We've recently finished mixing a new album by Matt Ottewill in his home studio.
The great advantage of a home studio is being able to refine mixes without the interruption of other clients or sessions. We can take our time and leave everything setup for days or even weeks as we check and correct mixes.
There are however many disadvantages ..
1. Without the pressure of time limitations there's always the danger of over mixing until everything is so 'perfect' the excitement is sucked out.
2. The opinions of others such as engineers are missed.
3. Without proper acoustic studio design, judging correct bass level is challenging.
4. Project fatigue increases as time goes on.
Dave Stewart once said you never finish a project, just abandon it. You can judge for yourself how well we did by heading over to Matt's site (www.mattottewill.com) and watching the first music video from the album, which will have been uploaded by the time you read this. The album is due for release very shortly.
During the mixing we did learned something new. We were using PMC monitors, which are well known for their flat frequency response even at very low volumes. This means the bass balance doesn't change. This was great for helping us judge bass levels but we noticed that when we switched to Matt's KRKs, the quieter we monitored the louder the lead vocal and snare sounded relative to the other sounds.
We quickly realised that this was because human hearing is particularly attuned to these frequencies and this causes a perceptual shift in balance. The KRKs were emphasising this, the PMCs were not. When the monitoring balance was raised our perception of the correct balance was restored.
At least, we think that this is what was happening. Do you know better? It would be great to hear from you.
Thanks for reading and watching
FairFax
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