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Speakers (Monitors): For recording, playing back and mixing your recordings you need an amplifier and monitors. You can use your hi-fi set up at first but ideally you should invest in a pair of studio nearfield monitors, which means monitors that are designed to be heard close up by one listener, usually no more than a metre away. Nearfields are made not to flatter the music but to to reproduce it with clarity enabling you to correctly adjust EQ’s, etc. in such a way so that when you hear your music sounding good, it will sound good on portable radios, MP3 players, stereo systems, and car radios.
Read reviews of the more popular models and buy the best you can afford. Then, importantly, calibrate your ears to them by playing reference CDs, i.e. well-mixed music of the genre you’re writing and/or recording, so your ears can be ‘tuned’ to help you mix your music similarly.
Monitor speakers are either passive or active, the latter having their own onboard amplifiers. As you go up the price scale they tend to be actives.
I use a hi-fi amplifier, an Arcam Alpha 6 Plus, and my speakers are passive Alesis Monitor 1’s (pictured left) which I’ve had for over twenty years.
Headphones: Even though I have a dedicated studio room (see the Gallery page) it’s rarely practical for me to work using my monitors, even at modest levels, as I tend to work (play?) in the evenings and early Sunday mornings, so I use headphones most of the time. Apart from the issue of disturbing others the received wisdom is that ideally you need to use both for different purposes. Other points:
● Headphones enable you to hear details better, so they’re vital for ‘tracking up’, i.e. actually recording tracks.
● Monitors give you a proper picture of the stereo soundstage, whereas with headphones this will be in the middle of your head.
● If you plan to use monitors a lot you will need to be happy about your room acoustics as all surfaces and furnishings will affect your perception of the monitors’ output. This is a science in itself and can involve expenditure on installing sound baffles in strategic places.
● As usual I’m afraid, the more you pay for monitors and headphones the better the fidelity. I use Sennheiser HD 650 headphones (below right), having tried others, I found these were by far the best.
My view is that you have to balance the ideal with practicalities and as long as you ‘calibrate’ your ears (see the Speakers section on the previous page) to headphones then that’s ok. I use Sennheiser HD650 headphones (about £275) which are superb in terms of detail. You should try and audition different makes and models, including ‘closed’ ones (which cover the ear and lock out other sounds) and ‘open’ ones (which don’t).
Drum Machines: Drum machines contain pre-programmed drum patterns that can also be strung together into complete songs and saved, so they are fairly easy to use and can be synchronised via MIDI to a synthesiser or a software sequencer playing a MIDI track. This enables you for example, to set up complete backing tracks of drums, bass and keyboard sounds all synchronised together. This is also useful for playing live - a drummer that’s always plays in time! Drum machines are somewhat out of fashion now as the last couple of years have seen huge advances in software products that provide real drum sounds using sophisticated samples of real drummers playing real drums. I use XLN Audio's Addictive Drums 2 and Toontrack's EZ Drummer 3 but there are many others, some more complicated to learn than others.
The heyday of drum machines was in the 1980’s when Roland’s TR-808 and TR-909 provided poorly synthesised drum sounds on countless synth band and hip-hop records.
I say poorly, but their obviously unrealistic sounds actually became cool for being in effect the sounds of an entirely new instrument. Indeed, those obsolete Roland machines are now highly sought after, and similar sounds have been used on hip-hop and ‘R&B’ records ever since.
But realistic sounds are required for making pop or rock recordings, and although Roland have successfully marketed more realistic sounding drum machines since the 1980’s, software products now provide a better option for those genres. I still use my (long since discontinued) BOSS DR-880 drum machine (pictured left) for sketching out songs quickly or getting inspiration for songs from playing improvised guitar along with their built-in patterns. The DR-880 also has an extremely good guitar processor on board with a large bank of very usable amplifier simulations as well as effects and I often record straight into Sonar using this.
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