I’ve heard Bruce’s mixes … They are excellent.
(If I could only get close one day.)
He is speaking from experience.
Thanks for your endorsement! Only took 20 years of awful mixes to get here hahaha.
There are a few schools of thought here.
1. Treat your area. The smaller the area the harder to treat. Most of us are in challenging to treat areas. To professionally treat a room to the point of getting accurate mixes you don't have to keep running out to the car for, you are looking at several thousand dollars. You can try and DIY and have varying degrees of success, but without accurate measurements you're flying blind at best.
2. Lose the room entirely. This means headphones. The more accurate the better.
3. Slate headphones or similar. Psycoacoustically designed to model other listening environments. I don't know how close they model Barefoot or ATC monitors in a great room. I haven't sat down and compared. I do know my sounds never translated better until I got these cans.
Ignore all of the above and pepper as you go along. The odds you'll nail a sound you love everywhere are against you, but over time you'll hear the deficiencies and can correct them (if you're really listening!). Do you want to sound muddy/bright/midrangey the first 10-? gigs until you get it sorted? I can't answer that. Better get to know your way around the front panel and keep the performance tab handy.
People may argue against all of the above. That's ok too. Maybe their experience is different. This has been my experience. 500 bucks for a set of cans really changed the game for me, personally. They're returnable for a full refund (make sure of that before you buy, I got a return promise because I too was skeptical).
Edit* and even after you do all this, you're still at the mercy of whoever is doing sound. All that bottom end chunk you love? GONE. (and rightfully so). A pointer I can give is let those guys worry about that. Write sounds that inspire you to play and sound good to you. Don't worry about the mix. That's the mix engineers problem. He has the tools to do what he has to to make it all work together. You can always run YOUR sound to your monitoring.