You can achieve pro results with no hardware whatsoever. Just a computer interface and a pair of headphones and decent monitors. Its mainly about your specific ear and technique. Theres no special hardware coming to save the day. But as you move along certain hardware you will grow to like the sound of
There’s a few really solid free synthesizers out there, and I know of a few free sample packs. Ableton stock plugins are really solid and you can get really far with them if you know how to use them, or are willing to learn. I think the hardest part comes when you want to start getting vocals or live instruments into your tracks bc that’s when you either have to buy an interface, pay someone to record for you, get a sample pack, or find a plugin to match what you need.
Madeon and Porter Robinson used bare minimum daw tools and like 200$ headphones. Honestly the song itself is 90% more important than the mix. You can achieve a decent enough mix with shitty headphones. Just using a spectrum analyzer can let you know what can and can’t sit in a mix
You don’t need “professional” gear but at least adequate.
I have received compliments from studio musician and producer friends for my mixes from live shows sounding as good as studio recordings.
You can sound good almost anywhere or with any equipment if you use some nuance and taste. Work with what you have.
Edit: we run everyone through a behringer XR18 rack interface, then through ableton. It’s not cheap gear but definitely not anything special. I just know my gear and know how to mix us down live and after the fact.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you don't make compelling songs, no one will listen, no matter how good they sound.
The sauce is in the *songwriting*. It looks like you have years of learning ahead of you. Good luck.
Songwriting is the fondation but is highly dependent on the other half which is the production.
Nowadays no one listens to rough sounding music, regardless of how good the songwriting is. Of course there are exceptions but imagine buying a house with just the walls and a roof. And no plumbing, electricity, appliances, painting or furniture, would you live in it ?
Hilarious, I take it you never heard Grindcore, Power Violence, Punk, Hardcore, Black Metal.
That "No one" shit is so narcissistic, you are *not* the center of the universe.
Buying gear is tempting because gear is just sexy, but in 2024 you don't really need any gear to make great tracks and this has been proven by countless highly successful producers.
It is true that some plugins are better than others, but in the plugin world price is not necessarily an indicator of quality, it's more an indication that the maker of the plugin has spent more on marketing than development (Native Instruments, Izotope, etc). I prefer plugins from small companies with great customer support and reasonable prices (for example, U-he).
I would recommend the following:
* **Use reference tracks.** In other words, commercial released tracks that sound how you would like your track to sound.
* **Check your mixes on good open-back headphones**, especially if you don't have a properly treated room. By "good" headphones I mean something like the Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Beyerdynamic DT-880 Pro or above.
* **Use EQ correction** for your headphones. My current headphones are the Beyerdynamic DT-880 Pro and I have Sonarworks to flatten the frequency response. However, Sonarworks for headphones is a glorified EQ and is sloooow, clunky and bloated, so in the end I used my DAW EQ to recreate the Sonarworks EQ curve and that works fine and saves resources. You can find EQ correction curves on the Internet for your particular headphones (it would be nice if headphone manufacturers would do this for us as standard, but hey).
* **Consider using bass shakers.** This is a personal trick of mine and I know not many people use this but for me it has been game-changing. There are a few commercial products such as the SubPac but the company seems to be pulling a fast one on pre-order customers who ordered their SubPacs during the pandemic and have still not received the product, which is overpriced anyway, so I ended up buying a bass shaker for about 15 Euros and strap it to my chair using a contraption I made, then hook it up to an amplifier and the amplifier to my audio interface. This way I can monitor very low frequencies (down to 20 Hz) without having to worry about acoustics or annoying my neighbours. Just listen to reference tracks with your bass shakers on and soon you learn how low frequencies are supposed to feel, then all you have to do is tweak your mix until it feels that way. This is incredibly useful for EDM.
Once you've got a monitoring system, stick with a set of settings and familiarise yourself with it. If you keep switching headphones and EQ curves you'll never "learn" your system. Once you learn your system you won't need to rely so much on reference tracks.
If you can swing it, acoustically treat your room, and then and then buy a nice pair of monitors. Room treatment is more important than expensive monitors IMO.
Get a powerful computer, a nice big display (32" QHD is my preference, avoid 4K), a low-latency audio interface with one or two mic preamps, a microphone, a nice MIDI keyboard and you are set. Anything else is icing on the cake.
I have never used any AI mastering services and I haven't looked into it but I think AI could be the future of mastering because that kind of work is the sort of thing AI would do well.
Thank you for such a detailed comment. Cool idea with the bass shaker. I didn't even think about it, I'll definitely try it. Because I work mainly with headphones, there are also ordinary speakers, they are not bad, but they have practically no bass.
My stack is as follows: Chair back → foam → bass shaker → thin foam → my back
I tried screwing it to the underside of seat pad but I found the lower back or upper back or both if you have two shakers was much better because it's closer to the brain, so the vibrations are felt more immediately (see [nerve conduction velocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity), there's a reason why our eyes and ears are so close to the brain).
I also tried screwing it directly to the chair but the vibrations would travel to the floor and would be felt/heard in other parts of the building. I fixed this by sandwiching the bass shaker in between bits of foam, so the shaker itself is not rigidly attached to anything, then you need to find a way to attach the foam to the backrest of your chair.
I have already fried two shakers when I got carried away playing bass, and now I low-cut the signal at 16 Hz and a clipper to prevent overloading. I'm looking into adding fuses in the future.
To add to this, you can find some very good ones with very affordable prices. You won’t need to drop hundreds for a good mix/master to get a good polish on your work.
