I’d reserve 5-10% in that for just a talent or ear for things too. One can have that already, or one can train and gain experience for it, but even though it’s not a scientific measurement, it plays a significant role. If one doesn’t have it, or doesn’t want to put the time in to get it, that’s where getting another engineer on board to help comes in. However, then you have to think about why you’re making music, and if your goal is to put out tracks or albums for wider consumption then it probably makes sense to get some help from someone that does this on a regular basis. If not, then a moderate level of experience, a few reference points, and some practice will go a long way.
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Thanks for the latest replies. Re: ear, well, I’m hoping it turns out I have this, or can develop it without too much trouble. I’m a play-by-ear pianist; my aural capacity is high, at the cost of my sightreading capacity (read: almost zero). All 8 of my piano grade exams were the same story of totally flunking the sight-reading but walking the aural exercises. But then a good ear for music may not turn out to be the same good ear needed for mixing. We’ll see!
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I’m guessing you’ll be fine. Funny enough, I haven’t really heard a lot of “bad” mixes recently, other than a couple of my own where I was using my open-back 701s in bed while my wife had the air conditioner blasting (during the summer). 
That… …didn’t work out so well. I compensated a bit for it, but still got two tracks mixed with a bit too much low end. Clean enough, but too much. Could just roll it off a bit on the final output, but once I’ve committed a track to being “done” for myself, it’s kind of dead to me, and I just move on. Those two tracks will forever be “bass heavy” 
If you’ve got good visual tools, that goes a long way too. I use Ozone for just a tiny bit of limiting (using things like the maximizer at VERY conservative settings typically) and use the stereo imager a bit to widen certain things in the mids/highs, and do a TINY bit of compression here and there for example. Ozone has EXCELLENT visual feedback, spectrographs, EQ visuals, etc. If you’re used to your headphones, and learn to interpolate the visual data into things a bit, you can get a pretty good initial mix. (unless the air conditioner is on too high) 
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I tend to do most of my mixing with headphones initially and I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten better at spotting problems with my old Sonys than I was with the Audio-Technicas that started to fall apart. The Sonys reveal more of the ugliness in the mud area (100-500 Hz or so).
But it often strikes me when I turn on my proper monitors that one sound might be totally off by several dBs. So although I feel I can get pretty far with just the headphones, there’s no way I’d ever skip the process of flicking on my Genelecs and playing the mix in my car and my in-ears to hear it in a different sound space.
The other thing I always do is comparing against other music so I know roughly how loud eg the bass should be in those speakers/headphones before playing the song I’m mixing. This helps to anchor the reference point as well as resetting your ears.
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I use GoodHetz CanOpener when I can’t use my speakers for whatever reason, not that I’m any good at mixing, but nevertheless it’s a great tool.
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To produce on, no. To mix on, yes.
I’ve had a whole journey with Ozone. I started out just using the ‘wizard’ thing to automatically generate settings for my stuff. This, in itself, works really well for more standard content (i.e. stuff with a beat that people might actually want to listen to). It does hype the bass a bit but easy to turn down. I got dissatisfied with it because the wizard wasn’t working well with more experimental material. If your work is predicated on subtle timbral shifts and big dynamic range sometimes compression, maximizers, etc. can really affect that. However, I’ve come back to Ozone and spent time learning the individual components to craft my own profiles from scratch. The dynamic EQ can work wonders if you like the character of very resonant sounds but don’t want them to overpower your mix volume-wise.
One other cool thing with Ozone is that you usually end up buying it in a bundle in one of the big sales that happen periodically, and there’s a ton of handy stuff there. In particular, I have intermittent problems in my studio with clicking sounds when I use gear with touch plates, and the RX declick works great for that. (Or, be like Ben Frost and put as many pairs of Vinyl and Declick in a row as your computer can stand and enjoy some weirdly degraded audio.) RX declip is super for processing some field recordings. I also got Neutron in my bundle, which I’m just starting to explore. Check out the Neutron presets for some examples of interesting and creative ways you can use Sculpt, etc. It’s been nice to grow into using these tools more fully and I don’t know if I would have done that if I hadn’t been lured in by the easy quick-fix mode of Ozone.
