3 Ways To Make Your Headphone Mixes Sound Great Anywhere

One of the things I’ve observed in other professional studios I’ve been at as a producer and when I interned, engineers at those studios didn’t necessarily have to check the mix in the car because they knew their environment very well and how things ‘should’ sound in that environment. That takes time and constantly mixing and working in that environment, with those monitors, and for our purposes, in our headphones.

One of the legitimate shortcuts (like the good kind, not the cut corners kind) I learned while I was a studio intern is using reference mixes. This refers to using professionally mixed and mastered songs directly from a CD or extracted into WAV or AIFF (NO MP3s!) and comparing your mix against it. 

Obviously your mix won’t sound exactly like a mastered song and you’re not attempting to get it that loud yet, the idea though is to get guidance through the frequency balance and vocal clarity on professional, high quality mixes.

For headphones and monitors alike, one benefit to using reference mixes is that you can ‘study’ the sound of your system by listening to quality mixes on it for extended periods of time. This helps establish a new normal and baseline for what you should expect out of your own mixes (don’t go overboard though, remember your comparing mixes to mastered songs). 

Reference 4 allows you to use the plugin’s calibration both in and out of your DAW so you can do the listening study on your computer’s audio/media player. 

I don’t think you need to do this forever but for the first 6 months after I got Reference 4, I started my production sessions out with around 15 minutes of listening to songs through the headphones and reference 4, to help reset my ears to what ‘should be’.

Another way to take advantage of reference mixes is using an A/B plugin that will allow you to play a song and volume match it to your mix. The A/B plugin will also bypass your mix channel & master channel plugins when you play the reference song so you get a full ‘my mix’ vs this reference song comparison. 

I currently use Sample Magic’s Magic A/B but unfortunately they no longer make it so here are a couple other options