we are sleeping. All the time. Our brain decides whether we focus on a sound or not. So there's a filtering process going on where the brain decides what is relevant information and what is not so relevant. Let me give you an example.

I like to take my dogs or my kids, or both to the beach. And then we typically drive to the car park on the other side of the dunes. And when we open the door, I already know I can't see the beach quite yet, but I know whether it's a big surf or a small surf, I can hear it. The beach is actually really noisy.

And then as we walk through the dunes. It's like the sound opens up, the moment there's visuals, [00:09:00] becomes really loud. And when you first go to the beach, it's quite impressive how loud the, the surf can be, how loud the ocean is. And that's also what we love about it. However, if I then walk my dog, and chat to the dog owners and play with my kids and go for a swim.

After a while, I'm no longer aware of just how loud the ocean is because it has become the new normal and that keeps going until it's time to leave. And I don't even notice that this is filtering effect is going on until I walk through the dunes back to the car when I suddenly real suddenly realize, oh, the volume dropped significantly just now.

And that's when I realized, oh, it was actually really loud. But while I was at the beach, I didn't notice. That's just one example.

Another example. Hope you can relate to this one. I'm sure you've all been to parties in your life and I definitely have been to a couple where the sound system [00:10:00] was anything but great, really terrible shitty speakers.

And when you get there and open the door and listen to the music for the first time, it becomes so dramatically obvious and you look, Ooh, that's not so nice. I keep that to myself, of course, when I go to a party. But you know what? Hours in, after having lots of conversations and listening to a lot of music, it's no longer as obvious.

Something funny happens, let's say the frequency response of that playback system is really outta whack. But eventually the brain tends to adjust to that. So hours in, I no longer hear the bad sound of the speakers anymore, but instead, I enjoy the music again. I bump my head, you know, have a talk and what we do at parties and the bad sound is no longer on my mind because my brain has learned to interpret that, figure it out, the frequency response and sort of now wraps itself around it and adapts.

And that's what we [00:11:00] humans do. We adapt. There's psychoacoustics going on.

So what can we learn from this? Let's bring it back to mixing. Well, imagine you start your mix and it's completely out of whack to begin with, and it's let's say, really dull. And now you decide to focus on some part of your mix and it takes you several hours and you still keep listening to this dull sound for a while.

Well, psychoacoustics kick in. Your brain learns that this is now the frequency response and starts to add and subtract accordingly, wrap itself around it, and eventually that becomes the normal. You see where I'm going with that?

That's when reference music can shake you out of it, and that's really the absolute core of it.

So, we need reference music to keep us on track, to keep our ears calibrated when [00:12:00] naturally they tend to drift a little bit. Is that just us mixers? No, of course not. Think about wine tasters after they try a couple of reds. Well, they definitely clean their palette, they cleanse in their palette and flush it out so they can taste accurately again.

And that's exactly what reference music does to us mix engineers. So good way to use reference music is throughout the mix, let's say every hour. You wanna have a little burst of reference music, not for a very long time. Maybe just a minute or two. That's probably all it takes, and I never listen to an entire song ever in reference music.

Instead, I jump in the middle. Usually the busy parts and listen to 10 seconds of this song, and then I jump to the next one. I listen to 10 seconds of that song and usually third one, and maybe after three or four quick little tasters. I jump through it. I get [00:13:00] different impressions of what professional sound is like, and now I turn back and listen to my mix end.

Ah-Ha!. Suddenly I hear my mix in contrast after having flushed out my ears with reference music and my short falls are super obvious, and that keeps me on track. It keeps me from going down the rabbit hole and spending hours and hours and hours on something that is actually not even important. It keeps my mind zoomed out.

It helps me to recognize what my mix needs in the big picture. And let me tell you one thing. If you solve the biggest problem in your mix, if you focus on the big picture. It will solve a lot of the minor details that might be spinning around your mind as well in the process. I find that it solves many of the small problems as you fix the big ones.

A little tip, hold onto this thought. Write that down.[00:14:00]

Okay, so that's what mixing, what reference music and mixing should achieve. Let's go back and discuss another problem and how to solve it. Your reference music needs to be easily accessible. If it's buried on a hard drive that you have in a different room and you need to walk over to get it.

