Mixing when you do not have a studio

The honest starting position

You are mixing on laptop speakers, or on earbuds, in a room with a fan. Professional mixing happens in an acoustically treated room on monitors that cost more than your computer. That gap is real and no technique closes it.

What closes most of the practical gap is that you are not mixing for a cinema. You are mixing for people who will hear it on a phone, on earbuds, on a laptop, or on a television across a room — which is to say, on worse systems than yours.

What each system hides from you

Laptop speakers have almost nothing below 200 Hz. You cannot hear rumble, hum, or an over-loud bass in the music. Mix on these alone and you will ship a video with a hum in it.

Earbuds and headphones give you detail and stereo but they exaggerate low frequencies and remove the room entirely. A mix that is perfect on headphones is often thin and quiet on speakers, because you set levels in an unnaturally quiet environment.

Phone speakers are the actual target for most feed video: almost no bass, a narrow midrange, mono, and often played in a noisy place. Anything that depends on low frequency is inaudible, and anything quiet is gone.

A television across a room adds distance and whatever the room does.

The multi-system check

The standard professional practice, available to you for free: check the mix on at least three systems, and fix only what is wrong on more than one.

That last clause is the important one. Every system lies in its own direction; a fault that appears on all three is in the mix, a fault that appears on one is in the speaker.

A practical set: headphones, laptop speakers, and your phone at arm's length with something else going on in the room.

The checks that catch real problems

Mono. Collapse the mix to mono and listen. Phone speakers are mono, most Bluetooth speakers play mono, and feed autoplay is often mono. Things that vanish in mono are cancelling, usually because a stereo effect or a duplicated track is out of phase. Resolve's Fairlight has a mono button on the monitoring section; most editors have one somewhere.

At low volume. Turn it down until it is barely audible. What survives is what the mix is actually carrying — and if the dialogue disappears before the music does, your balance is wrong. This test is more reliable than any meter for balance.

With something else going on. Play it on your phone with a fan running or a window open. This is the real listening condition for most feed video, and it is brutal about anything quiet.

With the picture off. Covered earlier in the course, and still the single best test of whether the piece holds.

Practical substitutes for a treated room

• Mix quietly. Loud monitoring flatters everything and fatigues your ears within twenty minutes. Set a moderate level and leave it, so your sense of "normal" stays calibrated.
• Take breaks. Ear fatigue is real and is why mixes get progressively brighter and louder over an evening. Twenty minutes off after an hour.
• Use a reference. Open a professionally mixed video of the same kind next to yours, match its perceived loudness, and switch between them. This is the closest free substitute for an accurate room: you are comparing against something you know is right rather than trusting your speakers in absolute terms.
• Trust the meters for level, your ears for balance. Loudness and true peak are measurements; your room cannot tell you those reliably, and the meter can.

Delivery targets to keep in your head

Pulling this block together, the numbers to hit:

• Dialogue clip gains levelled to peaks near -12 dBFS before processing.
• Music under dialogue around -18 to -24 dBFS.
• Ambience beds around -40 to -30 dBFS.
• Gain reduction on the dialogue compressor 3 to 6 dB on loud words.
• Integrated loudness near the destination's target — roughly -14 LUFS for platforms, -23 LUFS for European broadcast.
• True peak at or below -1 dBTP.

Those numbers are a starting point that will be approximately right for most spoken-word video, and every one of them is subordinate to whether a stranger can follow the words on a phone.

The one that matters most

If you do nothing else in this block: level the dialogue, lay room tone under the whole thing, put a high-pass on every voice, and check it on a phone. Four steps, under an hour, and it is the difference most viewers will actually perceive.

Today

Play something you have published through your phone speaker at arm's length with a fan on. Note every moment you could not make out a word. That list is your mix notes.