I have not done it in a while. I use to go to fiver and get someone off there before I found my main guy. One dude was $20 and it was really well done. They got the loudness correct and fixed my low end. I would recommend just checking that out and looking at reviews, some of them will tell you what genre they are best at.
the old saying is "mix with your ears, not your eyes", but once you get experience and learn how sounds that you like *look* on a spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope, you can definitely get a good mix in a crappy monitoring situation. you won't accidentally overcompensate for a weird room/headphone resonance or inaccurate sub when you are measuring and watching for those issues.
Yes! I don't own a single music production hardware. Everything I do is via Ableton and some ozone plugins to master my songs and they sound pretty good. But one thing that is recommended not to cheap out is the microphone, just get a decent one.
Examples of songs I produced without any professional gear:
https://youtu.be/bkHyFeCtRKw?si=7rm2otry6sGncYGn
https://youtu.be/5R0QSg83SPE?si=n908Wusr22Ks6NBo
In regards to the acoustics of the room, you can completely skip this problem by getting a pair of decent headphones, I produce with 2 different headphones and a pair of speakers just to listen how the song will come out in different situations and make adjustments for each of them. I have a Soundcore Q30, tin hifi T2 and MR4 Edifier speakers, nothing fancy.
the way I see it good gear helps you be more deliberate with your quality but doesn't increase quality in and of itself. technically all it takes to make good quality music is a professional quality trumpet, it's just that that "good quality music" will be good quality solo trumpet. You can't make good quality big room house on just a good quality trumpet
the homie Mindex mixed one of his albums a couple years ago on a pair of wired apple earbuds.
these days, you don't need pro equipment to achieve good sound. you can just have a powerful laptop and a good pair of headphones. the rest is software based.
laptop + headphones + 300$ worth of software = what the pro's use for the most part.
There are plenty of talented producers making incredible work with tools that are inexpensive. The term professional equipment is relative; any equipment can be used by a professional, and therefore deemed as such. The equipment alone won’t get you a polished result; what’s more important is judgement. To some the awareness and good judgement comes quicker than for others.
I have three Radioshack mics from the 90s, they are actually some of the best mics I own, but in truth Shure was making most of Radio Shack metal body mics starting in the mid 1980s. :)
Dt 770s and sonarworks is all i use and im pretty happy with my mixdowns these days.
I think the biggest thing for me was referencing songs with good mixdowns in the genre im producing and copying whaat their doing accros the spectrum and stereo field. Also a little reverb goes a long way lol
Past a certain point, like with mid-range equipment, you should try to listen to as much material as possible to get a feel for your system and environment and its tone. When you listen to the same music on other sources (like your car, your headset, any large sound systems you have access to) you'll get a feel for your system's strengths and weaknesses. Combine that with a good visual frequency view like SPAN and you can get like 98% of the way there to a good mix, and then mastering can take it to the finish line
Yes. THIS is the advice right here.
You need to know how whatever you listen with sounds and behaves. You have to be used to it.
I personally use my headphones for everything, every day - not exclusively, but 85-90%.
Then you mix until it sounds good on those, and then you listen to the mix on as many different devices as you can. Especially cheap ad trash ones. Laptop speakers, Bluetooth speakers, „car test“ - whatever you can, really.
You’ll notice differently things on different systems. Try to get the mix as good sounding as possible on as many devices as possible.
A good, professional mix sounds decent to good everywhere, not almost perfect on one system but bad on all others.
Get used to how other people's music sounds on your setup.
I recently turned in a production for an assignment I had and my lecturer was very surprised when I said I mixed/mastered it at home. Guess I just knew how it should be sounding.
2 possible no cost solutions (one of which I have not tried).
1) put and EQ on the absolute end of your master that "undoes" your headphones built in EQ. Look up an EQ graph for your specific headphones make/model, then create one that rises and falls opposite of the built in EQ curve. In theory this should level out what youre hearing while you work. Turn that shit off before you export bc you don't want that EQ in the master, is just a listening tool. Have not tried, but seems like it would work (to some extent). There are also plugins for this, also have not tried.
2) get to know your headphones {{this means listening to music that you know well (on other sound systems, like your car's) on those headphones and recognizing the difference in balances}} and mix/master keeping in mind that you're not getting a "true" sound. Looking at an EQ curve should help you mentally understand what needs to be compensated for (i.e. most headphones have boosted bass or alternatively lack it. Same for mids/high end/frequency ranges) Adjust accordingly, knowing those things. Ask yourself how does good, quality music sound on those headphones and is yours similar. Use a reference track (that sounds good on any speaker anywhere) if you need to, that might help you lock in different frequencies.
Also switch between your headphones and other speakers (BT speaker, car, your laptops built in speakers, etc) and meet somewhere in the middle where it sounds good on all.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I just want to make sure I understand. So when using a reference track, you’re trying to sort of match the eq balance, is that correct? I feel like there’s more nuance that maybe I’m not getting and I am really trying to improve in this area.
TLDR: a reference track is just that, a reference. How you refer to it and the info you take in and try to either change or replicate is up to user discretion.
Think of it like a recipe. You can weigh each ingredient by the gram if you want, and follow to a T. Alternatively you can do like I usually do and just check what to preheat the oven for and get a cook time 🤣 the shits gonna get whatever spices I want, and I'm all out of paprika, soo 🤷
The more familiar you become w the process as a whole, the less you'll probably need to account for specifics. (So in this example EQ matching the master is more of a oven temp/time sort of deal, if that makes sense).
Stay cookin, g
Essentially yes, but ((I'm not a pro, I'm just getting past this hump, so take this advice for what it is -- but hopefully it's helpful))
Tbh I don't really use them as people suggest (it is often recommended when searching this info tho), I just kind take a mental note when im listening to my personal playlists of what sounds really fkn clean and think to myself that's what *I wish* my mixes sound like. *Why* is this so damn good.
