eq monitors or not?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Singtall
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Singtall

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i know this has been covered a million times before across the internet, but i'm gonna ask some questions for myself since my situation is a little different.

i turned my 12'x32' shed into a studio. i carpeted the floor and had expansion foam (open cell) sprayed on all walls and ceiling. the room has no reflection that i can hear, it's pretty dead. even drums don't sound that loud in there.

my dilemma:

i recorded some drum tracks and eq'd them a little to sound "decent". a couple other engineers listen to the tracks through their monitors and said it sounded like a had a little too much low mids on my mix. i listened again to mix my and it sounded fine to me. i listened again on my laptop speakers and it was clear as day that i had way too much low mids.

someone suggested that i needed to pink noise the speakers to get it eq'd flat. ok, i'll bite....i never eq'd monitors in 30 years, but what the heck right? if it works for a pa system, maybe it's worth a try. so i hooked up a reference mic to my presonus mixer and hit the SMART button and went the through the process of pink noise and correction. what it showed me was a big hole in the low mids to the tune of over 5db! when you need 5db correction to your speakers, they aren't too flat to begin with is my thinking. i have the Yamaha HS80M's with subwoofer.

i was thinking that i was gonna see all kinds of peaks from room reflections or something to that effect, but my room is dead. maybe they made the speakers with less low mids to compensate for "most people's" untreated rooms? i don't know, but it has me all kinds of confused.

i came from Mackie 8's, so i was used to a little hyped low end and plenty low mids. but having no low mids with the Yamaha's is not a good situation for me. should i just go with the eq and forget about it? there is nothing in my room that i could move around to change the sound of my monitors....i tried moving the speakers and desk around with no real change in low mid response, which contradicts what most people say on the internet.

suggestions?
 
What you're seeing more than anything is probably the room (and at the proper resolution, it's probably much worse than 5dB). You can't EQ a speaker into being "more accurate" -- You can certainly change it to some extent, but unless you *know* that the room is not the problem (it IS the problem the vast majority of the time), trying to EQ the monitors is usually much like chasing your tail.

If nothing else, move the mic a foot. I'd bet that 5dB dip either goes more like 35-40dB or it bumps up to flat (or it could even potentially peak up 10dB or so).
 
i moved the mic around several times and i kept coming back with the same low mid dip, so i eq'd it using the presonus SMART room analyzer. it sounds very different now.

i eq'd my speakers....several times, then came to a place that i felt good about. then i remixed a track just to see what corrections i would do now that i'm hearing it differently.

check out the before and after:

after:
https://soundcloud.com/singtall/fall-away-mix-2

before:
https://soundcloud.com/singtall/fall-away-drum-test

i will have to hear this clip on several speakers to know what's real.
 
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I found that boosting the mids on my HS50's makes them sound a little flatter in small spaces.

Before I start mixing I will play a few reference songs that I'm very familiar with and that I know sound nice and flat.. I can change how I listen and mix in that room from what I hear back. For example: If my reference songs sound bass heavy, I'll know the lower frequencies in that room are giving me a false sense of bottom end and I will mix "bass heavy" to compensate. Give it a shot, may help..
 
MikeyCanzonetta said:
I found that boosting the mids on my HS50's makes them sound a little flatter in small spaces.

Before I start mixing I will play a few reference songs that I'm very familiar with and that I know sound nice and flat.. I can change how I listen and mix in that room from what I hear back. For example: If my reference songs sound bass heavy, I'll know the lower frequencies in that room are giving me a false sense of bottom end and I will mix "bass heavy" to compensate. Give it a shot, may help..
Click to expand...

+1

referencing similar tracks is very important, I use this trick a lot.
 
in the past, i ALWAYS referenced good mixes before mixing anything. this was an experiment just to see how the monitors being eq'd would effect my ears without referencing a good mix first.

i will spend some time listening to some cd's before the next attempt.

anyone else ever tried eqing their monitors?
 
i just edited my post and changed it up to have the newest mix first just to see how it effects everyone's ear. when i listen to the new mix first, the original one seems too fat.
 
Singtall said:
i just edited my post and changed it up to have the newest mix first just to see how it effects everyone's ear. when i listen to the new mix first, the original one seems too fat.
Click to expand...


I kinda liked the way the original sounded. There's nothing wrong with having a fat mix with big ol balls!!

Tell me, you have a rhythm gtr doubled and then that mono chorused/flanged gtr yes?
 
clean guitar has chorus and delay panned wide. the distorted guitars are one track per side. you guessed it.

i will be doing another mix later after listening to some cd's and hopefully i can get used to these speakers.....or they gotta go.
 
I liked the new mix much better. The old one sounded pretty muddy to me.
 
i will try the panning you suggested. thanks for the input.

for everyone else....

turn down your speakers for the first one because it's level is louder than the second one. or turn up the second one, whatever makes them the same volume so that you can hear the difference in the mix without volume being the final factor.
 
what do you think? Should give it a wall of guitars sound and it should allow the the cleans to live on the sides since they are still hard panned ....
 
it's cool. i came from the old Pantera school of hard panned guitars to show off he weird volume stuff i'm doing as it goes back into the clean guitars, but you can still hear it this way too.

the clean guitar is one stereo track. i used a stereo chorus and delay on the eleven rack and recorded it fully wet.
 
Singtall said:
it's cool. i came from the old Pantera school of hard panned guitars to show off he weird volume stuff i'm doing as it goes back into the clean guitars, but you can still hear it this way too.

the clean guitar is one stereo track. i used a stereo chorus and delay on the eleven rack and recorded it fully wet.
Click to expand...


Hey, I remember when Pantera was a hairband. Hahahaha.

I think the track is really cool. Is it an actual part of a song or just a little demo test for your room?
 
it's part of the song. my band in the late 90's was called "Silent Fear" and this song was from the second cd that never got released. me and the drummer or working on redoing those songs just to be able to say we finished it.
 
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