Headphone Mixing Course – Mixing With Mike

Description

Headphone Mixing Course – Professional Mixes Without Studio Monitors

The Headphone Mixing Course is built for producers and engineers who want to put together professional-sounding mixes on headphones. Whether you primarily work on speakers or you mix exclusively on cans, this course teaches you how to create mixes that translate to both — no guesswork required.

If you are new to mixing on headphones, the Sound On Sound guide on headphone mixing techniques provides a solid foundation on how headphone playback differs from speakers — we recommend reading it alongside this course.

What’s Inside

Class Breakdown

Kick off with Class 1: Mixing With Headphones — headphone types, impedance, sensitivity, HRTF, and assessing your own pair. Class 2: Headphone Software walks through EQ calibration, room and monitor simulation, and includes bonus reviews of CanOpener, Waves NX, Abbey Road Studio 3, and more.

For ear training, Class 3: Listening Exercises builds conscious awareness of imaging, depth, and separation using the Headphone Monitoring Playlist system. Class 4: Levels and Panning covers the Sound Field Inversion Principle and how to translate level and pan decisions through headphones.

When it comes to EQ, Class 5: Frequency Balancing addresses how driver proximity affects your perception of the frequency spectrum and how to work around it. Class 6: Density and Imaging shows how compression and saturation behave differently through headphones, getting both worlds consistent.

On the spatial side, Class 7: Creating Space covers early reflections, reverb, and delay techniques for headphone-based depth without losing clarity. Class 8: Speaker Compatibility focuses on control room simulations, translation methods, and cross-referencing to make your mix work on speakers.

For the finishing touches, Class 9: Automation works through foundational tracks, sectional changes, transitions, and lead instrument automation through headphones. Class 10: Finishing the Mix covers stem and mix-buss processing with headphone monitoring, wrapping up with final compatibility checks for any playback system.

Who This Course Is For

Bedroom producers, home studio engineers, and anyone who relies on headphones for mixing. No expensive room treatment required — this course was built for the reality of headphone-based workflows.

The techniques here pair well with mixing plugins like Cytomic The Glue for bus compression and the ToneBoosters bundle for EQ and metering. For producers working across genres, the Jay Cactus Drill Production Course covers complementary beatmaking and mixing workflows.

Course Format

10 video classes with real session walkthroughs. Each class builds on the last, moving from foundational principles to a complete finished mix. Downloadable PDF workbook and reference sheets let you follow along in your own DAW.

This Headphone Mixing Course exists because most people mixing on headphones end up guessing at adjustments that actually have straightforward, teachable answers. A mix that only works in your cans is not finished — it is untested. This course gives you the listening skills, translation checks, and workflow strategies to lock in a mix and move forward with confidence.

For deeper reading on audio signal flow fundamentals, check the Audinate learning hub.