The importance of the room you mix in.

[steevio]

Mixing dance music with headphones is a really great way to fck up your hearing. Don't do it.

+1

[AK]

mixing tracks can be done in phones with excellent results.

It's not ideal though and you have to make compromises. There are certain things which become apparent once you have tried mixing on headphones and then listen back through monitors. The most common things that spring to mind and from my own experience is a lack of stereo image, with headphones you tend to think things are panned too wide and then tendency is to reduce that width, then, when listened to over loudspears, it can come over and too mono/middly. Also, with efx ( esp. reverb ) you can think you are over doing things when actually you're not, and the effect over loudpeakers can seem as though the mix is too dry and one dimensional. If you know what to look out for you can get a balance in these areas but I personally think bass is tricky because you don't feel the vibration through the body, it's just 'there' in the middle of your head.

If you have been using good headphones for a while and know what to look out for, you could get along ok but for me personally, I having a burning desire to get back to my monitors ASAP.

Pardon my French on this one dudes, but fck headphones. Yes you can mix on headphones, problem is its about as enjoyable as licking juice from the snatch of an aging tramp.

In regards to treating a room, the idea is too treat it , not kill it . Soundproofing is probably more desirable in most situations, every pad I have dwelt in , I had complaints about noise, I need to feel the vibe and enjoy producing or I just turn off the computer.

Hence why I don't like it but then I have never licked the juice from an ageing tramp so can't make that comparison mate. I do however have monitors and can make a comparison there and for me, it's a no brainer.

[NoAffiliation]

i've had alot of small poor sounding rooms and i learned a quick trick instead of dealing with all the waterfall diagram crap and test software.

1. load and play track into daw and take screenshot with spectrum analyzer

2. play same track back with a microphone in the listening position and compare the spectrum of the mic vs. the digital file

takes 2 minutes and will show you the resonances, also is useful if you want to calibrate a subwoofer

in alot of ways fighting against a room is good for you as it will make you better

[eggnchips]

i've had alot of small poor sounding rooms and i learned a quick trick instead of dealing with all the waterfall diagram crap and test software.

1. load and play track into daw and take screenshot with spectrum analyzer

2. play same track back with a microphone in the listening position and compare the spectrum of the mic vs. the digital file

takes 2 minutes and will show you the resonances, also is useful if you want to calibrate a subwoofer

in alot of ways fighting against a room is good for you as it will make you better

Nice tip there. Anybody else doing anything similar?
I think a major problem with fighting against a room is that it becomes frustrating and therefore takes the enjoyment away from production. Like I said, my old room was a concrete square box that was horrible for mixing bass. You could even notice the changes by moving your head from left to right by a few centimeters, and this called for lots of track renders to try out in other areas. Making constant attempts to get it right isn't good for creativity I can tell ya.

[tone-def]

i've had alot of small poor sounding rooms and i learned a quick trick instead of dealing with all the waterfall diagram crap and test software.

1. load and play track into daw and take screenshot with spectrum analyzer

2. play same track back with a microphone in the listening position and compare the spectrum of the mic vs. the digital file

takes 2 minutes and will show you the resonances, also is useful if you want to calibrate a subwoofer

in alot of ways fighting against a room is good for you as it will make you better

Thing is a track will have different peaks and holes depending what key and scale it is in. Also just getting a screen shot is about the most inaccurate thing you can do. Spectrum analysers constantly move when you play a finished track because finished tracks have dynamics.

[simonb]

if the root notes of keys you tend to use resonate with the room, it makes it almost impossible to get your bass right.

My old bedroom had some pretty bad resonance around A1/A#1/B1 (at least when playing them on a synth) so I generally avoided these keys, mostly just because the sound annoyed me a bit.

Strange issue though, it's not like every time I listened to a professional track in A there was this massive annoying bass resonsance, it just seemed to be when I was producing.