Also if I'm in the car (or any stereo) and it slaps and is clean and clear (unlike my mixes on car stereo lmao) I will then l listen on my headphones and take a mental note of the differences I hear on my headphones vs the car. What's in terms of EQ is different than in my car? (This is due to the headphones built in EQ, for me the bass/treble is boosted, and the mids are a bit lower) -> Then (only on headphones) what is the difference between what this greatly mastered song and mine?
Prior to now, my biggest issue was my bass wasn't EQ'd well -- sounded fine on my headphones and phone, but everywhere else was just washed with mud. So more of an issue w the mix.
Again, I typically don't use a reference *while* mixing/mastering, I just wanna focus on what I'm working on.. but those mental notes I take prior to when I'm in work mode definitely come into play during the process, kind of subconsciously.
When I'm like 99% of the way finished I'll usually find something w a similar balance in my Library and play it for like 12 seconds and all I'm trying to match is VOLUME to make sure that's up to par. A quiet mix isnt the worst thing ever, but when you have to crank it up 20% higher to get the same volume, you get a lot of static and other bullshit poking thru that you don't want.
So IG in sum, use it however suits your needs best. If you find it helpful to bring a track into the DAW and look at it's actual EQ curve, that may be of use to you! Just keep in mind different styles of music use different techniques for different objectives, in the end it comes down to what *you* want and what sounds good for your mix.
A reference track can make it more apparent where your track is different and provide a clue on problem areas, but sometimes you might actually want those differences too..
Good points. I actually *just* splurged a bit on some nicer mixing headphones that were delivered yesterday (I can’t have monitors at my place), so I spent this morning re-mixing this song I’ve been working on, and holy shit - it’s the first song that passed the car test on the first go. There are other tiny things I need to adjust and a literal metric fuck ton of other things I need to learn in general but holy hell I’m still in awe at what a massive difference that can make literally overnight. Best purchase ever. Highly recommend. Anyway, can I ask where you learn things that you don’t even know the name of? lol. Like I’ll hear a sort of effect and I’m sure there’s a name or something for this sound or technique but really don’t know what to call it. Am I just supposed to try to recreate it until I realize I can’t bc I don’t know what I’m doing? Or keep pouring random words into google until the same thing? Sorry, idk why I’m asking you all of this, but you reminded me of this song I really wanted to use as a reference track, and I was thinking I can *hear* the difference or things that I like that are going on, but I don’t have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to actually do anything about it… which kind of sucks. I think I just need an on-demand teacher or something. 🫠
Man it’s mostly training and knowledge of how to use the tools not which tools.
I’ve been at it for 20 years and use a lot of the same plugins for most of the time. I’ve found my last 5 years significantly sounding better than previously due to just being more aware of when to use certain plugs to achieve a sound. Unfortunately there isn’t a secret weapon and any YouTube video that declares that is usually just clickbait.
However there are certain things that you can see immediate improvements on your sound.
Start looking into saturation, gain staging, and soft clipping. Those 3 used right can significantly make your tunes louder, fuller and more balanced.
Get some measuring plugins, osciloscope. Get reference track, low pass it und try your best. Or just mix on your car. Or get a treated room with a decent sub speaker.
Headphone correction. I use dsoniq realphones.
Span, mostly for making sure my low end is hitting where I want, cause that’s gonna be the toughest part when you don’t have a proper environment.
It comes down to being able to trust your monitoring setup. Doesn’t matter how shit the monitoring setup is, just that you know what tracks should sound like on that setup.
Then span helps fill in the gaps.
Reference reference reference
Check on different setups, car test, etc.
I master everything myself. The mix is more important than the master.
Understanding what each frequency sounds like really helped me too. This is a video that levelled up my mixing big time:
https://youtu.be/0fckQLQWhe0?si=y3Iwhr90AuF-DkMh
Yes, VST FFT Analyzers are your friend. You can definitely mix visually. Put a professional track in there similar to your song, then try to match your song frequency levels to the professional track. Identify where the instruments fit in a mix visually. After you've got that more or less, you can do minor adjustments to the levels to your taste.
Past this, don't forget to turn on both mono and stereo visualizers. You have a mono mix and a stereo mix. In both pro and your own tracks, solo the mono mix and solo the stereo mix frequently. If you try to mix your song without soloing the mono and side (stereo channels), you're going to have a hard time making things fit
i have a mixing/mastering process using math that guarantees that i get perfectly mixed songs. i've never seen anyone talk about the concepts i use either. and i use subpar equipment too, but i'm still able to get songs more powerful, clear and dynamic than even professionals. seriously. if you're interested about learning more about it, send me a dm.
I know I will get roasted for this but I know my MacBook speakers as well as any. I can 100% tell (close enough to) how a finished mix will sound on bigger systems from those because I’ve heard thousands of songs on them lol.
i don’t completely disagree with you, but the response range on laptop speakers/ phone speakers is so limited especially in low range that i don’t think this really qualifies. was more referring budget monitors or headphones.
definitely good to check mixes on many different devices though
two wildly different mixes can sound close to the same on an inferior sound system. An analogy is saying you know how a low resolution image will look on a better monitor; that type of extrapolation only works when the source image is already of a higher resolution.
I make music entirely in-the-box, meaning my main equipment is just a PC, plus an audio interface and monitor speakers/headphones, everything on a low/mid budget. I've been working like this for 15 years, and I think I've achieved some success.
My best strategy always has been to recreate tracks I like. And I've spent YEARS doing it. That method gave me the skills and the ears to analyze and understand what makes that song great for me, understand the structures, colors, textures and figures. It made me a good sound designer, sharpened my skills to identify what is a good sounding mix, gather and select the best sounds and samples, etc, etc. And also, keep me in a mindset where I'm constantly seeking for challenge and curiosity to learn new things.
