Mixing Tip #10 - Mixing with Headphones

Mixing with headphones? Noooo... Do never test!

Headphones (these days) can come in various guises: Open; Closed; Semi Open; "Studio" - Each have their uses but not for mixing.

One of the major problems you'll encounter is panning: Let's say you want to pan the hi-hat over to the left. Having done so, you lower its fader so it sits further back in the mix. A couple of hours later, you listen back through your monitors and... you can't hear it!

With headphones, you see, the sound is pumped directly into your cranium, via small speakers. Everything is louder, but more importantly, the frequency-range won't be faithful - This will be particularly applicable with bass frequencies.

Additionally, phase cancellation will be hard to spot.

Headphones can be very useful for really "zooming-in" to problems of a compositional nature - such as locating out-of-tune (or out-of-time) notes - Just remember to immediately remove them and not get tempted to fiddle with levels and stuff... Hey, it's easy to forget you have them on sometimes, I know, I've been guilty of it myself!

Well - I have to admit - when I began this series of 10 mixing tips, I had a few ideas in my head to cover. Of course, lacking the female's natural built-in ability to multi-task, I quickly forgot what those ideas were (within 10 minutes of writing the 1st tip to be precise!).

Further Reading

But we got there! And I think I managed to include (in some form) all that was initially intended. Of course, it does not (and cannot) finish here - there's much to cover - but don't forget, we have our exclusive mixing tutorial (and interview) with Sound Engineer Rick Snoman which covers a lot of ground and it would also be almost negligent of me not to mention his most superb book, "The Dance Music Manual - Tools, Toys and Techniques", which has become the acclaimed bible by many, on both the subject of mixing, and composing for various of the dance music genre's.

Obviously, TheWhippinpost will return to this essential subject again and again so make sure you bookmark this site, or, better still, subscribe to the RSS feed and be first to read everything new, NOW!