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The best mixdowns will sound great on any playback system, big or small. Here’s how to ensure your tracks do the same

A trap that it’s all too easy for the aspiring music producer to fall into is that of creating mixdowns that only work well on one kind of playback system. It’s an infuriating problem, as we tend to assume that once we’ve got our productions up to a standard where they sound great on one system, they’ll also sound good on headphones, in the car, or anywhere else.

Sadly, this isn’t the case, and we often find ourselves becoming so focused on the requirements of a particular type of system that we fail to consider how a project will sound in other contexts. This leads to disappointment when we test our music out elsewhere. While there’s no substitute for experience in this type of scenario, the good news is that there are various strategies that we can employ to ensure our music sounds great over as wide a range of reproduction equipment as possible.

They key to transferability is in ensuring that you’re not leaving any ‘gaps’ in your mix, in terms of both frequency spectrum and stereo panorama. Having big, beefy bass and solid kicks might be enough to make your track bang on a club system, but unless you’ve got the right energy in the mids it’ll sound tinny and unimpressive on laptop speakers, which will be unable to reproduce the lows. Likewise, your mix might sound fine on a big rig and a laptop, but have a listen to it on headphones and you might discover that its stereo image is lacking.

Working in bedroom or project studios can make getting that elusive perfect mixdown much trickier, because it’s harder to trust what you hear in such a restricted environment. But don’t worry, because in the following walkthroughs we’ll reveal some essential tips and tricks that make use of analysis plugins to ensure that you’re getting a full-sounding mix no matter how compromised your monitoring environment. We’ll also look at how to make your tracks more frequency-rich using layering and processing techniques that will help them sound better on smaller systems.