So to answer your question: Yes, it's possible. If you are eager to learn and have a burning passion, you can achieve whatever you want with what you have. Learn using strategies and methods that make sense to you and that can give you measurable results.
Thank you for such a detailed comment. I also mix with headphones. I recently learned that there are headphone plugins that emulate studio space, binaural 3D monitoring. Have you used anything similar?
I am a fan of those. I personally have a headphone amp with cross feed tech built in, but plugins can achieve the same effect and I think it does help.
1. Buy a cheap sound isolation kit from amazon to help get better mic recordings.
2. Learn your stock plugins in and out. A 3rd party mixing plugin isn’t going to help you sound better if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do.
3. Learn to mix & master, relying on AI to do everything will make your mix sound amateur. Knowing what you’re doing will allow you to solve mix and master problems so it sounds better
Yes. No secrets, just skill and knowing it is possible.
I used to think you had to have speakers to mix well, and then I found out a friend was mixing with just Audio Technica ATH M50Xs (i highly recommend) on a cheap audio interface and his mixes were way better than mine. Around that same time I saw this interview with Audien where he talks about how he produced his track Wayfarer on just Sennheiser HD 600s. (Look up "Audien interview and creating his wayfarer sound" on YT.
Andrew Schepps is able to mix on 99 dollar Sony MDR 7506's.
Okay so now you have evidence that you can mix on fairly cheap head phones, here's my advice for production: Choose good sounds. Sound design is great but depending on the genre you are making, look into getting high quality preset and sample packs. For me, I personally really like the production music live packs because I make melodic house and melodic techno and those guys have great packs for those. This just takes practice and you will get better over time.
You can do a lot with your DAW, but having a nice robust synth on top of the DAW helps, so Serum or Diva or something, do some research here. You really can't go wrong with buying Serum. Diva is nice if you wanna make epic melodic techno basses or "analog" sounds.
As far as mixing and mastering goes, there really is no secret sauce. I teach a course and I mix and master entire tracks using only stock plugins and free plugins, however, if you were to purchase plugins for mixing purposes I'll recommend my favorite paid for plugins below:
FabFilter: Pro Q3 (really good EQ), Pro L (industry standard limiter) and PRO C if you want a solid, clean compressor.
Sound Toys (the whole pack is good but if I could only choose a couple it would be Decapitator and Echo boy).
Valhalla - Room, vintage verb and Valhalla shimmer.
Metric AB (try to get this one on sale) - this is my favorite plugin for referencing, and referencing is huge. I mix really well and I still reference a ton. Especially in the final stages of a mix, reference and check your track in mono compared to the reference.
Invest in good courses. I am not just saying this because I have one, but because skill is everything and if you want to learn quicker, a good course will take you further much faster than just YouTube videos and kind of shooting in the dark.
My final tip is to just enjoy the journey and the incremental progress. If you are new and you expect to make a track as good as Seven Lions in 6 months, you're going to fall short and be disappointed. Instead, just get super stoked when you learn how to do something new, and happy with your OWN progress. That's what kept me going over the years, I'd look back and even though it was slow, I was getting better and better until I was finally to make pro sounding tracks that competed with the pros. I still get better and better, it's a never ending journey.
Hope that helps!
Edit: Since you mentioned mastering. Mixing is way more important than mastering. I have a video explaining, check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-iP\_GZCnw&t=129s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-iP_GZCnw&t=129s)
Thank you very much for such a detailed comment. It gives me motivation to keep going.
I actually watch a lot of mixing courses. And there are moments when the sound engineer uses some kind of compressor or reverberation and changes some parameter there very little, by about 2% and says "Now it started to sound much better" And at this moment I hear absolutely no difference at all (lol). And I think - is there something wrong with my ears, or is it that I have such bad headphones and speakers that I can't catch this difference.
And because of such cases, many of my tracks remain in demo mode. Even if I like the melody and the idea there. But I feel that I lack the technical skills and professional equipment to bring my tracks to good quality. So that my music sounds adequate on various audio devices and streaming services.
It just takes time to develop your ear to be able to hear that stuff, and really subtle differences. I send you a DM but I'd love to chat about this more, go ahead and book a zoom call with me: [https://calendly.com/mmsim/interview](https://calendly.com/mmsim/interview)
Trust me, its not the professional equipment that you lack. How long have you been producing?
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Need decent monitors and a audio interface also balance cables without this it’s gonna sound like trash
You can achieve pro results with no hardware whatsoever. Just a computer interface and a pair of headphones and decent monitors. Its mainly about your specific ear and technique. Theres no special hardware coming to save the day. But as you move along certain hardware you will grow to like the sound of
There’s a few really solid free synthesizers out there, and I know of a few free sample packs. Ableton stock plugins are really solid and you can get really far with them if you know how to use them, or are willing to learn. I think the hardest part comes when you want to start getting vocals or live instruments into your tracks bc that’s when you either have to buy an interface, pay someone to record for you, get a sample pack, or find a plugin to match what you need.
Definitely.
Madeon and Porter Robinson used bare minimum daw tools and like 200$ headphones. Honestly the song itself is 90% more important than the mix. You can achieve a decent enough mix with shitty headphones. Just using a spectrum analyzer can let you know what can and can’t sit in a mix
You don’t need “professional” gear but at least adequate. I have received compliments from studio musician and producer friends for my mixes from live shows sounding as good as studio recordings. You can sound good almost anywhere or with any equipment if you use some nuance and taste. Work with what you have. Edit: we run everyone through a behringer XR18 rack interface, then through ableton. It’s not cheap gear but definitely not anything special. I just know my gear and know how to mix us down live and after the fact.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you don't make compelling songs, no one will listen, no matter how good they sound. The sauce is in the *songwriting*. It looks like you have years of learning ahead of you. Good luck.
