Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Why do people say “mix with monitors”, yet ask you to listen to the same song with headphones?
Isn’t that exact opposite? I haven’t seen anyone say “studio monitors recommended for listening”. Curious about your thoughts on this.
Comments
Maybe because people listening will be using their laptop/tablet/phone speakers. ‘Normal’ people don’t have monitors :-)
Yeah, I think it's just a way to nudge people not to listen on their phone and laptop speakers.
This!
especially since so few people have decent speakers.
@seonnthaproducer : in case it isn’t obvious, for mixing and mastering, excellent monitors will have flat response. So, you’ll hear everything. And speakers are less fatiguing than headphones. Most engineers/producers also check mixes on headphones they know well as a point of comparison but try to avoid the fatigue that can creep in with extended hours listening on headphones.
I thought the idea was to mix where you get the best result but test on a range of devices.
I once heard Jack White in a documentary say that he listens to a track in as many ways as possible to try to get the mix to sound good through everything. monitors, headphones, hifi stereo, car speakers, device speakers, etc… he went on to say if it sounded good in each and every situation he knew he had a good mix.
This is 100% accurate. I make sure to run every mix through my iPad speakers & my phone speakers to make sure everything is clear. Ear buds, multiple headphones, and the car as well. The idea is that the mix should sound good on your $5K studios monitors and also on a $3 mono transistor radio
Follow this rule and your mix will sound good on everything.
It's the law of averages. Every different listening device and environment colors the sound, and no-one can know in what environment their music will be listened to. Hitting some sort of reference point that colors the sound as little as possible is a way of "averaging out" how the mix is going to be colored in the real world.
Think about it in the extreme. If you mix on iPad speakers, you're going to abnormally boost a bunch of frequencies that are going to make it should horrible on a car stereo. Mix on a home theatre system with a sub woofer and you're going to have thin mixes elsewhere.
Not many people going to listen on reference monitors, hearing your mix as closely as possible to yours. But the idea is to reduce the net difference. Also, if most professionally mastered music is done to such a reference, then your music is going to be more like it if you use a similar reference. People adjust reference mixed music to taste, so yours is more likely to be pleasing as well.
Starting with the best possible reference mix, then checking in the most likely ways it'll be consumed is just a quicker way to get to something that sounds as good as possible in the widest range of environments.
Andrew Scheps is a proponent of mixing on headphones. One benefit of headphones is that you don’t run into room resonances, which will be a major problem for most bedroom producers mixing on monitors. An untreated room is likely to be way more coloured than a good pair of headphones.
Using multiple devices while mixing is critical. I’ve had songs that sound amazing on headphones, earbuds, and my iPhone speaker. But they sounded like absolute shit in my car. I listen to a lot of music on my new Samsung bar speaker and decided to listen to some of my music through that. It was the first time I really noticed the volume discrepancy between my music and the music I’m trying to emulate.
BTW, TB Morphit is invaluable for mixing on headphones and for quickly simulating testing on a variety of playback devices.
Mixing on headphones is my only option, so Morphit is essential IMO. I wouldn't even try without it.
I mix on headphones (Sony7506) so I like it when folks listen thru phones. I’ve given up on testing thru other devices… I guess you get an average when you do that, but, for me, headphones sound best. That’s amateur production for you.
I don’t know if you use morphit on Mac, but if you do, check out soundsource, which allows you to host an plugins on your output, as well as waves ocean way plug-in, also running in sound source. That’s a great combination when working on headphones.
Good to know @mrufino1 👍🏼
That was very good, thank you!
Problem with mixing on headphones is that reverbs, stereo width, panning, high-frequencies, and instrument-separation may sound much more obvious or exaggerated on headphones than on studio monitors. When mixing on headphones, your mix may be too narrow as a result.
I will add above - the auricle is mainly responsible for the localization of sounds in space, which “turns off” when monitoring through headphones. Accordingly, it is physically impossible to build a correctly spatially mix in headphones, intended for listening both in headphones and on speakers. With binaural techniques, a very real listening space can be built with headphones, but it will not be reproduced on speakers. At the same time, the built space on the monitors is universal.
https://stevenslateaudio.com/vsx
More obvious or exaggerated, well said. I gravitated toward headphones as a beginner, because I found that I could hear the panning and EQ more clearly. Because the panning is so exaggerated, I'm compelled to worry less about whether it sounds "good", and more about whether it sounds "correct" through headphones. I can listen for the basics of what makes a song sound "professional", and then fine tune it with monitors.
The more pronounced ear fatigue made the initial EQ adjustments more obvious. I think headphones make it easier for a beginner to avoid "getting lost". Because with headphones, you can feel the ear fatigue developing in real-time, whereas with monitors, it creeps up on you.
Just my experience. Hearing a sound move between your ears is trippy, so I can see why someone might pan everything to the center, especially if they're not also using the headphones to listen to professionally-mixed music.
Been reading the comments and I learned a bit. Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts on this. Morphit is an awesome app, agreed on that as well.
One must listen to one’s mix in a variety of conditions to understand how it works in reality. Headphones, car speakers, stereo system, iPhone, iPad… all of it.
I remember the joys of mixing our demo tracks in a top London recording studio on big expensive speakers many years ago thinking it sounded amazing and then listening to the tape on the way home in the car at 3am and being so disappointed.
Agreed, excellent.
This made me feel a lot better!. I’ve always felt guilty about mixing on headphones, like I’m not “doing it right” but the fact is I can hear stuff better, I’m more focused, just like Andrew Sheps comments. Everything he says here makes total sense. Thanks for this!
And headphones are just a more consistent and reliable monitoring environment compared to most home studios. Dealing with room resonances is really tricky, and very few home studios have any kind of treatment at all, so most people mixing on monitors at home will be hearing low frequencies that are highly coloured by the room, and quite inaccurate. You could spend a lot of time fixing some low-end peaks that are derived from the room rather than the music.
Headphones are more likely to give you a true picture of your mix than speakers in an untreated room.
Bass is by far the most challenging thing to monitor accurately, and headphones can also have problems with delivering an accurate low-end, but at least it's more achievable on a reasonable budget compared to speakers.
Studio monitor mixing or headphone mixing - ultimately it's the end result that matters a LOT less than the getting there. That's largely why I listen back to the mix in many different forms - because I NEVER have a perfectly balanced room, or 100% flat headphones, or perfect ears, or whatever. I'm continually working in less than optimal circumstances just getting the job done as best I can.
So let the end result speak for itself. If you like your monitors and dig mixing on those - have at it. If you're a stickler for headphone mixing, more power to ya. Just end up with a mix YOU'RE happy with. If you can listen to your own track over and over and not get sick of it, mission accomplished!
If you could also make sure the rest of us don't want to rip off our ears after hearing it too, that would be appreciated.
You are not wrong.
For me, the ultimate mixing experience is good monitoring, where as the ultimate listening environment is headphones. That’s just what has worked for me. Everyone craves that ultimate, perfect environment with the best monitors and a ton of expensive gear, treatment, expensive headphones etc.. there’s no such thing as a perfect mixing environment. In fact, you could argue that all that gear can be counterproductive. If you use your gear enough and reference through different types of systems and work at it - you can do it, no matter how cheap or imperfect your setup is. Know your speakers/headphones.
Everyone always says “know your speakers/headphones”. How bout know your ears.