Let's be honest. Human nature doesn't allow us to do that. It's not gonna happen. We won't. We are actually gonna stick with a mix and just leave it for later. So it needs to be super simple for you to access. So there's a range of different ways, and there's no wrong or right here as long as it works for you.

Let me show you a couple of options.

Swing over to the next camera, and one option, of course is to use one of the standard music applications. I'm using Apple Music, for example, and over here is my reference music library, in which I have a range of different songs. You might know some of 'em, you might know all of them or none.

[00:15:00] Doesn't really matter, but they all mean something for me and they all mean something specific. And of course, I'm gonna cycle back to what exactly is in there for me a little bit later down the track. So I can now simply jump through a couple of different songs and listen to each one for a minute, and then I just go back to Pro Tools and continue my mix.

That's a really easy way, and this would probably work for most people.

But of course there are also a couple of other problems that we need to fix first because if you do what I showed you just now, you listen to Apple Music or Spotify or whatever it is you use, and then jump to your DAW, one of the first thing that will jump to your mind.

The sharpest contrast here is that, wow, the reference music is so much louder than my mix. And guess what? Attached to that is all the details. You will hear more detail, more effects, more balance, more clarity, but also more power. All of the things that come with [00:16:00] just simply turning something up.

Okay. Pause for a moment. This is a really important moment to just stop for a second and think about what's going to happen. If we now allow ourselves to compensate for the differences we heard, the only way to achieve that is probably to throw a limiter or maximize a tool of whatever mastering thingy you have across the master bus and push it.

And if this is your temptation, you gotta stop right now because that leads you down the rabbit hole, in a very bad direction.

Don't do it.

Do not put in plugins to achieve loudness in a mixing stage, if you do that too early, it's like trying to paint the wall before the wall is dried and the render is dry.

You gotta get the [00:17:00] underlying things right first before you put the finishing touches on the mix later, and that means do not put maximizer the tools across the mix unless you know exactly what you're doing. And you know what, even then, look, I don't do it. I honestly don't do that. So when I apply mix bus processing, it's for mixing purposes, not mastering or loudness.

And it's very important. Loudness is not on my mind. Okay?

Okay. Let's steer back to the problem. So there was this big level difference. The reference music was this, this loud, my mix was only so quiet. So of course it feels wimpy and thin and lacks in every dimension. So instead of trying to push our mix up, which would necessarily lead to the need of limiters of some sort, instead, let's do the other thing and pull the reference music down.

And we have to do it before we use the reference music. [00:18:00] Okay. This is super

important. And how do we do that? Well, let me show you a couple of settings. So we're back in Apple Music. Here it is. So the first thing that I want you to test is settings and under there on playback, check that the soundcheck box is ticked.

Soundcheck will now level the volume balance between the, pieces of music in your reference library. And it does an okay job at it. It's not perfect, please don't get me wrong. It's not perfect, but at least it gets them all in the same ballpark and it will avoid dramatic jumps in level. So brings all your reference music onto some kind of a level playing field.

Okay, the next thing you need to do is go to the overall volume over here. Pull everything down until it sits in the same pocket as where your mix currently is. So this is super important [00:19:00] because we are now adjusting the reference volumes overall volume down to where my mix is, rather than bringing my mix up to where the reference music is.

Because that's for the mastering engineer to do. And if you apply loudness tools too early, it'll make everything harder from here.

Trust me with that. Okay. This is a really important part and I really hope you wrote this down.

So let's assume we've accomplished that. Are there any other ways to monitor your reference music?

Yes. I wanna show you what I actually do because. Apple Music. Yeah, I do it on my laptop when I start a mix at home, but I always take my mixes to the studio for the finishing touches. And then I actually don't work out of Apple Music anymore. I wanna show you another option. So we're going back to Pro Tools.

So let's [00:20:00] zoom out over here and show proto. So let's say I've got a mix going over here. That's still sounding all right, my speakers are up. So let's have a quick listen to where we are at.

