mixing studio vs headphones

[steevio]

what are the exact dimensions of your room ?

download this free mode calculator and you can work out exactly which frequencies are resonating.
http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2009 ... alculator/

then if you check on a frequency / note chart you can work out which bass notes are causing the vibration, and avoid those notes in your basslines, or use a different key.
my studio is full of windows and they all rattled till i sorted them all out, just by wedging small pieces of wood into the frames where the windows opened, and attaching pieces of carpet across the really rattley windows. now i have no problems.

way better than using headphones mate.

thanks for the advice. but i think i didnt explain my self well enough.
i did fixed the door and window from making noise. i know that my problems are in the low-low mid but because its also a bedroom, i have no place for bass traps and i dont want to put any treatment on the wall (wood frames will just be noisy i think).
the calculator would be good if i didnt have a bed and a closet in the room

dont worry about the bed and closet, do the calculations and it will tell you which frequencies to avoid.
my studio is full of all sorts of things/furniture etc. but the modecalc told me which frequencies to avoid including low mids, and it worked, i never have problems now.

[lem]

what are the exact dimensions of your room ?

download this free mode calculator and you can work out exactly which frequencies are resonating.
http://www.microscopics.co.uk/blog/2009 ... alculator/

then if you check on a frequency / note chart you can work out which bass notes are causing the vibration, and avoid those notes in your basslines, or use a different key.
my studio is full of windows and they all rattled till i sorted them all out, just by wedging small pieces of wood into the frames where the windows opened, and attaching pieces of carpet across the really rattley windows. now i have no problems.

way better than using headphones mate.

thanks for the advice. but i think i didnt explain my self well enough.
i did fixed the door and window from making noise. i know that my problems are in the low-low mid but because its also a bedroom, i have no place for bass traps and i dont want to put any treatment on the wall (wood frames will just be noisy i think).
the calculator would be good if i didnt have a bed and a closet in the room

dont worry about the bed and closet, do the calculations and it will tell you which frequencies to avoid.
my studio is full of all sorts of things/furniture etc. but the modecalc told me which frequencies to avoid including low mids, and it worked, i never have problems now.

The kind of frequencies that you are talking about probably won't be affected much by the furniture.
One thing I wondered about those calculators, was that they don't take into account what the wall is made from. I mean its fine if you live in a solid walled victorian house, but what about these new builds that have paper thin partitions all over.

[Stomper]

i dont think i can avoid using all those frequencies.
i got 58-63, 116-127, 175-191, 233-255, 291-318, 350-382, 408-446.

my room 2.95*2.95*2.70

[steevio]

i dont think i can avoid using all those frequencies.
i got 58-63, 116-127, 175-191, 233-255, 291-318, 350-382, 408-446.

my room 2.95*2.95*2.70

ouch - your room is almost a perfect cube, the worst possible shape for a studio.

you got problems. if it was me, i'd move.
it depends on how important making music is to you mate.
maybe headphones is the only way, if you cant move.

your problem notes are A#1, A#2 A#3 and F3

i think the others are too high or not on a note to give you problems.
you could try avoiding working in the key of A#, F or D# to start with it might help.

[Stomper]

no, cant at the moment. i have 8" montiros about 1m from my face. if i could i would do that long time ago

thats what im not sure about. yes better headphones would be good. but its still headphones, so maybe paying someone to do the mixing for me for a while would be a better option (its not like im making track a week).
im short on money so headphones makes more sense since its a one time investment. but im just not sure how well i can mix with headphones so it also might be money thrown away (im kinda perfectionist about the mix and never satisfied with the result, could be the room though).

[NoAffiliation]

i love producing on headphones, you can hear more detail simply from reduced noise.

if you get monitors i say get smaller woofers with less actual bass. perceived bass and actual bass are different and in many cases in home studio type rooms you want less air moving. i went through this sh!t for years to the point where no matter what i mix on, as soon as i feel pressure from low end, i back it off to the point where it's almost inaudible. you will notice though if you try it that if you mute the bass you instantly feel that it's gone despite barely thinking you hear it in the mix.

no matter what you mix on, try to focus on the "pocket" if that makes any sense, don't worry about huge bass, just make a tight pocket. sometimes crappy laptop speakers are even good for this. i always flip the audio driver to listen through the laptop speakers. if the mix makes sense there it will usually translate, bass included

[AK]

You can still get a decent enough mix through headphones, I use them for deatial/panning/reverb checks, I'm in an angled room at the moment for my music - dunno if that's good or bad but to be honest, a lot is guesswork and a knowledge of frequencies. I look at spectral graphs of other tunes similar to what I do and also check each sounds frequency with an analyzer.

Mostly, I think channel levels are the thing to watch, I mean, if you have separation and each sound is in its own space and functioning as part of the whole, you can get kinda halfway there anyways and balancing the levels gets an issue. Overloading a track with stuff that doesn't need to be there and using samples is, imo, a surefire way to get mix issues, creating your own sounds from scratch and working them into the music with filters and envelopes allows you to almost mix as you go along. I never really hit that many obstacles with that approach and just try to sweeten things up towards the mixdown.

I learned a lot of stuff re: frequencies from steevio, ( it's all in here somewhere ) and not only does it help with your music, it's an absolute MUST HAVE for mixing too, google: notes to frequencies and also look at the harmonic series to give you an insight of what is really happening when you trigger a sound.

But yeah, a poor acoustic environment need not be the end of the world, you just gotta work harder and educate yourself and do a heap of A/B'ing with quality recordings.

[tone-def]

i got those headphones when i had room problems. it was a good move.

i don't think they fully replace monitors but using both together, even in a bad room improves things a lot.