One of the most helpful things you can do in your home studio is get your speakers setup to their full potential. The first question you have to ask is are your speakers where they belong. There are some simple things you can do to instantly reduce unbalanced reflections and unnecessary bass build up.
But let’s say you’ve done that and still need to take things a step further? One thing I’ve had to do over the years is tune my speakers using reference tracks.
Via Javier Aldana Flickr
What’s Wrong With This Pro Mix?
One thing many of us home studio owners don’t do enough of is listen to pro mixes on our studio monitors. We spend all of our time in the studio listening to OUR mixes. Big mistake.
The great thing about a pro mix is that, well, it’s a pro mix. In theory it’s been recorded by top engineers in a great sounding studio, mixed by a top engineer in a great sounding room, and mastered by a top engineer with careful attention to balance. In essence when listening to a pro mix you can be confident that it’s a good benchmark for quality sound.
So how does this apply to your speakers?
You should start listening back to some really pro mixes on your studio monitors and ask yourself one question: What is wrong with this pro mix? You “know” in your head that the mix should sound pretty darn close to perfect, so start listening to where your speakers (and their placement in the room) are actually making the mix worse.
Where Did The Bass Go?
Let me give you a real example. Last year my family moved into a new house. New house meant new studio for me. As I document in my series REthink Your Room I had to setup my speakers and acoustic treatment to get a flatter, more accurate sound out of my monitors.
But when listening to some great pro mixes out of the speakers I noticed one major trend: I never heard enough bass. Specifically it was in the low mid range where the bass guitar tends to live. I would say things, “Man, they should have turned up the bass in this mix.”
Uh oh, that’s a clue.
The pro mix isn’t wrong. My speakers are wrong. That “lack of bass” was a major indication that I had some more tuning to do on my speakers/room. I had two choices, either tweak my acoustic treatment some more (the hard way), or tweak my speakers EQ and placement (the easy way).
What To Adjust
If your monitors have some tone controls on the back (or room correction controls) then use them. Make some adjustments there, listen back to the pro mix, and see if you’ve made any “improvement” to the reference track.
If that still doesn’t cut it, try adjusting the position of the speakers. Pull them off the wall more if you have too much bass. Bring them closer to the wall if too little.
If after these tweaks, you still can’t get the reference mix to sound more balanced, you might consider some room correction tools like the ARC 2 from IK Multimedia. Just continue to check the results against the reference track.
The Reference Is Your Guide
The beauty of a reference pro track is that it will guide you. It will expose what is wrong with your room and speakers. Don’t freak out if it exposes a lot of problems. News flash, you’re in a home studio.
Simply use the pro mix to help you tune your speakers to a more optimal position or EQ curve. In the end it will help your mixes and recordings come together faster and translate better outside of your studio.
Do Not Create Another Song Until You Read This Guide
(Price: $17 Free Today)
Discover the 6 Steps for Creating a Radio-Worthy Song From Scratch
My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Great article. Not something that most people think about. I purchased ARC 2 a few months back and was skeptical, but it really made a difference in how much easier it was to get mixes to translate outside of my room. Well worth the money in my opinion.
Great article!!!
The eq and the arc type systems can be a pitfall! The most of the spectrum balance problems don’t come only from the uneven frequency room / speakers response. There is also reverberation time that has to be considered and imo is cruicial. Using the eq to tame excesive low end in room is not sufficient, it’s just reduced in amplitude and still is ringing causing the problems with low end clarity. Also in most cases filtering causes additional phase changes.
I think what Graham was trying to get at was to apply this practice when you’ve finished adding some simple room taming devices, whatever you might have.
For home studio owners, the first question will always be 1) how can I position my setup and then 2) what can I do to tame frequencies within the boundary of my limitations. Some home studio owners might be renting, or using a space that is shared for another facet of someone else’s life (outside of home studio work).
So, I’d assume tuning your speakers would be the final step, which I believe is a great idea.
