How to set your monitors and headphones 4 a perfect balance

0:00 How do we get that perfect mix?

Alright folks, Jonathan here. So how do we get that perfect mix? In other words, how can you get your mix to sound pretty decent? Well first of all I want to show you something. I'm going to play a track. Now have a listen. Now what's basically happening is your speakers are moving quite a lot. The louder you put the music, the more the speakers will move. Now again, without trying to go into If you want to get into greater detail, it's better for your speakers to move only a little bit because you will hear inside the music a lot better, a lot clearer. So, what I like to imagine is that speaker there. Now let's say, for argument's sake, that speaker is this distance away from me and we've got that at the volume of number one. Now let's say I move that speaker further away from me.

1:34 Which is very important

To get the same audio sound, almost the same volume of sound to hit my ear, I may have to turn that up to number two. Then if I move it further away again, maybe up to number three, further again, maybe up to number four, until eventually it's quite a distance away and I would have to have it very loud. Even though it's very loud over there, as the sound travels to me, it'll get quieter and quieter. So this is what I want you to do. And it will work, and it will help you get a better mix. Have your monitors quite low. Now that's one thing. The second thing which is very important. If you imagine you've got your headphone on and you're listening to some sounds here. Now take into consideration this. When you're playing through or when you've got music coming through your headphones the sound is quite low but because the speaker is slap bang next to your ear

2:28 About the headphone

It sounds very loud. Again, you know, there it's loud. If I put that speaker here, it's relatively quiet. So, in a sense, the equivalent of your headphone being here is the equivalent of that speaker being about, I don't know, 30 or 40 metres away being very loud. So this is what you need to do at stage two of this particular tutorial, explaining, first explaining about the speaker. Second one about the headphone. Now the third one that will bring all of this together, very simple. What I want you to do is have your monitor relatively low. Play it, let's have a listen. What I'm going to do now is the track I want to mix in, I'm going to press play. Now this is the important bit, right? What I'm going to do, I'm going to have the sound level so it's equal, headphone equal to speaker. In other words,

The audio level is exactly the same. Now, admittedly, that speaker will be a lot louder because it's further away. The headphone will be quieter because it's right next to my ear. If you can work on this principle, you'll get a precise and exact balance of audio which will enable you to get a better mix. Now let's do a mix. Now you see I'm talking to you now. I'm not having to shout. I can hear that. Here you go. See, it wasn't loud. I can talk to you. I'm not having to shout. Yet, I got a relatively good mix because all of the sound was there and like I said earlier, the louder it goes, very often, the less you will hear in the music. So when you're doing this set, when you're doing your mix, have the volume down, you know, for recording purposes. But then, when you want to play out, then of course you can turn it up. Practice and enjoy. Here we go.

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