Also, I tend to mix over various output devices in the process of putting together tracks. Lately I have done a fair bit with an old pair of Beats we had in the house, along with my monitors and Beyerdynamics. I’ll also run stuff on my laptop speakers as a bad speaker simulator. Since a lot of what I am doing is more esoteric I don’t care quite as much about it translating to phone speakers or whatever, but I do want it to not totally sound like trash without my exact setup (which has happened in this trial phase).
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I use DT 990 Pro for mixing. I think it’s better than not having a studio or proper room with all the treatment (I don’t have any of these). Like many others mentioned, if it sounds not the way you want it in your car, it’s pretty much guaranteed (in my opinion) it’s due to either car speakers not being good or mix is not where it should be.
I absolutely love it! I basically use a subset of its functions though at any given time, and use them sparingly and custom set per track. I do put a couple of things on the master output too, but very sparingly. I always set my thresholds JUST below higher peaks for example. I don’t like to competely squash things (unless I’m very specifically going for a squashed sound which is super rare). I think you can apply the Ozone tools in such a way that it won’t significantly impact evolving timbres, dynamics, etc.
I like it because I can set upper caps, (for example) but not push all of the sounds up to those caps. I also like some of its transient management.
All of this said, I’ve started doing a bit more outboard before it ever hits Ozone, so in those cases, I use it even less. (I’ve been using Neve 1073 transformers, pre-amps, and outboard compression a bit on specific channels during recording, so mixing that down is a bit of a different process than if I just recorded stems from synths and then do all the mixing digitally. It’s kind of nice trading off between the two, as the process feels less homogenized, and more deliberate per piece of music.
Unfortunately I haven’t finished anything yet since setting up the outboard gear, as I’ve just been getting used to how it sounds, impacts the tracks going into the DAW, etc. It’s been a while since I’ve recorded that way. (like almost 20 years probably) I’ve got it set up now to where it’s easy to get things tweaked for the project I’m working on though, so the next time I record something that way I’ll be able to finish it up nicely. (I’ve just been doing so many home-owner-projects lately that music has been sparse for me. They’re all done now though, so now I shall music once more.) 
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Not much to add because multiple people have already stated the fundamentals, but I’ll repeat it again because I’m avoiding work…
I use headphones for the initial jam and mix, mostly to keep my girlfriend from throwing my Digitakt out the window, but also because cans are great for honing the details that make a track shine (texture of certain samples, playing with the stereo field etc). After that I’ll switch to speakers and invariably find that the drums are all wrong - usually too loud and with too much or not enough attack. Then I give a listen on airpods, likely followed by more tweaks to EQ and levels. The final boss is the car - that’s where you’ll either have a “hell yes!” moment or go back to square one. Repeat until you have your desired results.
I find this process gets me a “professional” sounding release nine times out of ten, though if I really want to go the extra mile I’ll then send my mix to a professional mastering engineer in a well treated room.
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You absolutely can, I just had to spend some time learning and experimenting vs accepting the suggested settings.
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Agree completely. Along similar lines, I had to relearn pretty much everything digital mixing wise when I switched from my old Waves plugins to Ozone. They behave quite a bit differently, and things that I thought I just plain knew, were only the beginning when using the new software. Kind of like going back to some of the hardware outboard I’ve been using actually. Learning those subtle sweet spots is fun, but also takes a bit of time.
I do most of it manually (in Ozone), but I do occasionally let it learn the splits between EQ ranges for example. They usually need further tweaking of course, bit it’s handy to get a bassline at a couple points in the track, and then find a balance between them.
I’ve actually duplicated tracks in some of my music so that I can apply things differently between them, then just switch back and forth in the song depending on which section it is.
I also do that with 303 lines. Instead of programming multiple patterns and switching the pattern like a song, I just have say, four copies of the 303, each one with one pattern loaded into it, and then nearly identical signal chains after each one, but it allows some additional freedom when applying effects to each one that you wouldn’t have without 2-3 times the autmation requirements if using a single one.
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Thank you for all this, some really interesting stuff and I’m very grateful for all the help and advice. A few questions:
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What’s meant by rolling off?
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Is Ozone something that is active while you’re working on your track and listening to it back, or is it something you engage only once you’ve got the track ready and need to then master it?
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I had previously thought that speakers were the preferred way to mix. There seems some disagreement on that. Would I be right in saying it’s better to mix on phones unless you have the means to ensure a properly accoustically-treated room?
