a friend Graham here from recording revolution dot-com and I always say if you could make one change to the way you mix your music to see way better results it would be to mix in mono in fact one of hip-hop's most sought-after mix engineers Derek Ali who really rose to fame when he mixed Kendrick Lamar's award-winning to pimp a butterfly is a huge advocate of mixing in mono and in an article on sound on sound he broke down why he does this and what the process looks like for him all these shares this surprising fact about how he gets his mixes to sound so good about 80% of my time mixing I spent listening to just one or a tone speaker so yes in mono dr. Dre always told me that if I could get something to sound amazing on crappy speakers it'll sound brilliant on normal speakers so I tried to get a great mix on the aura tone and then I'll go to the NS tents so the aura tone is an old-school little box it's a small mid-range e crappy sounding speaker for a while behringer made a clone of it called the baritone and they sold this for about 99 bucks I've got one love it I've used it for years I don't think they make it anymore for some sad reason but the idea is that it's a real crappy sounding box and when he references the NS tens he's talking about Yamaha NS tens which I also think some crappy but they're more full range near field monitors that are pretty ubiquitous in most recording studios so 80% of to pimp a butterfly was mixed in mono on this crappy speaker very interesting now listen to what Ollie says is the reason why he does this I mix on just one or tone because I like specific elements of the mix to pop out and listening in mono on that speaker really helps me to find that it's difficult to assess your balance in stereo whereas when you listen in mono you can gauge the true value of how everything sits in the mix for two huge points about this quote Ali's saying that when you mix in mono it helps you identify problem frequencies and make sure everything's poking out in the mix right and then also it allows you to get a true balance you're not fooled by stereo because here's the problem if you never listen to your mix in mono you start to pan and you get things sounding really nice they're spread out I mean I love hard pan TLC are panning is a godsend but you put guitars on the hard left since whatever you got vocals and kick drum and bass and snare up the middle whatever it sounds good to you you fool yourself by creating separation but you don't know if your separations gonna hold up tonally it's holding up spatially if someone listens in headphones and if they're in between speakers perfectly which no one sits in between speakers perfectly anymore the only time they'd be getting that separation is with headphones but when you collapse tamaño what happens it's harder to hear your tracks it's harder to distinguish the guitars in the sense from each other because it's all folded on top of each other that's why people don't like mixing in mono but that's exactly the point it reveals if you can't hear it very well that your EQ is not right or your balance is off it's your job to make the track sound good on top of each other so that there's no EQ masking or frequency masking I should say that's really the problem you've got all these mid-range frequencies all potentially covering each other up and you don't notice that until they're on top of each other so when they're on top of each other you can easily say I can't really hear that guitar anymore so I got either EQ the guitar or EQ the vocal that's covering up the guitar or both and I won't stop until I get a nice clarity and separation because then I know my EQ is right then once you pop it back out the stereo it's gonna sound even better because you've got clarity and separation through tone which is rule number one step number one and then you have an additional layer of clarity and separation through stereo width and panning which is just awesome the other part is he's using this crappy speaker which exposes the mid-range and allows you to get the balance right in the mid-range because here's the problem with nice speakers or nice headphones problem is that they sound nice so that's a problem because you get nice highs you get nice lows you get a lot of separation and clarity and a lot of Sonic real estate and it just paints your mix even if they're relatively flat speakers in a flat room let's say it's still paints are mixed in a really nice spot which is important very important you want to hear things for how they truly are but what ollie has figured out and he learned this from dr. Dre and a lot of people have been doing this is you need to expose the problem areas which typically are the mid-range and a mid-range II speaker like the aura tone or any kind of crappy computer speaker is going to over accentuate any problems in the mid-range so you might have a guitar that sounds decent on your monitors but it's actually a little harsh you don't realize it now a lot of people are gonna listen to your music on crappy speakers their car stereo is gonna sound crappy they're Apple earbuds are crappy and that might expose some harshness in the mid-range that you won't notice in your nice sounding speaker so you want to make sure you hear it in those crappy mid-range e areas to