Interested in learning

[vasial]

Hi guys,

I really am the perfect example of an amateur musician. I have been playing a cheap keyboard and guitar for the last few years, I have reached my threshold of creativity on both, guitar is way to tough of action, fingerpicking tears up my nails it so bad, and the piano-keyboard is essentially just expressionless. But because of a serious lack of money, there is a high doubt I'll be seeing any newer, more inspiring instruments grace my life, but I'm gonna keep pushing and squeezing what I can out of these. The keyboard is hooked up to the computer with MIDI, and given the way that today's music industry works, free samples, etc., that has given me a lot of high quality sounds to work with, even if I can't get very good pitch versatility out of them.

But this brings me to another question, my speaker system is, as goes simple PC speakers, pretty good but also old, has a decent base speaker, and left and right channels, that's it, and those left and right are like, right next to each other. -.- All things kinda out of my control, I live with my brothers.
But the question is, what really from a musicians standpoint does a pair of even entry level monitors do, positioned as best in the room as possible (which is so beyond my knowledge level right now) do as opposed to this. Obviously it gives me more distinguishable left/right channels, probably more power and drive, and I assume more frequency independence? Is that really all I'd have to pay a minimum of 150 dollars for? And what's that gonna really do for me?

I have lots of VSTs for my DAW, SONAR, the only things we've really spent some money on, and I have a lot of earnest interest in music, I like learning about sound, to put it another way, which leads me to believe mixing/mastering/producing would possibly be a direction for me to look in, but these things are just so far above my head, I don't know where to go now.

Money, money, money...

Thanks for the help.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

For more on monitor purpose, selection, room placement and room treatment, check out the four-part series on monitor selection and place ment beginning with Part 1 here:

http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/columns/gstep/index.php?id=74

There is a side menu on that page that'll link you to parts 2-4 when you're ready.

But for now the short answer is that the purpose of a studio monitor is to allow the engineer to hear everything he/she needs to hear in the way they like to hear it, so that they can modify the sounds through mixing or mastering to get what they want as an end result with as close to zero guesswork or trial and error as possible.

It's that simple and that difficult. The description is simple, but what it means can be difficult because everybody has different "ears" and rarely agree on which properties of monitors work best for them, and compounded even worse in the fact that not everybody who wants to mess with this stuff can actually afford the "good stuff" (so to speak.)

Also on the website (click the "Resources" tab) is a custom studio reference book catalog of over 90 books from Amazon.com related to the art, science and business of audio engineering, sorted into 9 different categories. You might want to brows through there -especially, but not limited to - the Beginners/Getting Started section for some great books from which to learn how all this stuff works.

G.