Listening Back and Listening Ahead

First off, we’ve got to listen to what we’ve recorded. We record tracks of acoustic sounds, samples ‘n synths. We listen to those tracks and try to decide how good they sound, and how we could make them better by re-recording them a different way.

This is the process of listening back in time, to the original sound sources that we recorded. Here, there really is something to the idea of reproductive accuracy. Ideally, we’d like our recorded sounds to resemble quite precisely what happened in the studio.

But there’s more.

Once we’ve got sounds on tape, we’ve got to produce a master recording that will sound great wherever we or our customers decide to play it. And this looking ahead aspect of control room monitoring is the other, tougher, part of what we’ve got to do with monitors. We have to predict how our recording will sound to our listening public. We would like our monitoring system to make this job easier, not harder. We’d like our monitors to guide us toward good sound, not bad. This has little to do with accuracy, and much to do with musical intensity and impact.

Kentucky Voicing

The most basic technique for successful monitoring, used especially on location, is called Kentucky Voicing. It is a process of adaptation, to any monitors in any environment. You select a small group of successful recordings that you really like, and get to know them very well on your reference system. Then, those recordings become your reference. You carry them with you, and use them to learn how the various speakers you are using sound, including the rooms they are in.

In practice, as you listen to these recordings on location, you notice how the monitor system you are using affects the recordings. Are they bass light? Thin-sounding? A little brittle perhaps? Is there an annoying lower-midrange resonance? You get these features of the sound quality “in your ears,” and then, when you are doing your own work, you mix to have these same values, meaning you mix to have the bass light, the mix thin-sounding, brittle and with that same annoying lower-mid resonance. You assume (and pray) that when you get back to your reference room, the changes you noted in your location monitoring were a function of that location system only, that they will all disappear and that the recordings will now sound good, like your reference recordings.

The goodness of this approach is that it is simple, cheap and fairly effective. The badness is that you have to mix toward perceived defects, which is always a little scary. Do you really want to make something sound bad in the hopes that it will sound good later? (Gulp!) Like I said, scary!

You can use Kentucky Voicing in your own control room as well. You “teach” yourself how successful recordings sound in your room, and try to make your recordings match that sound.

But, at the same time, it would be even better if you could get your control room/monitoring system to sound really good all on it’s own! Then you just have to mix until it sounds good. How do you do this without going broke?