Quick Tip: Surveying the Mix Landscape

Here’s a quick tip I found on Gearslutz while going through some of their archives.

An interesting way to check your mix is to put an EQ on your master bus with a sweepable low-pass and high-pass filter. By engaging the filters and sweeping them, you can in effect solo different frequency areas in the mix. It’s a different way to listen to areas of your mix that are getting cluttered so you can clean things out. It’s also something you can try on individual inputs to find the trouble areas as well as the good stuff.

Interestingly, the bx_hybrid EQ plugin from Brainworx has a feature called “Auto-Listen” that does something along these same lines. When the feature is turned on, any EQ band that is being adjusted gets solo’ed.

Now this probably isn’t something you’d want to do with the band in the room, but it can definitely be a helpful tool during virtual soundcheck or for ear training on nearfields or headphones. I actually created some presets for the Waves Q2 plugin so that I can quickly pop through different octaves.

If you’re looking to get a different perspective on your mix, try it out.