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Used to mix on $40 earbuds in my mom's kitchen in San Salvador, now I can't track without my one broken monitor
When I put out my first tape back in 2019 I did the whole thing on $40 Panasonic earbuds at my mom's kitchen table in San Salvador, just me, a cracked laptop, and whatever free plugins I could find online. I would bounce a track, listen in my cousin's car the next day, and go back and fix the bass because the earbuds lied to me about everything under 100hz. Fast forward to now, I finished my album D11-04 and I mix almost everything on a pair of old Tannoy Reveals where the left one has a blown tweeter, so I pan the whole mix to the right speaker and check it in mono like some kind of cave man. The weird part is my low end got tighter once I stopped trusting my eyes on the EQ curve and just felt the kick in my chest through the one working cone. I also stopped stacking 6 compressors on the master, now its one glue comp and a limiter and I move on, because sitting there for 4 hours tweaking 0.3db was killing my ears and my sleep. My homie Diego still sends me beats mixed on Beats by Dre and honestly some of them knock harder than mine, which messes with my head. I lost the free plugin folder when my old drive died in 2021 and rebuilding it taught me more than any tutorial. Curious if anyone here still mixes on cheap headphones on purpose, or did you all move to monitors and never look back?
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abbyc3318d ago
Did losing that plugin folder force you to actually learn what you were doing instead of just grabbing whatever was free? That blown tweeter story is wild but it makes total sense that you'd trust your gut more once your eyes couldn't cheat off the EQ curve. I still keep a pair of cheap Sony buds around just to check how stuff falls apart on bad speakers.
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