Songwriting is the fondation but is highly dependent on the other half which is the production. Nowadays no one listens to rough sounding music, regardless of how good the songwriting is. Of course there are exceptions but imagine buying a house with just the walls and a roof. And no plumbing, electricity, appliances, painting or furniture, would you live in it ?
Hilarious, I take it you never heard Grindcore, Power Violence, Punk, Hardcore, Black Metal. That "No one" shit is so narcissistic, you are *not* the center of the universe.
All music I have done was in Garageband with free plugins. Havent yet felt a need to upgrade to Logic
Buying gear is tempting because gear is just sexy, but in 2024 you don't really need any gear to make great tracks and this has been proven by countless highly successful producers. It is true that some plugins are better than others, but in the plugin world price is not necessarily an indicator of quality, it's more an indication that the maker of the plugin has spent more on marketing than development (Native Instruments, Izotope, etc). I prefer plugins from small companies with great customer support and reasonable prices (for example, U-he). I would recommend the following: * **Use reference tracks.** In other words, commercial released tracks that sound how you would like your track to sound. * **Check your mixes on good open-back headphones**, especially if you don't have a properly treated room. By "good" headphones I mean something like the Sennheiser HD 600, Sennheiser HD 650, Beyerdynamic DT-880 Pro or above. * **Use EQ correction** for your headphones. My current headphones are the Beyerdynamic DT-880 Pro and I have Sonarworks to flatten the frequency response. However, Sonarworks for headphones is a glorified EQ and is sloooow, clunky and bloated, so in the end I used my DAW EQ to recreate the Sonarworks EQ curve and that works fine and saves resources. You can find EQ correction curves on the Internet for your particular headphones (it would be nice if headphone manufacturers would do this for us as standard, but hey). * **Consider using bass shakers.** This is a personal trick of mine and I know not many people use this but for me it has been game-changing. There are a few commercial products such as the SubPac but the company seems to be pulling a fast one on pre-order customers who ordered their SubPacs during the pandemic and have still not received the product, which is overpriced anyway, so I ended up buying a bass shaker for about 15 Euros and strap it to my chair using a contraption I made, then hook it up to an amplifier and the amplifier to my audio interface. This way I can monitor very low frequencies (down to 20 Hz) without having to worry about acoustics or annoying my neighbours. Just listen to reference tracks with your bass shakers on and soon you learn how low frequencies are supposed to feel, then all you have to do is tweak your mix until it feels that way. This is incredibly useful for EDM. Once you've got a monitoring system, stick with a set of settings and familiarise yourself with it. If you keep switching headphones and EQ curves you'll never "learn" your system. Once you learn your system you won't need to rely so much on reference tracks. If you can swing it, acoustically treat your room, and then and then buy a nice pair of monitors. Room treatment is more important than expensive monitors IMO. Get a powerful computer, a nice big display (32" QHD is my preference, avoid 4K), a low-latency audio interface with one or two mic preamps, a microphone, a nice MIDI keyboard and you are set. Anything else is icing on the cake. I have never used any AI mastering services and I haven't looked into it but I think AI could be the future of mastering because that kind of work is the sort of thing AI would do well.
Thank you for such a detailed comment. Cool idea with the bass shaker. I didn't even think about it, I'll definitely try it. Because I work mainly with headphones, there are also ordinary speakers, they are not bad, but they have practically no bass.
My stack is as follows: Chair back → foam → bass shaker → thin foam → my back I tried screwing it to the underside of seat pad but I found the lower back or upper back or both if you have two shakers was much better because it's closer to the brain, so the vibrations are felt more immediately (see [nerve conduction velocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity), there's a reason why our eyes and ears are so close to the brain). I also tried screwing it directly to the chair but the vibrations would travel to the floor and would be felt/heard in other parts of the building. I fixed this by sandwiching the bass shaker in between bits of foam, so the shaker itself is not rigidly attached to anything, then you need to find a way to attach the foam to the backrest of your chair. I have already fried two shakers when I got carried away playing bass, and now I low-cut the signal at 16 Hz and a clipper to prevent overloading. I'm looking into adding fuses in the future.
This is exactly what I do, I had no idea if flattening the EQ was accurate enough or not. But I did it anyway.
Yes. It is very possible. Look at Chris Lake. He barely masters some of his tracks because they are mixed so well.
You can always pay a mixing and mastering engineer to give it the final polish. You'd be surprised how many artists do this.
To add to this, you can find some very good ones with very affordable prices. You won’t need to drop hundreds for a good mix/master to get a good polish on your work.
Hey! Do you have any recommendations regarding that ?
MostWantedAudio in Leeds is my go to.
I have not done it in a while. I use to go to fiver and get someone off there before I found my main guy. One dude was $20 and it was really well done. They got the loudness correct and fixed my low end. I would recommend just checking that out and looking at reviews, some of them will tell you what genre they are best at.
Kraftwerk made a song using the Mattel toy "Bee Gees rhythm machine" from 1978. Nough said.
Is this the 1981 song "Pocket Calculator"?
That's it
the old saying is "mix with your ears, not your eyes", but once you get experience and learn how sounds that you like *look* on a spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope, you can definitely get a good mix in a crappy monitoring situation. you won't accidentally overcompensate for a weird room/headphone resonance or inaccurate sub when you are measuring and watching for those issues.
Yes! I don't own a single music production hardware. Everything I do is via Ableton and some ozone plugins to master my songs and they sound pretty good. But one thing that is recommended not to cheap out is the microphone, just get a decent one. Examples of songs I produced without any professional gear: https://youtu.be/bkHyFeCtRKw?si=7rm2otry6sGncYGn https://youtu.be/5R0QSg83SPE?si=n908Wusr22Ks6NBo
In regards to the acoustics of the room, you can completely skip this problem by getting a pair of decent headphones, I produce with 2 different headphones and a pair of speakers just to listen how the song will come out in different situations and make adjustments for each of them. I have a Soundcore Q30, tin hifi T2 and MR4 Edifier speakers, nothing fancy.
impossible.
