There are endless guides and “quick-fix” products out there for making the room and speakers which you use for mixing “flat.”  But honestly, unless you’re paying bank and have an acoustics designer as a generous uncle, you’re not going to get an ideal situation to mix in.

There are however some everyday tools that let you at least see/hear some of the weirdness your room might cause, and sometimes even help you fix problems in speaker placement, and even some minor tuning.

I suppose I should have started with why you should tune your room/speakers.  It really comes down to translation.  If you want your mixes to go from place to place, club to club, car to car  – and maintain a decent sound, then you’ve got to try to “clean-up” your mixing situation as much as possible.

I can show you how with an example:

My setup involves a macbook and external monitor sitting between my speakers.  The macbook sits well below the speakers, but the external monitor is tall enough to “shade” some of the sound coming from the right speaker.

I hadn’t realized how much this affected my sound until I took a 10kHz (10,000 Hz) sine wave and panned it far right.  My extreme highs were lower by 3-8 dB on the right side, which had been causing me to mix hi-hats ridiculously loud.  All I had to do was slide my monitor over a few inces and re-center my space – and the problem went away.

Tuning in a Few Steps:

1) In order to diagnose some of my problems, I used what are called “test oscillators.” These are simple devices (and plugins) that generate differen’t waveforms and noise at set amplitudes.  In Logic you’ll find the “test oscillator” plugin as an insert under “utility” or as an instrument.  In Pro Tools, I just use the audio-suite “signal generator” which writes the waveforms to whatever track I have selected.

What you want to do is listen to some sine waves in the low, mid and high ranges.  Good basic starting points are 100Hz, 1kHz (1000Hz) and 10 kHz (10000Hz). I’ve provided some 44.1kHz/16bit wavs if you need some (I burned these to a cd to take to other people’s studios)  If you record at a different sample rate/bit depth, you definitely want to make your own.

Sine Wave – 100Hz

Sine Wave – 1kHz

Sine Wave – 10kHz

Pink Noise (-20dB)

Note: Please be careful when listening to these, as depending on how loud your system is, you could damage your speakers/ears if you blast yourself with sine waves or pink noise for too long/too loud.  Normal use shouldn’t do any damage to anything, but pumping them so loud that your neighbors will complain is definitely NOT advised. I would also advise against streaming them (just download them) as the files are pretty big.

These are good bench marks of low, mid and high.  I also try sweeping up and down a bit (slowly) and hearing how other frequencies are reproduced by my speakers.  What you want to try to listen for is “Are some frequencies noticeably louder than others?” and “If I pan these signals left and right, do I hear a difference?”

Make sure to keep track of what you notice – maybe even write some of it down.

2) Check to see that as you pan a frequency left and right that the sound actually moves left and right.  Then pan back to center and try to perceive it is actually center.  This may sound silly, but lots of funny things can throw your stereo image off.  Sometimes, something as simple as angling your speakers an inch in or out will make a world of difference.

3) Last, I always repeat these steps with some Pink Noise at -20dB.  Pink Noise (NOT white noise) is roughly random noise that has “equal power per octave” which relates relatively well to how we hear.  I’ll spare you the SCIENCE, but pink noise is our rough way of having non-music signal which relatively “flat” volume across the frequency spectrum.  If while playing pink noise through your system, if you hear your lows or mids or highs stand out or disappear, you’ll have some sense of the “holes” in your system.  These are the places where changes you make to your mix might not be heard enough or heard far too loudly.

4) To fix these problems, is sort of a college degree in itself.  But there are a few simple thigns to try.

First you can try to mix while “knowing” the limits of your system – This means if your speakers put out WAY too much bass, then you know you can mix the low-end louder than you actually want it to end up.  That way when someone else’s speakers- say a system with no sub – plays your mix, there’s still a fair amount of low-end push.

Second you can try moving some of your gear.  This is generally the only way to correct some of those left-right panning issues.  Try moving your speakers further apart and closer.  Also try elevating and lowering them.  Last, play with the angles at which your speakers are pointed in.

You can also try to move things other than your speakers – basically anything that might sit between you and the speakers is a potential mix-killer.

Third you can go for Equalization.  An outboard graphic EQ or sometimes just a saved EQ preset on your master fader can help you compensate for frequencies that your system lacks or over-emphasizes.  Just make sure that if you set up this kind of “dummy” EQ on your master bus that you bypass it before doing ANY bounces.

Hope this helps, and happy sound hunting.