References, Monitoring and a Mix Checklist

Your ears adapt to whatever you're listening to. After an hour, a too-bright mix sounds normal and a buried vocal sounds fine. Monitoring discipline, references and checklists are how you keep your judgement honest.

Monitoring level

How loud you listen changes what you hear. The ear is less sensitive to bass and extreme treble at low volumes, so a mix balanced very loud will sound thin and dull when played quietly, and a mix balanced quietly may have too much low end when played loud.

• Pick one comfortable, repeatable level for most of the work. In a typical home or project room with near-field speakers, around 79–82 dB SPL is a sensible calibrated level. The often-quoted 85 dB comes from large cinema rooms and is too loud for a small one.
• Check at a whisper now and then. If the vocal and kick still read at very low volume, the balance is solid.
• Protect your hearing. Safe daily exposure falls fast with level: around 85 dBA for 8 hours, 88 for 4, 91 for 2, 94 for 1 hour, and 100 dBA for only 15 minutes. Take a break every hour; fatigued ears make bright, harsh mixes.

Using reference tracks

A reference is a released track in the same genre whose sound you'd be happy to match. Pick two or three, import them into your session on a track that bypasses your mix bus processing, and compare.

Loudness-match them first. Mastered references are typically around −8 to −11 LUFS, much louder than an unmastered mix. Without matching, the louder track always sounds better and you'll chase loudness instead of balance. Turn the reference down until its loudness is within about half an LU of your mix.

Then ask one question per comparison:

• Is my low end bigger or smaller? Is the kick or the bass leading?
• Is my vocal as loud and as clear?
• Is my top end brighter or darker?
• Is my mix as wide? Does it have as much depth?

Compare at the start of a session and after breaks, rather than constantly flipping back and forth. And bear in mind a reference in a different key will have its bass energy at different notes, so the low end will read differently.

Translation checks

Your mix will be heard on everything except your studio speakers. Check, roughly in this order:

1. Mono with a correlation meter — see the stereo lesson.
2. A phone speaker. Phones roll off below roughly 300–800 Hz, so you hear bass through its harmonics. If the bass vanishes on a phone, add harmonics (saturation, an upper layer) rather than more sub.
3. Earbuds and headphones — good for finding clicks, pops, bad edits and harsh sibilance, less reliable for balance.
4. The car or a living-room speaker — a real-world sanity check for low end and vocal level.

Write notes with timestamps, then return to the main speakers to make the fixes.

Automation last

Once the mix is balanced and processed, add movement. Common moves: a dB or so up on the vocal or the music bus into each chorus; riding the vocal so phrases stay within a few dB of each other; delay and reverb throws on phrase-ending words; filters opening in builds. Automation is what makes a static mix feel performed.

The mix checklist

Before you bounce:

• Lead element clearly audible in every section, including at low volume
• Kick and bass both heard; neither masks the other
• No muddy build-up around 200–500 Hz; no harshness around 2–6 kHz
• Sibilance under control
• Reverb and delay returns 100% wet and not too loud (mute test)
• Low end mono; no sustained negative correlation
• Mix holds up on a phone and in mono
• Compared at matched loudness with two or three references
• Master peaking around −6 to −3 dBFS, no limiter you'll forget about, no clipping
• Exported at the session's sample rate, 24-bit or 32-bit float, named with version and date

Then step away. Listen fresh the next day before calling it finished.