Yo yo,
I’ve been producing for a while now. I normally work in my friend’s studio which is easy and cheap, but he has moved out of town and his studio is a goner. I know for sure that I am going to be taking music seriously for the next few years, and a long term investment is necessary. On the contrary, I live in a new york city apartment, with neighbors who apparently are not fans of the bass :/. I need to be able to truly hear the real mixdown as I will be sending my tunes directly from my laptop to mastering.
I produce dubstep, bigroom house, and electro.
Am i better off investing in a pair of Sennheiser Hd-25’s? Or a small set of monitor’s? Some small KRK’s maybe?
Whatcha think?
J
I have KRK RP5 G2s, i also have a neighbour that is a cunt.
During the day time and when working on parts of tracks or mixing i usually use my monitors, at quite a bit of volume they aren’t too bad (if your room accoustics aren’t awful), the KRKs make things sound pleasent, but not nessecarily flat.
For a proper mixdown and tweaking sounds a bit more directly i use my AIAIAI TMA-1’s, again they aren’t exactly flat, but i find i get a good idea of the sound referencing them against the KRKs.
When i pull stuff from home to the proper studio (Genelec 1037C’s and matching subs) it tends to be quite close to what i was hearing at home through the phones.
Headphones will be fine for just getting your levels balanced enough for the M.E to be able to know what you want from the track, the fine tuning and accurate monitoring is their job.
Your’e going to want both probably and check between the two but it doesn’t sound like either will be ideal. If you need to hear the real mixdown headphones won’t give you a proper stereo image. I would also look at Yamaha HS series or better monitors over the KRKs.
not arguing the fact that it happens, but I still think the best way is in a car. Closest thing to a club system… which is where most of us want our music played at the end of the day.
I bought some KRK headphones a while back, for monitoring and mixing, and they are fantastic. it took me a while to get used to them, and i do still check my mixdowns everywhere i can as there can be issues with spatial mixing, however once you know them inside out it can be done. if you do need to use headphones, make sure you listen to absolutely everything with them, and learn them inside out!
Nothing wrong with KRKs for arrangement and mixing, everybody knows they are nowhere near flat but the reason they are everywhere is because they sound pleasent, you can give them some wally for quite a while without your ears getting tired.
As with any speakers after taking things away to a real studio you learn to compensate for your monitors.
Also the majority of bedroom producers are dealing with bad accoustics, so for near field monitors at that price the krks are a good bet.
Just checking levels on decent monitors at different master amplitudes, double checking in decent headphones then checking a bounce on some consumer stuff (car stereo/ipod/phone whatever) is surely plenty enough to ensure the mastering engineer knows what to do with the track.
Doesn’t apply to OP but i use these quite often at Uni and they are great, need the sub as well or they are puny:
It’s relevant in the fact that if he can’t afford a proper monitoring system for mix downs and what not, those options present good situations/places to check your final product, thus educating the OP on how to compensate… or what tools he can use to learn how to compensate for a less than ideal situation.
For the same price of KRK’s you can get yourself a pair of Equator Audio D5’s. They’re honestly the best monitors for the price, and the only reason you can get them for $300, is because you can only buy them directly off the company website. Nice flat response for production, and they’re powerful! If you properly isolate them from your desk (Auralex MOpads will do the trick) you don’t even need a sub. Check them out, they’re amazing speakers.
tip - learn your speakers-monitors-headphones (whatever you’re using).
It sure is nice to be able to get the best equipment possible, but let’s face it, not everyone will be able to afford it. Learn the acoustics of your room and it will help a lot when doing the mixdown.
In my room, the low frequency’s seems to pop out more then it should, so I know what to do to compensate for it.
It really depends on how seriously you want to take it and how you want to go about it. If you want to take it seriously, you have basically 3 options:
Get KRKs or something else made for bedroom use and use them naked. Basically, used like this, they’re like other speakers except less noisy and–depending on which ones–more cost efficient. It is really nice to have speakers around, though. Even if they don’t sound perfect.
Get and set up acoustic treatments for your room, arrange the furniture/speakers so that they sound right, and buy decent monitors…decent starting at about a grand for the set. It’s expensive to do nearfields right. At least they’re still cheaper than mains.
Spend less money on headphones to get close and use the rest of the money for extra gear and–when it comes time–a few hours in a recording studio with an engineer at hand to help you and a better monitoring system than you could possibly put in an apartment. If you do this, HD25s are awesome headphones but not perfect. Open-back headphones supposedly give a better stereo image, and I’d pick something flatter like mdr-7506s even if I went with closed back.