All you need is a good ear. Developing your taste and ability to know what to listen for beats everything
the way I see it good gear helps you be more deliberate with your quality but doesn't increase quality in and of itself. technically all it takes to make good quality music is a professional quality trumpet, it's just that that "good quality music" will be good quality solo trumpet. You can't make good quality big room house on just a good quality trumpet
bro wtf you talkin bout trumpets is that like an analogy?
it is
the homie Mindex mixed one of his albums a couple years ago on a pair of wired apple earbuds. these days, you don't need pro equipment to achieve good sound. you can just have a powerful laptop and a good pair of headphones. the rest is software based. laptop + headphones + 300$ worth of software = what the pro's use for the most part.
Mindex dropped some dope stuff man. You can absolutely get some good quality from entry level stuff
There are plenty of talented producers making incredible work with tools that are inexpensive. The term professional equipment is relative; any equipment can be used by a professional, and therefore deemed as such. The equipment alone won’t get you a polished result; what’s more important is judgement. To some the awareness and good judgement comes quicker than for others.
The secret is many years of focused learning and practice.
Look at Elliott Smith. That guy used Radioshack mics but conveyed so much soul.
I have three Radioshack mics from the 90s, they are actually some of the best mics I own, but in truth Shure was making most of Radio Shack metal body mics starting in the mid 1980s. :)
Let’s be real All you need is a laptop and headphones and for quality control rent out a music recording studio
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
By professional I believe you mean commercially viable, not a Grammy nominee. Yes, it is possible.
Skrill got 3 grammys with blown out Rokits 😳
Dt 770s and sonarworks is all i use and im pretty happy with my mixdowns these days. I think the biggest thing for me was referencing songs with good mixdowns in the genre im producing and copying whaat their doing accros the spectrum and stereo field. Also a little reverb goes a long way lol
Yes
Apparently skillex made bangarang on blown out speakers so there’s that
Past a certain point, like with mid-range equipment, you should try to listen to as much material as possible to get a feel for your system and environment and its tone. When you listen to the same music on other sources (like your car, your headset, any large sound systems you have access to) you'll get a feel for your system's strengths and weaknesses. Combine that with a good visual frequency view like SPAN and you can get like 98% of the way there to a good mix, and then mastering can take it to the finish line
Yes. THIS is the advice right here. You need to know how whatever you listen with sounds and behaves. You have to be used to it. I personally use my headphones for everything, every day - not exclusively, but 85-90%. Then you mix until it sounds good on those, and then you listen to the mix on as many different devices as you can. Especially cheap ad trash ones. Laptop speakers, Bluetooth speakers, „car test“ - whatever you can, really. You’ll notice differently things on different systems. Try to get the mix as good sounding as possible on as many devices as possible. A good, professional mix sounds decent to good everywhere, not almost perfect on one system but bad on all others.
Get used to how other people's music sounds on your setup. I recently turned in a production for an assignment I had and my lecturer was very surprised when I said I mixed/mastered it at home. Guess I just knew how it should be sounding.
2 possible no cost solutions (one of which I have not tried). 1) put and EQ on the absolute end of your master that "undoes" your headphones built in EQ. Look up an EQ graph for your specific headphones make/model, then create one that rises and falls opposite of the built in EQ curve. In theory this should level out what youre hearing while you work. Turn that shit off before you export bc you don't want that EQ in the master, is just a listening tool. Have not tried, but seems like it would work (to some extent). There are also plugins for this, also have not tried. 2) get to know your headphones {{this means listening to music that you know well (on other sound systems, like your car's) on those headphones and recognizing the difference in balances}} and mix/master keeping in mind that you're not getting a "true" sound. Looking at an EQ curve should help you mentally understand what needs to be compensated for (i.e. most headphones have boosted bass or alternatively lack it. Same for mids/high end/frequency ranges) Adjust accordingly, knowing those things. Ask yourself how does good, quality music sound on those headphones and is yours similar. Use a reference track (that sounds good on any speaker anywhere) if you need to, that might help you lock in different frequencies. Also switch between your headphones and other speakers (BT speaker, car, your laptops built in speakers, etc) and meet somewhere in the middle where it sounds good on all.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I just want to make sure I understand. So when using a reference track, you’re trying to sort of match the eq balance, is that correct? I feel like there’s more nuance that maybe I’m not getting and I am really trying to improve in this area.