make sure that you address any problem so if there's a really harsh guitar you can fix that with EQ or you can fix it with level and it'll still sound good on nice speakers and again like I said most people that gonna hear your mix the people that you're making your mix for are gonna listen to your mix on crappy speakers in crappy situations where there's not a lot of top and not a lot of low-end those are usually the areas to get lopped off so it's virtually a mid-range e style mix so if you don't know what your mix sounds like when it's mostly mid-range you don't really have a clue as to how your mix is going to translate in the real world so this is a very helpful tool for translate ability and a very helpful tool for your track to have commercial viable success to be able to be radio ready like I always say so a couple of pointers here if you don't have an aura tone or a baritone or some kind of crappy mono mid-range e speaker you can still do this in two steps one is to just fold your mix to mono even on your current speakers you can do this by going to the master fader or the mix buss and taking the pan pots or knobs if they're there and collapsing them up the middle instead of left and right or you can use a stereo widening plug in Pro Tools comes with one for free typically used to increase the stereo width but you just do the opposite you go from 100% width to 0% width and it just collapses the stereo field to mono and that way you can get a mono mix for as long as you need to get the EQ right then you need to do a second step which is to listen back to your mix on a crappy mid-range speaker so buy crappy computer speakers or some crappy radio anything that allows you to reference your mix take notes of what needs to be changed and adjust accordingly yeah Derek ollie spends 80% of the mix on this crappy mono mid-range speaker then he moves on to his near-field monitors the Yamaha and his tens very interesting it's not just a 10% check or a check at the end this is where he does a lot of the mixing it's not the bulk of the mix decisions making sure everything sits right can poke out nicely in the mix and feels balanced mixing in mono and mixing on a crappy mid-range speaker two powerful hacks in one and you're not hearing it just for me you're hearing it from again an award-winning mix engineer Derek ollie so I have two questions for you and a free gift one is do you mix in mono ok leave me a comment let me know 1 do you mix in mono if not why if yes how's it going for you two do you have a crappy mid-range speaker that you reference yes or no let me know if you don't are you gonna get one I'd love to hear your thoughts just leave a comment below this video and now for the free gift I mentioned if you're interested in getting better mixes mono is one of the biggest hacks out there okay it's so useful what do you do when you're mixing in mono how do I know what kind of EQ decisions to make or what kind of compression decisions to make how do I actually do the mix while listening in mono if that part of the process is overwhelming to you or you're mixing in mono but you still find that your mixes don't sound as professional as what you hear on the radio what you're streaming on Spotify then I've got a super helpful tool for you it's called my six steps to a radio ready song guide what this is is I basically reverse engineered every major song you've ever loved okay every good sounding songs annika Lee I don't care what the genre is but every professional sounding mix out there has gone through these six steps okay from song idea to what you hear on the radio or what's released on Spotify or Apple music there is a six step process the problem is most of us in the home studio skip usually three to four of those some of us skip five but on average three is where most of us are skipping okay mixing is just one of those six steps mastering is just one of those six steps there's four other steps and what I decided to do is distill it all down map it out for you from step one to step six so you don't miss a single step and then give you tips and tricks and best practices for each step along the way so what this will help you do is make sure that your song doesn't just go from idea to amateur but from idea to worthy enough to be played on the radio sonically speaking now you still got to write a good song and you still got to be talented but at least you will have the process to ensure that your song sounds as good as it possibly can and it's a free pdf it's meant to be read once and digested once but then hold on to it so you can reference it every time you're making a song so I like to print out my reference guides and put them right on my mixing desk maybe you want to keep them on your tablet or on your phone but keep it next to you where you make music and then as you're coming up with a song idea you can go through this process and reference all the steps in the guide it's absolutely free my gift to you just go to radio-ready guide.com put the link here in the video radio-ready guide com if you want it grab a copy of it it's a free easy download as my gift to you so that's it for today thanks for watching thanks for liking this video thanks for subscribing to this channel appreciate all the support I'll see you another video real soon