Digital Music Front

Posts Tagged ‘speakers’

I managed to overcome my recent bout of musician’s block long enough to finish the latest track I’ve been writing. Finish at least to the extent that the music is written and layout done. Now what remains to do is that most hated part of any musical recording – post production.

When the Rockstar Philosopher and I released our first track as Untitled Project, I was surprised at how different it sounded on speakers other than the ones we had just spent the last 8 weeks writing it on. I suspect that a large part of this is due largely to my mediocre mastering skills, but I do believe there is also a significant component that can be put down just to the different response curves of different speakers. I’ve never really paid much heed to how different one song sounds on different systems, until I was listening to my own music.

This experience really hammered home the need for a good pair of monitor speakers, but unfortunately all my rather limited budget could afford when I last went gadget shopping was a pair of Edirol MA-7A’s. They’re not bad little speakers, but they’re also about the cheapest monitors money can buy, and as with anything, you get what you pay for. The speaker cones are only 3 inches, and subsequently they have almost no bass response. That is unless you turn on the bass boost function, however that render’s them useless as monitor speakers – why something like this is even included on a monitor speaker I don’t know, except perhaps that they are really aiming at a more general purpose computer speaker rather than a true monitor.

The upshot of having to use such ill suited equipment is that the mix down and mastering process for me is a convoluted and protracted nightmare that often takes me longer to complete than the actual creation of the song. I will spend hours tweaking the levels, trying to make sure its a nice balanced sounding mix, with no clipping or horrid over compression sounds, and then bounce it all to disk, only to find that what I had sounding pretty decent at home sounds like gutless radio trash on anything else. So the process is repeated, and I go home and try to remix the song in a way to compensate for the deficiencies I heard when played on a real system, only I’m again limited in what I can hear, and so it usually takes me between 10 and 20 attempts til I get something I’m remotely happy with.

So it is that post production has become something that I dread, its the thing that makes me hate being a producer, its that last horrible barrier to being able to say “I’m done with this,” and moving onto to something new. Worse, it even starts to make me hate my own music. I always think its a sign of how good a song is, that you can listen to it through over and over throughout post production, with only minor variations to the levels and overall sound, and not end up hating it. But I am getting close, and thats a problem obviously, because I don’t want to hate my own music.

Unfortunately the only real solution to this I can see is to get better speakers, but my budget doesn’t really allow for that at this point in time. So until it can, I guess I will be dishing out loads of tinny sounding radio trash.