These days there is absolutely no reason, other than a financial one, why we can’t all make commercial quality recordings in our own homes and bedrooms. The real problem is often not so much how to capture the performance but how to make it shine and give your work a professional sheen!
Monitoring
Whatever you spend your hard-earned wedge on possibly the most relevant purchase you should make will be your reference monitors and the environment you chose to listen to them in. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should aim for the most expensive units on offer, but rather look at systems that suit your personal circumstances and the audio you will be using them to monitor. In addition to this you should also beware of the old ‘egg box‘ treatment and try to design the layout of your room in as natural a way as possible. Remember that when you and your friends and hopefully customers, listen to your mixes the chances that they will all march around to your bedroom to listen to the material as it was meant to be heard is very very very remote.
This brings to mind one of the most famous of the oldest and most pertinent, but not necessarily accurate, studio tales regarding mixing and production. Back in the 1970s the legendary producer and loose cannon Phil Spector was asked how he went about creating the Wall of Sound he was known and why he always preferred to mix his material in Mono. The wall of Sound idea came about because he wanted to “create little symphonies for the kids” by doubling up and sometimes tripling up instrumentation. he would then go on to mixing the whole live room sound through old reverb rooms and springs to create a sound that would seem dynamic and powerful even through the old-fashioned AM radio systems and Juke Boxes of the ere. He even took this one stem further by sticking to his preferred output of Mono instead of the new Stereo sound as he felt that he (and only he) knew how his music should be heard and if he mixed the music into a stereo format listeners would move the two speakers apart further than he wanted the sounds to be reproduced from and therefore out of his direct control! Not a megalomanic at all – honest but he did manage to create some incredible textures using only one speaker!
The thing to remember here is try to create an environment to work in that is A). sympathetic to the sound you want to create, B). sue speakers with as ‘flat’ as dynamic response as possible and C). create a room that has just the right qualities for listening to your sounds in as natural a way as possible. In short don’t cover the walls with duvets. carpets and all manner of soft furnishings (even egg boxes) in an effort to deaden the sound. Try to investigate the opportunities of tuning your room in such a way to listen to things without killing all of the room atmosphere and also without destroying all of the bass and sub bass frequencies other wise you will soon find out that your customer’s will be either blowing the bass drivers out of their home systems because you have mixed the tracks with too much bottom end or, equally bad, they will be complaining of hearing loss due to the fact that you have over-compensated for your ‘dead’ room treatment buy boosting the upper frequencies for to high!
Maurice
BrickBeat Recording Studio
