I know a handful of people that mix on headphones. I have varying degrees of thoughts on that. I get it, some of us are in bedrooms, our parents house, married with kids (not wanting to wake them up at 3AM!) But if you can, try to at least use headphones and small speakers- take frequent breaks, do car tests, and all of the other things that you can do to give yourself a lot of variety of listening experiences.
The thing with headphones that we have to remember is that they’re very fatiguing when you have them strapped to your head. You’ve GOT TO watch the volume. The work that I’m familiar with that has been mixed only entirely on headphones, most of the time.. not all of the time, tends to have a lack of depth. It tends to get very very upfront, really loud, and that happens to me all the time. There seems to be a spacial disconnect.
I think the only way around these issues when you’re mixing on headphones is to mix low levels, and take very very frequent breaks.
I do find that for a pop world, headphones are actually pretty good. If you’re mixing pop where you’re trying to get everything really forward, really compressed, really loud, overly bright and in-your-face- headphones are fantastic for that because that’s what they do really well!
We have a lot of great questions this week including:
• Do you have a service where we can pay for you to critique our mix/production? (of our personal work)
• What if I don’t have any studios monitors yet….. would you advise me to mix on headphones??
• Should the drum room be dampened or a wood floor?
• What is the workflow for broadcasting live on Youtube?
• Is your gear (or most of it) turned on all day so that it’s ready to go?
