You have the room, the songs and the gear. The record is still not out.

Your room and your monitors are telling you something the car cannot hear, usually in the low end, and the mix has been balanced to them. The fix starts with knowing what the mix is actually doing, not what the room says it is doing.

• AudioVibes measures loudness, true peak, the relationship between the two sides, and the fold to mono.
• ABA Compare holds two versions at the same loudness so a change is judged on the mix, not the level.

You have lived with this song for months. You can hear it finished. The recording still isn’t it, and each replay shows you the gap.

You can do it yourself, and for as long as the result is the one in your head, you should. A producer is for the day it isn’t: somebody whose whole job is the gap between the song in your head and the one on the recording, who hears it from outside, settles what the song needs before anyone records, and gets that out to the talent and the engineer. If the song is not settled in your head yet, he is guessing and you are paying for the guesses, so the song is settled first.

Here you see the price of each step before you pay for it, and you only ever pay for the next one. The first step, Milestone 0, settles what the song needs, how it will be heard and who plays, before anyone records a note; if you go on, it is credited in full. If the song isn’t settled yet, the Muse Chart Room is the step before it.

Do it yourself for as long as the result is the one you want. The day it is not, the question is what a studio charges for, and whether you can see it before you commit.

Here you see the price of each step before it starts, and you only pay for the next one. The price sheet shows where a record starts: the kickoff, the rhythm section and the finished-mix pass, priced line by line, three ways in. The arrangement, solos and vocals are the steps after it. Engineering that runs over is the studio’s cost; anything that comes in under comes off your bill. If the budget is short, work comes out. Nothing is ever discounted into something less. You decide what the record needs, and you can stop at any step and still leave with a finished mix.

Two mics on one source pick it up at slightly different times. Each sounds right solo; together, parts of the sound cancel and the kit goes thin or loses its punch. It is hard to hear and easy to measure.

ABA Phaze Check measures how two pickups of the same sound line up in time and polarity, from the raw recorded tracks, and shows what to move.

Most often the vocal and another performance are claiming the same frequencies at the same moments, and the louder one usually wins. Turning the vocal up makes it sit on top; it does not make it sit in.

ABA Pocket Check maps where the vocal and up to three other performances own their space and where they share it. The map says where to listen; your ears decide what to change.

Not when you run out of ideas, and not when the tweaking stops. In an ABA production, a mix is finished when the producer, the client and the engineer agree that it is, and sign.

Working alone, you are all three, which is why it is hard to feel finished. Before you start, decide what “done” means to you. When you feel like stopping, measure the mix against that, not against how tired you are of it.

Here, you do. The client owns the stems, and the delivery at the end of a production is a listed set of assets, not whatever happened to be on the drive. The list is public.