Ep 45 - Your Smartphone Knows Your Mix Has a Problem, Do You?
Studio Stuff Podcast #45 | Your Phone Knows Your Mix Has a Problem. Do You?
We get into three listener questions this episode, and at least one of them might change how you check your mixes going forward.
The first question comes from Northern California, and it is one we have probably all experienced but never quite pinpointed. A listener notices his mix sounds great in the car and on AirPods, but something about the iPhone speaker makes his reverb sound harsh and brittle. When he tries to fix it, the mix loses something on the other playback systems. We dig into what the phone EQ curve is actually doing, why reverb returns tend to live right in the problem zone, and why other people's mixes don't have the same issue on the same device. The phone is not broken. It is telling you something true.
The fixes we talk through: high pass and low pass your reverb return as a first move, add a touch of pre-delay to separate the wet from the dry, and check the whole thing in mono while you are at it. We also make a small promise to ourselves to start checking mixes on our phones more often, which is either a great habit or a rabbit hole. Probably both.
The second question is about signal flow. Specifically, what is the advantage of routing your mix to a stereo bus group channel rather than going straight to the output? We walk through how we each handle this in our sessions, why the output channel stays completely clean in both cases, and what happens if you run room correction software like Sonar Works and forget to bypass it before you bounce. Chris also explains why keeping that group bus as a middle man makes it easy to import your mix bus chain from a previous session into a new one, which took a few extra words to explain but is genuinely useful.
The third question is a bonus, and it is a good one. Does anyone actually track their time on a mix, and if so, how? Steve uses his feelings. Chris blocks time by the day and lets the song fill the window. We also look at a free plugin called Project Time Pro by Hoffa that logs your session time automatically the moment you open the session. Great concept, one small flaw involving an open Cubase session and a backyard barbecue.
You'll Learn:
Why the iPhone speaker exposes reverb problems that other playback systems let slide
The two-move fix for harsh reverb on phone speakers: high pass and low pass the return, then add pre-delay
Why pro mixers EQ their reverb returns way more than most home studio producers realize
The case for keeping your output channel completely free of plugins
How a stereo bus group channel makes your mix chain portable between sessions
Why blocking time might be smarter than tracking it, and what a free session timer actually does to your workflow
Topics and Stories:
The phone speaker that knows too much
Why Chris is finally going to start checking mixes on his iPhone
The Sonar Works bypass you absolutely cannot forget before bouncing
Steve's feelings-based approach to pricing flat-rate mixes
The goldfish and the bowl
Project Time Pro and the barbecue problem
Listener Q&A:
We had three great questions this episode. Keep them coming. Submit yours using the form in the show notes or leave a comment on YouTube and we will get to as many as we can.
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