I’ve long heard about the virtues of using reference tracks to compare your mixes against, but never actually got around to trying it myself. That might all be about to change though.

One of the creators I subscribe to on Patreon is Reverbmachine. If you haven’t heard of Dan aka Reverbmachine before, he’s definitely worth checking out as he does some excellent tutorials on how to recreate the synth sounds from a variety of songs, including 80’s classic such as Shout by Tears for Fears. Patreon subscribers also get to download his remakes as Ableton Live sets too, which are definitely worth the small monthly fee.

In his latest Patreon post he goes into detail of how he gets so close to the original sounds and yes, you’ve guessed it, reference tracks are a large part of it. He goes on to describe the Ableton Live template he uses, based on the instructions in this article.

https://patches.zone/reference-tracks-in-ableton-live

I’ve just followed them myself and now have a shiny new template to use and abuse. Of course, the real trick will be in finding the right reference tracks to compare against, and to that end, iZotope have some suggestions that are worth considering. Certainly agree with their first choice of Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’ as it’s such a rich, well mixed track with lots of space for the different parts.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/4-popular-mixing-reference-tracks-and-why-they-work.html

Looking forward to seeing where this little excursion takes me!