I have those cans , but also four others headphones , a mix cube and two sets of monitors in different rooms. Don’t know if that is necessary if you know your listening space really well, but it works for me… sometimes. A lot of jumping back and forth.
But before a mixing session I try to sit and listen to music for at least 15 minutes or so , so I can bring that with me into the session.
Even more important for me is to listen a bit to some tunes before exporting.
When making music , I can get very carried away quickly, because more bass is better right ? that is very easy to think when creating music at least.
but after a while I need a reality check , listen to some music again and very often get surprised. The heavy bass music I love , is very less bassy than what I am doing in the creating moment, which will of course be very troublesome.
My last test is in my living room , which is pretty bad sound wise. I listen to some tunes , and then my track . If it sounds ok there , I feel pretty confident it will translate good in other speakers .
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Just re-reading this thread. This sentence particularly stuck out. This is what I was doing, but I was getting disheartened by the fact that, having got the track sounding great (at least to me) on my mixing headphones, it then sounded bad on my “real” (everyday) headphones. So then you go back and adjust the track on the mixing headphones, such that it sounds right on the everyday headphones… and now it sounds wrong on the mixing headphones. How do you get out of this death loop!? Or is mixing (as some have suggested) just so much of an inexact science that this tweak-and-try-again-ad-infinitum is unavoidable? Perhaps I’m looking for perfection, a “one true source” of how things really sound.
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It’s common for me to end up with a dozen micro-adjusted mixdowns for each song before I actually finish. I don’t consider myself an incredible mixer but I think my skills have improved vastly from release to release and I’m pretty happy with where my last album ended up.
Unless you always use the exact same sounds and arrangement techniques you need to approach each track at least slightly differently, which is where the real challenge lies imo.
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Mix on the worst speakers you have. Best advice ive ever had. If it cuts through them then it will work on anything.
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I check on everything possible while mixing, then do the living room and car checks after. Definitely check on phone, laptop, monitors, earbuds, main phones, etc. while you’re mixing though if possible.
It’s a bit of a juggle and interpolate thing. While you can apply science to a degree, other things definitely play a part. It’s also an art. It’s also something you can train, or just have an inherent talent for. Psychoacoustics. Things sound different to just about any person within some sets of parameters. You can spend a little time and get it close enough, and 75% of the time that works out great. Occasionally you’ll nail it instantly. Other times you may not ever be happy with a particular mix. You can spend a ton of time chasing minutiae. That can pay off, but it can also waste a lot of time, energy, and become frustrating.
It’s all trade-offs. Why are you mixing?
Who is your audience?
Will your audience care (within reason, don’t half-ass, but honestly assess this).
Is it mixed well enough for where it will be played?
Is it just for you?
Do YOU want it to be perfect just for your own sake?
Do you want it perfect for your audience?
Are you spending a year mixing Dark Side of the Moon, or a fun tune for posterity for you and your friends?
Do you and your friends nerd out over music and audio nuances?
Do your friends even listen to the type of music you make?
Do you want it to sound good in a club, or on some audiophile’s hi-fi system?
Do you want it to sound good for people at forrest festivals on mushrooms?
Are you making a pop hit?
This will determine just how far you want to go into learning, buying, building, consulting, networking, etc. to make sure your mix applies to the questions above and about a thousand others that I won’t type on my phone with one finger.
One needs to weigh the intents against the audience, gear, effort, time, money, resources.
It doesn’t matter which ones apply to you. All are valid, but you have to figure all that out, and decide if something like mixing on just headphones will work for you, or if you need to consult engineers, or build a studio, buy monitors, etc.
But, all of the helpful tips from everyone responding will certainly go a LONG way. Check on everything you have access to, then adjust as much as you’re willing to adjust. Also compare the original to some of the adjusted ones, and like others have said other music that you want to sound similar to. Sometimes you get it right early on, but second guess things due to fatigue, different mind states, etc. maybe it didn’t need changing.
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Yes, exactly my mistakes. Don’t hear terrible sub bass or lows and I use a lot feedback, delays, grains, so the stereo picture becomes inadequate on speakers
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I’ve actually put on my open back headphones and had the level very low, while listening on monitors at the same time to get the feel of it externally, while also hearing some of the stereo effects, phases, etc. of course you don’t want to do this too much, and it’s only useful in some situations, but you can find some things this way.
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