Recording and monitoring

koneguitarist

I’m in awe of some of the threads on here regarding treating your studio acoustically and also what speakers are used for monitoring or headphones etc. 
A lot of it frankly is way over my head, maybe also with being in my 60s and a lifetime of playing in bands without monitors plus my time on a flight deck, even using ear protection I feel my hearing does not have the range. 

Now I am in no way denigrating the discussions at all, but for me I certainly wouldn’t know where to start and whether I would actually hear the difference if I did some of the things right. 

Is this a way of taking the room out of the equation for consistency or are people just trying for a more professional sound? 

Some of my favourite recordings of all time are quite limited in a lot of ways yet the limitations can sometimes give you that sound you want, or is it just the engineers were so good? 

Anyway will be reading them and learning what I can to improve my recording and was wondering what the most simple change you made that had the biggest effect to you all. 

Using quality Monitors, Headphones, treating room or just learning to use what you have better, what made the difference to you. 

blobb

A lot of monitoring is about translation i.e how it sounds on other systems. Most things I have recorded, it's only me who listens to it so I just get a good sound for me and that's that.

Musicwolf

Monitoring and room acoustics is really all about one thing - getting the mix to work on other systems in other rooms.

I think of it like trying to paint a picture in a room light with coloured, artificial, light.  You can get your painting to look fine in the room in which you are working but take it to another location and the some of the colours may look wrong.  This is why artist's studios have strong, natural, light and why mixing rooms need flat acoustic responses.

You can't control the system or the room where the mix is listened to but, if you mix it in a 'flat' room you stand the best chance of making it work on any system.  This applies particularly to the low frequencies.

Those of us who have dabbled in home recording have inevitably come up against the problem that the mix sounds fine in the home studio but just doesn't translate to other systems.  The usual workaround is to keep playing the mix in other environments, such as in the car, taking notes and tweaking accordingly.

steamabacus

I've found the biggest improvement for me (after a lifetime of working in untreated rooms) was to buy a decent set of studio reference headphones (at least a couple of hundred quids worth). I find the only 'difficulty' has been learning to judge the bottom end - mixing on cans you miss that 'thump' (even though the bass end detail is there) and that can lead to overcooking the bottom end of the mix. But after a bit of a learning curve, and cross-checking mixes through speakers occasionally, the mixes come out much better.

I find a lot of what I see online about mixing seems a little fixated on the 'stuff' (monitors, plug-ins, what-have-you) and missing the importance of learning the activity through practice.

I think a lot of learning to mix is actually learning to hear - or, more accurately, listen. Critical listening is something that can be trained through practice. Only through training your critical faculties can you begin to judge what exactly it is you are hearing and what adjustments might make it better.

koneguitarist

Interesting replies, but do we think the best recordings were made now or decades ago? 

smigeon

koneguitarist said:

Interesting replies, but do we think the best recordings were made now or decades ago? 

Neither. I was just now listening to a recording of Oscar Moor and Inez Jones made in the 1950s. It sounded wonderful to me. But a lot of stuff recorded in the past year sounds wonderful to me also. Just in a different way.

koneguitarist

Agree with this, I have a live album by Red Beans and Rice live at the Dublin Castle, it sounds wonderful to me, but of an era. As the 70s moved on I thought everything in some was. Is better, clearer and better mix etc, but the drums always sounded the same. Dull.

Macca_25387

My two pence is if the song and the arrangement is great then i don’t think it matters to a degree how it was recorded. As above some sketchy 50s recordings are amazing because the song, arrangement and the artists were amazing. There’s some brilliant recordings coming out now aswell. There’s more studio trickery going on i’d say, but there’s great stuff in amongst it. 

PolarityMan

koneguitarist said:

Interesting replies, but do we think the best recordings were made now or decades ago? 

On an objectively technical level production quality is far higher than decades ago. It's not even questionable. Some people may prefer the capture of an unadulterated performance more but I don't think you can argue that standard haven't massively improved.

PolarityMan

Macca_25387 said:

My two pence is if the song and the arrangement is great then i don’t think it matters to a degree how it was recorded. As above some sketchy 50s recordings are amazing because the song, arrangement and the artists were amazing. There’s some brilliant recordings coming out now aswell. There’s more studio trickery going on i’d say, but there’s great stuff in amongst it. 

There are some genres where you can't really separate the production from the composition though because sound design is such an important aspect of the music.

smigeon

So we all seem to recognise that there are many kinds of “wonderful”. 

If you’re anything like me as a beginner in recording and mixing, what you are mostly aware of in the first few efforts is “it sounds like crap”. The challenge is how somehow to evolve away from this crapness to something you like (and, possibly, what others might like). This is a personal journey that involves learning about all sorts of stuff, maybe or maybe not including room treatments. In my own journey the most significantly thing in the early days was learning how to EQ the different instruments so that they gelled, as opposed to all sounding separate and unrelated. This was using headphones. That got me to a place where I was reasonably happy with what I was hearing. But then I played it on speakers and in the car. And, lo, it was crap again. And that kicked off a new iteration focusing on how to sound good not only in the headphones but also in the car, through the band’s PA, on a phone or iPad etc.

Now when I listen to my early stuff that I was OK with at the time, it now sounds pretty poor, despite me having gone through those two stages of learning EQ and learning different device characteristics. So then it’s a case of going round the loop again and seeing what further improvements can be made. It never ends, but I do finally quite like some of my current stuff.

So far, I’ve not paid much attention to room treatment (beyond moving my speakers around a bit) because for whatever reason i’ve ended up using the car as my primary target domain. Maybe room treatment will become important to me in the future, or maybe not. I still have LOADS to learn about just EQ, never mind compression, use of space/reverb, effects, etc. etc.