Home Studio Mixing Tips, Pt. 1

My Mixing Cheat Sheet has a ton of detail on the audio mixing process. In this series, I’m throwing down some quick mixing tips for the home studio.

How should I check my mixes?

Avoid using phone speakers or built-in computer speakers to check your mixes or masters. These tiny speakers can’t reproduce bass frequencies accurately, so any notes generated using them will be inaccurate as well.

What should the volume level of my mix be?

When mixing, the loudest points in your mix should peak at around -3-6 dB on your meters. Don’t worry, this won’t make your mix sound too soft! During the mastering process, we’ll bring the overall volume up to a final competitive level, but it’s best to leave that for the mastering studio.

What’s a good sample rate or bit depth for my mix?

I’d record in at least 24-bit, wherever possible; it’s the default setting in a lot of modern audio software for good reason. You probably don’t need to use 32-bit floating point in a home studio recording/mixing situation. 16-bit is also perfectly fine to use, but I’d save that for demos and rough stuff.

Be aware that CD quality audio is generally of lower fidelity than modern high-quality streaming audio, so a conversion down to 16-bit will be necessary if you’re making CDs.

For sample rate, I find 48 kHz to be a good balance of modern, high definition sound quality, without going so high as to make your digital audio files very large and cumbersome to work with during the production process. I’ve heard many amazing mixes made by professionals that were done at 48 kHz, and also many not-so-great mixes made by students done at 96 kHz and above.

I usually recommend experimenting with higher sample rates above 48 kHz only after you’ve maxed out every other piece of your recording chain. Mic placement, mic choices, your experience recording in different situations, the acoustics of your space, the quality of the performers you’re recording, the quality of the instruments you’re using; all of these variables will have a much larger impact on your quality of sound than your sample rate will, so work on those first.

Be sure to check out Part 2 and Part 3 of this series for more mixing tips.