Okay. By the way, this is, um, a song that I mixed for my friend Adam Gardener, and this song, Bursting Into Colors is going to be released very soon. So check it out. It's a good fun song. Really happy pop song. Um, great piece of music, and thanks Adam for, you know, letting me mix your work. Pleasure to work with your music.

So, back to Pro Tools. So that's my mix. If I want to audition out of Pro Tools, some people throw the reference music into the Pro Tools session, but then if you mix a lot of different songs, you would have to import them into every single one of 'em, and that can lead to file management issues. And then there's the next thing [00:21:00] I mentioned earlier, how I do use some master bus processes, but with my mixing hat on when I, when I mix, and if you not play your reference music and it travels through the same bus or you see the problem there, that is not something I like to do. So if I listen to, listen to my reference music, I wanted to go directly to the speakers without traveling through any prev plugins, of course.

And the easiest way to do that in Pro Tools, of course, is to use the workspace browser.

So I just, located my. reference music over here in my reference, in in my, documents folder where it lives. And then you simply select all the songs in there, right click. And, where was it on the top?

Create catalog from Selection. So a catalog and Pro Tools is the same thing as a playlist in, Spotify or Apple Music, or wherever you listen to, and you can open it up out of Pro Tools from the catalogs area over [00:22:00] here. Oh, I forgot to make it, didn't I? So let's go back to where I was. Over here, doc documents, select everything and right click Create.

And we call it reference music and typos. All good. So now this. Selection will pop up on the catalogs over here, and I can play it from there. That means out of Pro Tools, I can now audition, via the audition path, from here and just jump into my different songs, and I wanna show you a couple of, ones that I have in there.

For example, this legend of a song.

Okay, cool. that keeps on going, so I just don't wanna play this for too long. Otherwise, YouTube will give me trouble with the copyrights, but I want to contrast this against another [00:23:00] song or two. And then I want to talk about what I can read from those songs. So let's continue with this song.

And that song.

Mm. And let's look at another one, maybe last one for now. Um.

Okay. That was a bit of a wild musical journey, so let me explain why I picked these songs and what I can read from them. I would like to iterate that I'm not going to zoom into the snare sound of this song and now try to apply the EQs and compressors in my song. To match that, that would be the copy paste mindset.

And you must [00:24:00] avoid this when referencing. Instead zoom back out and see the big picture. So the songs in my reference library, they all serve a purpose. And I call this the benchmarks, the sonic benchmarks. What am I talking about? I used Roxanne by The Police, a classic from late eighties, early nineties.

Please somebody put in the comments and let me know what year it was from. it's one of the songs that I love for the songwriting and all the melodies, and it also comes from a time when people record it to analog tech machines and produce sound with less bass to, so to me, Roxanne by The Police is an example of how shy in bass something can be and still sound good.

If it was any less than that. It's clearly to bass light. So that's my benchmark point right here. And on the other side I had some reggae productions. There was some Seeed among, great band. [00:25:00] There were some Steven Marley among another great production, and of course something electronic, in this case, Madonna song.

But all of those have one thing in common. They max out the bass. So that's a benchmark. Over here. There's a point in my bench where I say, okay, that's where they are. And anything more than that is just too much bass. So I had the benchmark point for light bass and heavy bass. So let's say I'm mixing something today that has nothing to do with any of these genres.

Let's say I'm mixing a country, nothing about country. I love country. Where should that be? So if I listen to my country song and back into my references, I can now listen to the police, and I can listen to Madonna and realize, okay, bass wise, I'm about here. That's a good place for country to be. I definitely wanna be closer to the bass light area, then to the really bass [00:26:00] heavy area.

But if I was to record or mix, let's say a reggae song, maybe I wanna be here. Okay. And getting the right amount of bass into my song is really easy. If I've got these two benchmark points, light bass, little amount of bass, and maximum bass heavy, then I can see where I sit in between. And that really gives me the measure points.

That's my calibration. Okay. And I could keep talking about my reference library because every song in there has a certain quality. And each of these qualities in my mind is a mapped across a benchmark. So there's a song for a minimalistic arrangement, few things, lots of space, beautiful transparency.

