One big problem when mixing is:
Is there enough bass in the mix? Is it too toppy, too squawky, too woolly and muffled?
Well, you don’t know. Even if you had God’s own monitors, you wouldn’t know, because your hearing adapts to the signal, especially if you’re working on a piece for a longer stretch. Your brain EQs your perception to make the sound bearable
As for bass: Normal monitors won’t play back as low as you need them to. You need a tool that will tell you what’s going on in the bass region that is out of your hearing range and your monitor’s playback range. Har-Bal is a mastering EQ and analyzer package for Windows PCs and Macs. First you analyze your mix. The analysis will show how tops, midrange and bass are distributed in your mix.
Now you load a world-class reference mix of a similar musical style, let’s say R&B if you’re doing R&B and you compare the graphs of your mix with the graph of the world-class reference mix.
Then you adjust the graph of your mix to a shape quite similar (similar, not exactly the same) to the reference mix´s graph.
Bob’s your uncle! You are rewarded with a mix that is 100% compatible with the rest of your music style’s greatest successes.
Not too bassy, not too toppy. No need to test it on a million different systems! Finished! And you can be confident that your piece will be played and not taken off the air because it just doesn’t cut it sound -wise. I bought Har-Bal and I recommend this software. They don’t pay me to write rave reports about it. I tried it and I found it worked.
Try it yourself and you will find that it will save you a lot of time and money, You don’t need world-class monitors to make world class mixes. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like some world class monitors for myself
It does mean that world class monitors don’t solve the basic problem of subjective hearing. Har-Bal does, and that will take a great weight off your shoulders, believe you me!
Regards,
Robert
