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Many recording enthusiasts like to fixate on “things” that separate them from the big boys. Some readers of Gearslutz.com would love to believe that the reason they aren’t Bob Katz is because they don’t have some $20k piece of gear. It isn’t because they lack experience or talent, it’s because of this one thing and if only they had it, they’d be certified hit-makers.

The fact is that once a certain base level has been achieved, the differences between engineers are almost entirely experiential and philosophical. If you took any unanimously great engineer and put him in your home studio, chances are he’d still make a better mix than you would if you had access to his professional facility. In the audio world, the clothes do not make the man.

So what is necessary for good mixing? In my experience, great mixers need only three things: an excellent listening environment, the ability to make targeted changes, and the experience to know which changes are necessary.

An excellent listening environment does not mean that you need to spend millions of dollars to get your room analyzed and treated. All you need is to really understand how your room sounds and how that translates to the outside world. Investing top dollar in studio acoustics is meant to accomplish one goal—to remove the elements that color a sound and make a room a unique listening environment. Acousticians strive for “portability” which is the ability to take something out of one space and have it sound the same in another. That way, the hundreds of clients who come into big-time studios can all trust that the decisions they make will translate when they leave the building.

For home recordists, it is not necessary for you to make your listening environment universal. Instead, you really just need to make sure that you understand your listening environment. If you understand that your room has a 120 Hz standing wave throughout it, then you know to compensate for that in order to get a good mix. This may mean that your mixes sound awful in your listening environment, but you know they will sound good everywhere else.

Yamaha NS-10s which became the studio standard back in the 70s. Even today, they are a mark of a serious recording studio. The reason these speakers are so prevalent is not because they “sound good” or because they are veristic in any environment. Rather, the NS-10 is a standard because practically anybody who is worth their salt knows what they sound like. The speakers themselves sound like absolute crap to put it plainly. But engineers, consciously or unconsciously, know how to make changes on these speakers so that the mixes sound good everywhere because they know how these speakers sound.

(Aside: it is important to note that despite their ubiquity, NS-10s are limited in their usability because they lack the frequency range to accurately depict low-end. Also, if you attach a sub to NS-10s, prepare to be laughed at.)

The ability to make targeted changes is the simplest criteria to fulfill. Digital Audio Workstations are so advanced that nowadays you can make practically any change that you would need. The real problem is knowing what changes are necessary and executing them properly.

That is the biggest issue that home recordists and nascent engineers face. The kind of calculation that is necessary for a mix is not intuitive. You can solo your individual tracks and have a gorgeous piano, a breath-taking drum set, and a rocking bass, but when you put them together suddenly everything gets muddled. Mixing is not an exercise in arithmetic—it takes the experience to know when less is more. Sometimes making one thing sound terrible by itself will ultimately make everything sound great when it all comes together.

So the next time you are ogling that Fairchild on eBay, remember that it’s not what you have, it’s how you use it.