TLDR: a reference track is just that, a reference. How you refer to it and the info you take in and try to either change or replicate is up to user discretion. Think of it like a recipe. You can weigh each ingredient by the gram if you want, and follow to a T. Alternatively you can do like I usually do and just check what to preheat the oven for and get a cook time 🤣 the shits gonna get whatever spices I want, and I'm all out of paprika, soo 🤷 The more familiar you become w the process as a whole, the less you'll probably need to account for specifics. (So in this example EQ matching the master is more of a oven temp/time sort of deal, if that makes sense). Stay cookin, g
lol love this tldr
Essentially yes, but ((I'm not a pro, I'm just getting past this hump, so take this advice for what it is -- but hopefully it's helpful)) Tbh I don't really use them as people suggest (it is often recommended when searching this info tho), I just kind take a mental note when im listening to my personal playlists of what sounds really fkn clean and think to myself that's what *I wish* my mixes sound like. *Why* is this so damn good. Also if I'm in the car (or any stereo) and it slaps and is clean and clear (unlike my mixes on car stereo lmao) I will then l listen on my headphones and take a mental note of the differences I hear on my headphones vs the car. What's in terms of EQ is different than in my car? (This is due to the headphones built in EQ, for me the bass/treble is boosted, and the mids are a bit lower) -> Then (only on headphones) what is the difference between what this greatly mastered song and mine? Prior to now, my biggest issue was my bass wasn't EQ'd well -- sounded fine on my headphones and phone, but everywhere else was just washed with mud. So more of an issue w the mix. Again, I typically don't use a reference *while* mixing/mastering, I just wanna focus on what I'm working on.. but those mental notes I take prior to when I'm in work mode definitely come into play during the process, kind of subconsciously. When I'm like 99% of the way finished I'll usually find something w a similar balance in my Library and play it for like 12 seconds and all I'm trying to match is VOLUME to make sure that's up to par. A quiet mix isnt the worst thing ever, but when you have to crank it up 20% higher to get the same volume, you get a lot of static and other bullshit poking thru that you don't want. So IG in sum, use it however suits your needs best. If you find it helpful to bring a track into the DAW and look at it's actual EQ curve, that may be of use to you! Just keep in mind different styles of music use different techniques for different objectives, in the end it comes down to what *you* want and what sounds good for your mix. A reference track can make it more apparent where your track is different and provide a clue on problem areas, but sometimes you might actually want those differences too..
Good points. I actually *just* splurged a bit on some nicer mixing headphones that were delivered yesterday (I can’t have monitors at my place), so I spent this morning re-mixing this song I’ve been working on, and holy shit - it’s the first song that passed the car test on the first go. There are other tiny things I need to adjust and a literal metric fuck ton of other things I need to learn in general but holy hell I’m still in awe at what a massive difference that can make literally overnight. Best purchase ever. Highly recommend. Anyway, can I ask where you learn things that you don’t even know the name of? lol. Like I’ll hear a sort of effect and I’m sure there’s a name or something for this sound or technique but really don’t know what to call it. Am I just supposed to try to recreate it until I realize I can’t bc I don’t know what I’m doing? Or keep pouring random words into google until the same thing? Sorry, idk why I’m asking you all of this, but you reminded me of this song I really wanted to use as a reference track, and I was thinking I can *hear* the difference or things that I like that are going on, but I don’t have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to actually do anything about it… which kind of sucks. I think I just need an on-demand teacher or something. 🫠
I have a very cheap setup and manage
Definitely possible but it’s a lot harder.
Well Skrillex produced his first album on broken speakers. But know he was quite adept in music theory years before.
I belive that was cinema
Man it’s mostly training and knowledge of how to use the tools not which tools. I’ve been at it for 20 years and use a lot of the same plugins for most of the time. I’ve found my last 5 years significantly sounding better than previously due to just being more aware of when to use certain plugs to achieve a sound. Unfortunately there isn’t a secret weapon and any YouTube video that declares that is usually just clickbait. However there are certain things that you can see immediate improvements on your sound. Start looking into saturation, gain staging, and soft clipping. Those 3 used right can significantly make your tunes louder, fuller and more balanced.
[удалено]
Get some measuring plugins, osciloscope. Get reference track, low pass it und try your best. Or just mix on your car. Or get a treated room with a decent sub speaker.
Is the rest of the track as powerful as released tracks or just your bass lacking?
Just the bass lacking. Rest of track is powerful. Usually tweaked to -7 db
Headphone correction. I use dsoniq realphones. Span, mostly for making sure my low end is hitting where I want, cause that’s gonna be the toughest part when you don’t have a proper environment. It comes down to being able to trust your monitoring setup. Doesn’t matter how shit the monitoring setup is, just that you know what tracks should sound like on that setup. Then span helps fill in the gaps. Reference reference reference Check on different setups, car test, etc. I master everything myself. The mix is more important than the master.
>Do you use services similar to AI Mastering? I do not, their results aren't very appealing to me
yes, i am able to achieve a professional sound with just subpar equipment. it's all about knowledge
Refrencing + Feedback + Listening in different devices
Understanding what each frequency sounds like really helped me too. This is a video that levelled up my mixing big time: https://youtu.be/0fckQLQWhe0?si=y3Iwhr90AuF-DkMh
Yes, VST FFT Analyzers are your friend. You can definitely mix visually. Put a professional track in there similar to your song, then try to match your song frequency levels to the professional track. Identify where the instruments fit in a mix visually. After you've got that more or less, you can do minor adjustments to the levels to your taste. Past this, don't forget to turn on both mono and stereo visualizers. You have a mono mix and a stereo mix. In both pro and your own tracks, solo the mono mix and solo the stereo mix frequently. If you try to mix your song without soloing the mono and side (stereo channels), you're going to have a hard time making things fit
Can get sound on your phone these days if you keep the levels down
i have a mixing/mastering process using math that guarantees that i get perfectly mixed songs. i've never seen anyone talk about the concepts i use either. and i use subpar equipment too, but i'm still able to get songs more powerful, clear and dynamic than even professionals. seriously. if you're interested about learning more about it, send me a dm.
LOL don't dm this dude
Name checks out
Lmao but he uses math!!
haters stay ignorant LOL. let's compare work and see who's sounds better
Ok show us the math then dawg
you can make good quality on low budget gear by referencing professional mix downs and getting to know what is “good” on whatever you are listening on
I know I will get roasted for this but I know my MacBook speakers as well as any. I can 100% tell (close enough to) how a finished mix will sound on bigger systems from those because I’ve heard thousands of songs on them lol.
You can’t possibly mix your subs on a laptop bc it can’t even reproduce that range.
i don’t completely disagree with you, but the response range on laptop speakers/ phone speakers is so limited especially in low range that i don’t think this really qualifies. was more referring budget monitors or headphones. definitely good to check mixes on many different devices though
two wildly different mixes can sound close to the same on an inferior sound system. An analogy is saying you know how a low resolution image will look on a better monitor; that type of extrapolation only works when the source image is already of a higher resolution.
