Part 3.
Hello friends!
Today I will touch a very important issue that divides a professional community to this day. It is a matter of controlling the sound of the music we write.
Monitor acoustics, studio monitors, speakers, and just acoustics: all of these are the names for what we use to hear the sound in our studio. I will call them either studio monitors or simply monitors. There are a lot of them. They have different parameters. And it is not so easy to choose the best for your studio. The proper sound monitor guarantees you a professional quality of the sound.
Let me briefly tell you what we will have to rely on to choose most suitable settings for our home studio.
First, this is the room itself. The room sometimes may nullify all our attempts to get an acceptable sound. Everything from size, ceiling height, wall material, furniture arrangement, all directly affect what we hear in the end.
Proceeding from the fact that we, after all, not a professional studio, but some kind of premises in which we will work, I will give you some advice on arranging your workplace in order to get the maximum result, at minimum cost.
1. The room should not be square. In this case, there can be no question of any quality control. The best shape of the room would be a rectangle.
2. The optimum listening point is a point located 1/3 of the length of the longest wall of the room and in the centre of the room, relatively short wall.
3. Studio monitors and your ears should create an equilateral triangle.
There should be no less than two meters between the monitors themselves. This is important for the formation of a high-quality stereo image. But sometimes it is not possible to do due to smaller size of our room, therefore, this rule can be neglected. Personally, I did not notice much of a difference.
It will be good if the walls of the room are covered with drapery or rugs. This will make it possible to get rid of the first reflections of the walls. If this is not realistic, you will have to put up with a certain amount of echo, which will somewhat "blur" the sound.
Do not expect to hear the full bass range of your music in this room. To achieve better low frequency sound, we need to carry out work on the installation of a sound absorption system, which is not included in the format of this post. But I will tell you how to get around this later.
Now I would like to talk about choosing studio monitors. On the one hand, everything is simple, on the other, everything is very individual.
The first thing to look at is the size of the largest speaker. The larger it is, the lower the frequencies you would be able to hear. There are also pitfalls here. The larger the speaker, the more powerful the monitor will be, which is also not always good. For small premises with an area of 10-15 square meters monitors with loudspeaker diameters of 5-8 inches will suffice. You do not need bigger as you still would not be able to take an advantage of the excess power from them in smaller room.
Remember, studio monitors are a measuring tool. This is what allows us to hear all the flaws in our music and fix them so that the music sounds at full and high quality. To be honest, listening to completed work on high-quality studio monitors is not always pleasant. This is because they produce a true sound. Even when you listen to work of well-known composers you will be surprised to hear some flaws in the music.
Every studio monitor sound different. Here you need to choose what you like best for yourself. The easiest option is to take a familiar music that you know well, come to the showroom where studio monitors are sold and spend some time listening over different monitors, so you can choose the one that fits your budget, while producing the best sound.
I can suggest a few good and not expensive options.
1. Mackie CR-X Series, 5-Inch Multimedia Monitors with Professional Studio-Quality Sound - Pair (CR5-X)
Please note that in the last two cases, the cost goes for one studio monitor. This is normal practice in a professional environment.
Now, let us talk about headphones. I will express my opinion right away based on my practice. Why do we need them? How they can help and what they are not suitable for.
- Headphones will not replace studio monitors. Whatever systems and plug-ins we currently have, there are still no properly working technologies that would fully simulate the mutual penetration of sound from channel to channel.
- Headphones are good at the stage of arrangement. It just so happened that I am doing the arrangement just at the time when my family go to rest. In this situation, they are not interchangeable.
- Headphones allow us to control the low frequencies to a greater extent, which we cannot sufficiently control on studio monitors in our room.
- Choose open headphones. They will reduce ear fatigue and the risk of hearing damage.
- Use them as little as possible! Protect your hearing!
By tradition, I will recommend several models of headphones.
1. Samson SR850
2. PreSonus HD7
In the next part I will talk about midi keyboards and controllers.
Stay tuned…
Andru "Namaste" Shaitar
webdisweb@gmail.com
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