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.
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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.