Thanks for pointing this out Peter. I was thinking the same thing as I was reading this area.
Hi,
I have been following the youtube channel pretty closely coz i am in the middle of setting up a small home studio and getting into recording.
My question is that my room is about 12×13 ft and i was looking at the presonus eris e5 monitors.Will they be enough or shall i go for the 8″ monitors………the room is not treated at all..
Do reply ….need your help on this
My room isn’t much bigger than that and I’ve mixed with both 5 inch and 8 inch monitors. You can definitely get away with the 5inch ones. Just know you’ll have less bottom end (say below 50hz).
That’s a quite nice article
As for me, I always listen to 3-4 pro-mixes in the similar genre as the song I’m going to mix just before I start to move faders and andjust knobs. It may be Green Day, Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift etc (really doesn’t matter)
Kind of year-training exercise
AS WELL AS WHOLE TIME U R 100%
I am Using A 2;1 Sound System as my monitor…i used this reference tracks Technic .. But Some times hear some Problems Like if i listen My mix from any other place of room i listen much bass.. but when i listen from infront my desktop it sounds pritty good.. what to do ???
Nothing wrong here. There’s only one place in your room it will sound good, where you mix. That’s very normal.
Hi Graham and thank you for reading my question.
Could you please recommend where I might be able to find a pro-mix to use as a reference for comparison. I don’t have a home studio or monitor speakers as I am mixing out of a pair of $16 JVC HA-S160-B stereo headphones plugged into my laptop. I would really appreciate if you could recommend something like a short clip/track/segment from which I could use to gauge what a good sounding unmastered mix would sound like.
Thank you very much for your assistance!
Best regards,
Justin
Use any mix you like. Try your favorite band and pull one track from their album.
Hi Graham and thank you for your kind reply.
I have tried used songs from cds of my favorite artists. However, those tracks are already mastered. I am trying to figure out what a pro mix sounds like without any mastering so I can compare my mix to see what I did wrong and what I need to edit to get that pro-sound before the track is mastered. Any suggestions on how I can do that? I’ve been searching for quite some time of what a pro-audio engineered unmastered mix would sound like but I’ve never been able to find clippings for me to do comparisons with…
Read this post: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2012/09/07/why-you-should-compare-your-mixes-to-mastered-tracks/
THANK YOU GRAHAM!!!!
I listen to just about *everything* on my monitors. I regularly switch from the “casual” AV40s to the JBL LSR305s – everything, training videos, podcasts, TV/Movies, YouTube, all the music.
A very good producer friend of mine always said to me “get to know the sound of your room” use reference tracks to learn how things sound in your mixing environment. His belief is that evey room will have its own unique characteristics . Before he starts to mix down he will spend half hour listening to reference tracks. He calls it tuning his ears!
Hi Graham, I’m a starter and have been following you recently. Your tips are practical and helpful. I don’t have a good acoustic room . just a bed room in fact. But I have been studying my room where I mix by listening the mix in another by different sound system here 5.1 speakers. It makes a great difference. My mix that sound OK in my monitors never sound good in my 5.1 speakers . pleas. Advice
Hi Graham!
I’m on the verge of purchasing my first studio monitors and I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to most-effectively set them up.
My question: do you think that after doing some frequency analysis on my monitors that I should place an EQ on my master fader for every mix that compensates for any notches or boosts that I find due to my room? Seems to me like this would be a free/manual alternative to buying the ARC system.
Thanks!
You could – but it would have to be a really transparent and precise EQ. Hard to compete with the way ARC does it.
Now that being said, I’ve moved away from using ARC and have spent more time learning my speakers in my studio. Liking the results I’m getting.
In addition to reference tracks, you can use this free software http://www.roomeqwizard.com to get some more details about your room acoustics.
Even if you don’t have a calibrated mic, it will tell you at least the difference in sound after adjusting the speaker positions or adding some acoustic treatment to the room.