How to Get a Pro Sounding Mix with Tonal Balance Control

Hey my name is Brian Fisher here with iZotope, and  today, I'm going to be talking about a tool called   Tonal Balance Control and how it can help you  with your mixing and mastering at home. If you're   mixing in a home studio like I am, you're likely  working with an imperfect monitoring situation.   Small rooms have all kinds of acoustic issues  from comb filtering and frequency buildups, to   you know, frequency cancellation. It can be really  hard to get an accurate picture of the low end of   your mix, specifically the sub frequencies.  This is where Tonal Balance Control comes in   and is a lifesaver. Tonal Balance Control  is kind of like a reality check for your mix   so you can see how it stands up against  other professionally produced tracks. All right, so first things first. Tonal Balance  Control is a reference tool that allows you to   see the tonal balance curve of your audio. That  is the distribution of energy across the range   of audible frequencies. You can then compare your  tonal balance curve to a set of targets based on   different genres. Tonal Balance Control 2 has 12  different genre targets built on machine learning   analysis of thousands of great sounding tracks.  Just add an instance of it on your master bus   and you can quickly see how your mix stacks up.  It's super helpful to check your work and overcome   the challenges of your listening environment.  I often use this as a last step just to make   sure that the low end and the high end in my  mix is in check and sitting in a good place.   Another great feature in Tonal Balance  Control is the custom target feature.   If you click here, you can go create a target  from audio file or create a target from a folder   if you want to use a specific reference or a folder of references to check your mix   against. I use this feature all the time if  clients have given me specific references for   a master or a mix. For this track I am going  to choose modern because I just want to see   in general how my low end and how my high end stack up against most modern mixes. All right, so I'm going to play back a section of a track  called “Dangerous and Beautiful World” and   I am starting in the broad setting instead of the  fine setting because I just want to see in general   how these frequency areas are stacking up against  the target. So the blue highlighted area is where   you want to be sitting. If you toggle over to  fine, you can see sort of the generalized curve.   This is the top of the range, this is the bottom  of the range, and the brightest part here is   kind of the ideal zone of this target. So I'm  going to go back to broad and play this back.