The contrast is a really busy production, packed with pieces, a wall of sound, overwhelming, but still clean and powerful. So there could be. Outside the area where [00:27:00] something is too thin or could be too wooly and too too chaotic. And in between I can see where I fit and where I should be.

I have reference points for narrow, how mono mix can be and still sound good and beautifully wide. And if it's any wide, it's just too much. And again, I can check where do I fit in between these benchmark points. I've got references for the top end. Bob Marley, Coming in from the Cold. That hihat sound, I know it so well. That's, you know, the kind of place where I wanna be. And I've got another song that's dark in nature so it can reference the top end using these two.

They're my two benchmark points.

I even have the benchmark point for the song that has the maximum amount of voice sibilance that I can get away with. You know, if it's a smidge more than that, it's unbearable. You know, it's just right. It's, it's a lot. Anymore, and it's unbearable. I've got this [00:28:00] song, so if I ask myself, do I need to de-ess more or am I de-essing enough already?

I quickly check this song and I know immediately where I am. You see where I'm going with that.

I'm building my own reference, which keeps my mind from drifting into an uncalibrated workflow. My reference music brings me back.

So do I still use reference music? Not as much as I used to because I've mixed so much that it sort of engraved my brain.

But I still do it every once in a while to get myself back on track and keep training my ears, because ear training itself is a little bit like, you know, working out a muscle. You can build up strength. If you then don't focus on it and practice it, eventually you sort of tend to lose it a little. So it's a good thing to refresh every once in a while.

And that's what I do with my ear training. [00:29:00] Good. Alright. Look, today was a really important session for me. I hope you got a lot out of it. It's time we wrap it up.

So let me just sum up the core concepts for you. Getting a mix wrong is not on you per se. It doesn't mean you don't know how to do it or you're incapable of it. If that's your problem, you just haven't used the right tools yet. And the reference music is one of the most effective tools if you effectively, to get your mixing up to a much better quality really quickly. So it's a really important thing. In addition, it also trains your ear. Now, when you go back and focus between your mix and the reference music, you will typically find things where you say, all right, that element of my mix, I nail it. It's on par with everything else.[00:30:00]

And you will also find things where you fall short. That's normal.

But the important thing is you've got this honest representation of what you got right and what you did not. And that now tells you what you need to work on. So in other words, it focuses your mind on improving, and that's really what it's all about.

So training your ears to to get better at ear training. It is not something that you can achieve in a day. It's just like learning your instrument. You need to start it. You need to put in the hours you need to play until your fingers bleed, so to speak, and you need to keep doing it again and again.

That's really important. And by referencing your music, you already train yourself to recognize patterns in professionally produced music and see how you map against it. And this contrast is so telling. Okay? You see how we wandered from problems in mixing [00:31:00] to problems in acoustics and how to overcome them to calibrate your speakers in a calibrated room.

Now we calibrate our ears and we find a tool to do this again and again. So when I go to another studio, if I'm invited to record elsewhere. One of the very first things I do while we settle in and unpack our bags and put our food in the fridge and start to set up microphones is to put on my reference library and I hit play in the background and I don't even need to focus on it anymore.

The moment I get to the speakers and if I heard them for a while in the background, I'm already tuned to the sound of this studio and I know exactly how it translates. So now I'm using the psychoacoustics effects to my advantage. That's what a reference library does for you, and it's another step for you to turn your ears into a razor sharp weapon.

Okay? If this is [00:32:00] something you're interested in, and if you want to go further, there's lots of resources and I will also introduce more episodes on that.

In addition, I would like to point you towards my Ear Training for Better Mixing course on the Mix Artist Academy. It's a course that I built specifically for people who would like to dive in deeper and train your ears and get them better and better, and better and better with the one focus to improve your mixes.

There will be more about that. If you wanna know more, please reach out to me and I will probably mention this again in in upcoming sessions. 'cause I think it's honestly the best thing you can do to invest into yourself, into your own skills instead of buying more plugins. Okay, that's all for today.

Let's wrap it up. I hope you have a fantastic week and next week I shall see you again for the next mix sessions. See you then.