The mix sounded huge.
You did it late,
with the monitors turned up,
because loud felt good
and good felt finished.
The kick had weight.
The bass sat under everything
like a floor.
You were careful with it, even.
You pulled it back a little,
because there was plenty.
Next morning
it came out of the kitchen radio
at the volume people actually use.
No floor.
A kick drum
that was mostly a click,
and a bass line
you could follow
only because you wrote it.
Nothing in the mix had changed.
Your ears had.
Human hearing
is not equally sensitive
to every frequency,
and the shape of that
changes with level.
In 1933
Fletcher and Munson
measured how loud
pure tones had to be
to sound as loud
as a tone at one kilohertz.
Today the curves
are an international standard,
ISO 226.
At a quiet level
a low note needs far more energy
than a note in the middle
to sound equally loud.
Turn everything up
and that gap narrows.
The bass seems to grow
faster than the rest.
So a mix balanced loud
is balanced for loud.
Turn it down
and the low end drops away first.
Balance it too quietly
and the opposite happens.
You add bass
to fill a gap
that only exists
at that volume,
and on a big system
the low end is too much.
There is a second trap
inside the first.
Louder sounds better.
Almost always.
So any comparison
where one side is louder,
your mix against a reference,
the plugin on or off,
is decided before you listen.
Match the levels first.
The fix is boring.
Pick one listening level
and mix at it.
Moderate,
not loud,
the level you could talk over
without raising your voice.
Mark the volume knob
so you can find it again.
Then check at the extremes.
Turn it right down,
nearly to a whisper,
and listen
for what disappears.
Turn it up once,
briefly,
and listen for what gets too big.
The mix is not right
when it sounds good at one volume.
It is right
when nothing important vanishes
at any of them.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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