The Story
Never trust your headphones to give you the best sounding music on the first go. I have a pair of sport headphones that I use for my everyday mixing, but I swear when I’m running them through Logic they are a lie. When I finish a song, I believe I have the right mix of vocal harmonies and bass, but as soon as I take off those headphones and cross monitor the sound on other speakers, I feel deceived. Either my bass is way too high or my vocals are barely audible. Either I have real Logic Pro X issues or my headphone game is a lie!
I’ve learned the solution is to listen to your track on multiple speaker systems. In addition to my everyday headphones, I started to tweak the sound for different sets of speakers. I learned that something that sounds good with headphones, sounds like mush on mac speakers. Something that sounds good on Mac speakers sounds like poop on iPhone headphones. Can I find a good medium?
The Solution
The solution is to monitor your track and tweak it to perfection. I prefer using the base plugins that come with Logic and a few plugins from Ozone to help me out. But at the end of the day, my vocals are still wack. It could be because I have a 13yr old puberty stricken voice or because I don’t have proper sound proofing when I record. That background noise makes my tracks sound gritty.
But for all of those audio engineers and perfectionists that say I should invest in sound proofing…suck it! We out here eatin’.
What kinds of problems have you run into mixing and mastering your audio? Do you have any preferred settings or solutions for this? Let me know in the comments below.
