Stop judging your mix by your phone's speakers
While I know my mixes aren't perfect, I do take pride in trying to make things sound good. And by good I mean, good enough for my ears.
I'll pine for hours, tweaking small things, notching the EQ, and all that. Dumping multiple mixes along the way. I'll listen to each mix out loud, with headphones, in the car.
I even throw the noise to an Amazon Echo to make sure it sounds good there too. Somewhere in the process, I'll end up listening to it on my phone. Not via AirPods, I mean from my phone's speakers.
Generally, I don't regret doing it, but there are some deep cuts that end up sending me down a rabbit hole due to something really funky in the mix.
The current track I'm working on is one of those.
The intro of the track, an intentionally tinny guitar meets up with some light drums. When the first snare claps in, the entire mix pulses, the guitar oddly becomes a didgeridoo. After a few measures, I come in and everything levels out again.
Kind of felt like there was some unintentional side chaining going on.
I ended up trying a bunch of stuff to fix it. Notching EQs around what I thought was the problem area. Messing with the panning and squashing the stereo down in some creative ways to see if that would help.
Mixing in mono didn't reveal the issue, so it was a lot of trying things, bouncing the track, listening and trying again.
Probably went through a dozen iterations trying to track down this psychoacoustic anomaly before reverting back to my fuck it, ship it approach to making music.
Of course, it didn't stop there. The mix kept undulating, and I kept researching.
The official diagnosis appeared to be the following combo loco:
- Mid-heavy instruments
- + Crappy phone speakers
- + Playing it way too loud
So I played the track again, at a reasonable volume, and things sounded better.
Don't be like me, wasting hours of your life trying to get your music to sound perfect through your phone.
Update: Whatever super sonic oddity I was struggling to mix out of the song finally resolved itself. This only happened after I laid down the final set of vocals and did yet another pass of mixing. I think everything finally dialed down to the right volume to not be problem for my iPhone's crappy speakers.