IF one does not have access to genelacs or decent monitors + sound treatment would it always make sense to use production headphones? Basically is it pointless to use monitors without sound treating the room?

 

Hell no. With a little work you can learn your monitors and your room. Focus on practicing mixing and referencing your mix to other ones.

 

Personally I wouldn't even recommend headphones for anything other than casually listening to music. Or referencing your mix after mixing on monitors.

 

Not necessarily. If you know what the room you're in does to sound across the frequency spectrum & you are familiar with it, you could do fine mixing in that room. Some of the most sought after mix engineers spend 80-90% of their time mixing through consumer grade boom-boxes. Typically the hardest thing to accurately monitor & get right is the lowend if you're in a room not designed for critical listening. You can mix in headphones, but they simply cannot give you the psycho-acoustic aural cues listening in a real room with real reflections & physical speakers placed in front of you can. People tend to "over mix" for lack of a better term when using headphones. Typically bass heavy. But anything can be done if you train yourself right & you learn from your shortcomings. Heck - not a fan - but I think Skrillex mixed his 1st or 2nd album almost entirely on some cheap ass cans. Im not saying that that mix could stand up against a lot of stuff & win, but like I said it can be done.

 

Always put my tunes on a cd and listen in the work van about 40 times. Then go back to studio at home and try and improve. Studio time consists of Monitors and Headphones. Find Pads and stuff sound louder on both Sennheisers so crucial to use monitors and work van

 

depends of the kind of work you do, there are many professional artists that compose, mix and some even termporarily master their own songs on the fly with headphones before a show. its mostly dance music or edm though. then when time to release officially they send it to someone for proper mix/mastering

 

In my humble opinion. You can get a decent mix with a pair of monitors (in a price range $250 to $500) of frequency range in the lower 40 to 50Hz and in the top 20 to 30kHz, as your room is not treated to the sound.

And later you send work for mastering

 

Reference, reference, reference. If you have the ears and can tune your mix to a reference track or two you could do a decent job. Pick a few tracks that you feel exemplifies the genre you are working on and do your best to tune yours to the sonic spectrum that you are hearing. Go back and forth, tweaking knobs and sliders until you feel they are close to what you hear. You also can use visual tools that can help (http://www.voxengo.com/product/span/). Pro mixers do it and so should you. The first time I experienced someone doing this was in this "million $ studio" where the fellow was (I think) on this gorgeous SSL XL9000K desk. I had no idea what he was doing at first, then when I did I thought that he was cheating because he couldn't create the sound on his own. Only later when I was visiting in Nile Rodgers studio while he was mixing a song of a friend's that I realized, that if like one of the greatest producers ever was referencing then it must be the rightous thing to do (I wish that I could remember the track he was bouncing back and forth but it escapes new now). The bottom line though is, if you know your monitors or cans and will use reference tracks you will be able to do a better mix than if you didn't.

 

Just buy a decent pair of monitors and listen that the tracks you listen to the most, the ones you know have more "bass, treble" ,etc.

The headphones are good for production only (imo)

 

You will learn the sound of your room after while, but it takes a long time. A good half-way house, and around the same price as a good pair of cans is a solution like IK's ARC2. If you have average monitors it can help a great deal.

 

cba 2 read. But it's not either/or. Listen widely, on as many speakers as u can. This includes headphones, maybe. But try (even) listening from different perspectives - ie from well outside a "room" ur playing ur mix in. And @ different volumes. And using crappy speakers. And using good monitors. And etcs. Ur audience will cover all these bases. Try 2 make sure ur well ahead of their experience.

 

If you mix on low volumes, you can easily get by with an untreated room. However bass frequencies, i.e. bass drum and bass guitar often require cranking more dbs to get them accurately. And that's why treatment is important, because bass monitoring fucking sucks in small rooms (for more explanation check frequencies' wavelengths and compare them with your room's dimensions).

Answering your question I think headphones can come very handy in a home studio environment. Especially those with accurate bass response like the Beyerdynamic DT-880 or Focal Audio Professional. I mix in a treated room which almost feels like an anechoic chamber and still use headphones to check my mixes and monitor their bottom.

 

So here is a quick lowdown on Speakers, Headphones, and what to consider as far as listening to your "sound".

First, Headphones in the studio are great for two things, artists listening to the tracks they are laying down and engineers looking to "solo" tracks to listen to specific instruments and the independent effects they will apply to a channel or group of channels. Headphones will help you focus, but will not allow you to hear the balance of sound overall.

The key to speakers to to have phase aligned sources to hear your sound. This is why the best engineers will mix off Genelec single speaker (or equivalent) speakers. And they will have spent many hours listening to recordings that emulate the sounds they are looking for, so they can hear a great mix on those speakers. They may have multi-thousand dollar monitors in the studio they are mixing in, those are for show or to blow away producers or artists who "NEED" to hear the sound big and loud. If you know your speakers and your room by listening to great mixed sound you will have a starting place to build your mix.

The only thing I really want to add is: if you are new to mixing remember to save reverb and other effects that you are looking to develop your full mix until you have built a good general sound. Having a different reverb for the drums and each of your other instruments will make a hash of your sound and it will never sound right when you bring things together. If your artists need it to record, feed it back to them through their monitors/headphones, but keep the tracks clean. Clean tracks build a solid foundation, dirty ones leave you with Sh@@.