Why You Mix in the Morning and Not at Night

By Edward Lapple

If you are like most musicians that have recorded and mixed their own songs, you have probably experienced this.

You finish your session late at night and then you do a killer mix. It sounds great and you are thrilled. Thrilled, that is, until the next morning when you play your hot mix for your [Label / Agent / Band-mates / Friend / Significant Other / Mom / insert name here]. Incredibly, your multi-layered mixing extravaganza sounds like it’s all coming through a trumpet and being played over your cell phone.

What happened? All of the individual instruments which you could discern with such clarity at 2 AM have homogenized into midrange at 10 AM. The lead guitar is lost behind the snare, the horns sound like a buzzer in the corner, the backing harmonies are not there at all and your vocal is somewhere inside of the rhythm guitar. What has gone wrong? Have you gone deaf or stupid or both?

Click and Slide to Learn What Went Wrong

You have run afoul of fatigue and the law. The fatigue comes from hours of listening to progressively louder monitors, and the law is something that was stated by two fellows named Fletcher and Munson.

First, let’s address the fatigue problem. I don’t care if you’ve had three lattes a half-hour before you mix and you’re hopping around the control room on one foot. If you have been listening to the monitors for more than a couple of hours, your ears are starting to suffer from fatigue. And, as each minute passes, your ears are getting more fatigued. For verification of this, just note the position of the volume control for the monitors at the start of a session. Let’s say that the pointer on the knob is in the 10 o’clock position when the session starts. I’ll bet that six hours into the recording process you will find that the monitor volume control has crept up to 3 or 4 o’clock. As your ears get more fatigued by listening, you need to keep increasing the volume for it to seem as loud as it did half an hour before. By the end of the night, those things are screaming, but to you, the volume seems about the same as when you started the session.

Now for the law: this law was devised in 1933 by Harvey Fletcher and W. A. Munson. If you want to get bleary-eyed just Google these boys and read about their research. However, here’s the skinny on how it applies to our mixing problem. The subjective equalization of the ear changes with volume. The lows and the highs are much easier to hear at louder volumes. A Fletcher-Munson Curve illustrates that, as hearing fatigue causes you to crank it up, you will hear the bottom and the top with much more clarity. The end result is that, when you listen to your mix the next morning with fresh ears, at a normal human volume level, you are going to hear all of the mid-range instruments with what will seem like the lows and highs filtered out.

So now you know why what sounded so awesome last night, sounds so awful this morning. If you mix in the morning - or, more precisely, at the start of your session - you should get a better-sounding mix.

Another tip to achieve a good mix is to be sure to listen to the final mix on a small set of “near field” monitors. Then you have an idea what it is going to sound like on John Q. Public’s stereo system, which is a lot different than your big studio speakers. You might even want to drag in a couple of speakers from a five-year-old Nissan Sentra and hear what your mix is going to sound like coming over the radio and into a car.

Remember, it doesn’t matter how good a job you did playing and tracking if you lose it all in the mix. so be careful and do it right. The last thing that you want to do is approve a late-night mix and have it sent to duplication only to receive 1,000 CDs that sound like a bad call on a cell phone.