billroper | New Frontiers in Mixing

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I just spent an hour and a half beating up New Frontier. With luck, the next song won't take anywhere near that long to fix up.

It strikes me that it would be really convenient to have small computers with wireless cards sitting turned on and connected to the other stereos in the house so that I could just copy a file there to listen to instead of having to burn CDs. Of course, I have no small unused computers sitting around. I do have a couple of big, hulking ones.

I suspect this is not going to be a popular suggestion. :)

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From:

filkertom.livejournal.com

For once, it's my turn to say these words:

What you want to do...

... is to have ONE good set of active nearfield monitor speakers and ONE good set of headphones. The headphones help you find any nasty glitches in the audio, and then the monitor speakers help you position your sounds properly.

The difficulty of using CD players, radios, MP3 players, regular computer speakers, etc., etc., etc., is that they are designed for hi-fi sound reproduction; their purpose is to make the sound, sound better. Monitor speakers give you the sound as it is. Get a good mix on those, and you'll have a good mix.

I finally got some monitor speakers for myself for Christmas, and the difference in sound from the 5.1 multimedia speakers I had been mixing with, and from every other set of speakers I've ever owned, is astounding. If you have got monitor speakers, and you don't feel you can trust the sound from them, then you've got the wrong speakers, or at least the wrong placement.

From:

billroper

Actually, I have a fine pair of nearfield monitors which I'm very happy with and I have a pretty fair idea of how they translate to other environments. But I like to check final mixes in a variety of environments just to make sure that there isn't something I'm missing. Thus, we always do a truck test to make sure that nothing that we really care about is disappearing into the road noise; similarly, I check on the Magnapans in my living room -- speakers that are notoriously bass light -- and then on the ancient Pioneer speakers with the 12 inch woofers in my bedroom just to make sure that there are no interesting artifacts that show up under those conditions. (There was one mix of Graham's that I made many years ago -- long before I got my current monitor speakers -- where I listened to the mix in my bedroom and heard a pressure wave coming across the room from those big woofers. It turned out that he'd clipped a lapel mic to the inside of the bodhran when he recorded that track. No wonder it felt like my head was inside the drum.)

But in the current case, I simply wanted to let