Reference material is a set of several high-quality mixing works selected according to your own mixing style. It’s usually up to you, each song should have a different emphasis, some may have great balance, some may have fat bass, but no matter what, these songs should provide a baseline for our mix and as a goal that needs to be achieved first. In addition, reference material can also be used to test monitor speakers, which is useful for people who often need to work in different monitoring environments.

Using reference material is an indispensable part of mixing. Choose a group of mixes that suit your style, compare them intuitively, and find out the problems with your own track. Because our ears can adapt to the tonal changes between mixes very quickly, it’s important to compare the reference material with your own mix. You can clearly find your own shortcomings by quickly switching between them (Senior, 2008), which is the key to ensuring the basic quality of a mixing work. At the same time, using this kind of reference material can also set a direction for the work you want to mix, so that you can know the mixing degree of each frequency band and instrument in this style.

Personally, I like to use “Nobody home” by Avril Lavigne as my reference track when it comes to pop-rock style mixes.

This song has excellent low frequency and the wideness of the acoustic guitar, and the small and short reverb used on the snare drum makes me think it is very suitable for the current mainstream acoustic rock music. At the same time, the electric guitar of this song also retains enough details, and the transient nature of the instrument is also appropriately preserved. So I consider this a pretty standard pop rock mix, and I often use it as a baseline for my mixes.

Creating your own reference CD (no date). https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/creating-your-own-reference-cd. (Access date：1/3/2024)