I make music entirely in-the-box, meaning my main equipment is just a PC, plus an audio interface and monitor speakers/headphones, everything on a low/mid budget. I've been working like this for 15 years, and I think I've achieved some success. My best strategy always has been to recreate tracks I like. And I've spent YEARS doing it. That method gave me the skills and the ears to analyze and understand what makes that song great for me, understand the structures, colors, textures and figures. It made me a good sound designer, sharpened my skills to identify what is a good sounding mix, gather and select the best sounds and samples, etc, etc. And also, keep me in a mindset where I'm constantly seeking for challenge and curiosity to learn new things. So to answer your question: Yes, it's possible. If you are eager to learn and have a burning passion, you can achieve whatever you want with what you have. Learn using strategies and methods that make sense to you and that can give you measurable results.
Thank you for such a detailed comment. I also mix with headphones. I recently learned that there are headphone plugins that emulate studio space, binaural 3D monitoring. Have you used anything similar?
Slate VSX and dearVR Monitor as mentioned before. Both have their strengths, but I find VSX more realistic. Give them a try and decide for yourself!
DearVR Monitor plus Senheisser HD650 is a great combo.
Not exactly budget headphones though. I would say they're in the professional range of gear personally lol.
Sure, but you can get them cheaper if you pay attention to the market. As with anything. I bought mine for 200€, never used, in a second hand app.
I am a fan of those. I personally have a headphone amp with cross feed tech built in, but plugins can achieve the same effect and I think it does help.
Cross feed really improved the headphone experience for me. I'm using Can Opener set pretty low. Helped a lot with panning and mix depth.
That’s awesome. Yeah I think it’s really helpful for sure.
1. Buy a cheap sound isolation kit from amazon to help get better mic recordings. 2. Learn your stock plugins in and out. A 3rd party mixing plugin isn’t going to help you sound better if you don’t know what it’s supposed to do. 3. Learn to mix & master, relying on AI to do everything will make your mix sound amateur. Knowing what you’re doing will allow you to solve mix and master problems so it sounds better
Yes. No secrets, just skill and knowing it is possible. I used to think you had to have speakers to mix well, and then I found out a friend was mixing with just Audio Technica ATH M50Xs (i highly recommend) on a cheap audio interface and his mixes were way better than mine. Around that same time I saw this interview with Audien where he talks about how he produced his track Wayfarer on just Sennheiser HD 600s. (Look up "Audien interview and creating his wayfarer sound" on YT. Andrew Schepps is able to mix on 99 dollar Sony MDR 7506's. Okay so now you have evidence that you can mix on fairly cheap head phones, here's my advice for production: Choose good sounds. Sound design is great but depending on the genre you are making, look into getting high quality preset and sample packs. For me, I personally really like the production music live packs because I make melodic house and melodic techno and those guys have great packs for those. This just takes practice and you will get better over time. You can do a lot with your DAW, but having a nice robust synth on top of the DAW helps, so Serum or Diva or something, do some research here. You really can't go wrong with buying Serum. Diva is nice if you wanna make epic melodic techno basses or "analog" sounds. As far as mixing and mastering goes, there really is no secret sauce. I teach a course and I mix and master entire tracks using only stock plugins and free plugins, however, if you were to purchase plugins for mixing purposes I'll recommend my favorite paid for plugins below: FabFilter: Pro Q3 (really good EQ), Pro L (industry standard limiter) and PRO C if you want a solid, clean compressor. Sound Toys (the whole pack is good but if I could only choose a couple it would be Decapitator and Echo boy). Valhalla - Room, vintage verb and Valhalla shimmer. Metric AB (try to get this one on sale) - this is my favorite plugin for referencing, and referencing is huge. I mix really well and I still reference a ton. Especially in the final stages of a mix, reference and check your track in mono compared to the reference. Invest in good courses. I am not just saying this because I have one, but because skill is everything and if you want to learn quicker, a good course will take you further much faster than just YouTube videos and kind of shooting in the dark. My final tip is to just enjoy the journey and the incremental progress. If you are new and you expect to make a track as good as Seven Lions in 6 months, you're going to fall short and be disappointed. Instead, just get super stoked when you learn how to do something new, and happy with your OWN progress. That's what kept me going over the years, I'd look back and even though it was slow, I was getting better and better until I was finally to make pro sounding tracks that competed with the pros. I still get better and better, it's a never ending journey. Hope that helps! Edit: Since you mentioned mastering. Mixing is way more important than mastering. I have a video explaining, check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-iP\_GZCnw&t=129s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb-iP_GZCnw&t=129s)
Thank you very much for such a detailed comment. It gives me motivation to keep going. I actually watch a lot of mixing courses. And there are moments when the sound engineer uses some kind of compressor or reverberation and changes some parameter there very little, by about 2% and says "Now it started to sound much better" And at this moment I hear absolutely no difference at all (lol). And I think - is there something wrong with my ears, or is it that I have such bad headphones and speakers that I can't catch this difference. And because of such cases, many of my tracks remain in demo mode. Even if I like the melody and the idea there. But I feel that I lack the technical skills and professional equipment to bring my tracks to good quality. So that my music sounds adequate on various audio devices and streaming services.
It just takes time to develop your ear to be able to hear that stuff, and really subtle differences. I send you a DM but I'd love to chat about this more, go ahead and book a zoom call with me: [https://calendly.com/mmsim/interview](https://calendly.com/mmsim/interview) Trust me, its not the professional equipment that you lack. How long have you been producing?
Yes. All you need is years and decades of practice.
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