You've been working on your mixes long into the night when a sudden noise breaks your concentration.
*Slam!*
What was that? You hit the spacebar and the looped snare drum stops in its tracks.
*Slam!!!*
The sound reverberates throughout your home studio. The ringing flutter of your untreated room echoes in your ears and you discover that it's the same nasty ringing frequency that you were trying to EQ out of your snare drum.
You sneak out of your studio to investigate and you see a lanky red fellow zoom through your front doorway. He yanks the front door behind him and it hits with a thunderous crash, the flutter echo from your studio ringing even louder.
Door Slammer is the seventh Yuletide Trickster to wreak havoc on your home studio, but ironically, he unwittingly helped you out.
The lack of acoustic treatment in your studio makes it hard to hear exactly how your music sounds through your speakers. An untreated room will color the sound of your music and make it difficult for you to make mixes that translate to other speaker systems.
That flutter echo you heard from those slammed doors? You want to get rid of that as much as possible.
A treated room will simply help you make better mixing decisions because you can actually hear what's coming out of your speakers without being worried about how the room is coloring your mix.
At the very least, put treatment behind your monitors on the wall in front of you as well as in the early reflection zones directly to your left and right as well as on your ceiling right above you if possible.
It doesn't have to be expensive, and if you're on a budget, check out my article on cost-effective acoustic treatment here.
If you don't have the opportunity to get a lot of acoustic treatment, consider mixing at lower volumes and use headphones to check your mixes.
If your mixes aren't translating as well as you want because you're stuck mixing on headphones only, make sure you read my guide on mixing with headphones inside Step By Step Mixing right here.
Tomorrow's Yuletide Trickster is a fat tub of lard that loves to sabotage your low-end, making your mixes muddy and boomy in the process.
Come back tomorrow to see how you can fix your muddy mixes after Skyr-Gobbler has gotten to them.
See you then, dear reader.
Björgvin
