Tune Your Room

If you are serious about getting into recording, there's something that a lot of gear salesmen and audiophiles don't really push that hard. That's tuning one's listening environment. Until a few days ago, I considered it something that I would eventually get around to doing. If I knew then what I know now, I would have tuned my room BEFORE building up any gear for my tracking room.

I used a device called the DBX DRIVE RACK STUDIO monitor management system. The unit comes with an optional RTA (real time analysis) omni-directional microphone that "analyzes" your listening room for you. The process is called "pinking out" and it's quite fasinating. The Drive Rack module generates pink noise (at a very loud volume, incidentally) and records what frequencies are boosted and what frequencies are attenuated. Then, it creates a custom EQ curve for that room, so that the monitoring is, for lack of better words, more true to what's on tape.

I didn't think I would hear much of a difference with this thing, until I pulled up a mix I had been working on the day before. Wow. All I can say is wow. I didn't think my room was that horrible until I heard, with great clarity, the mix I was working on with a true EQ graph. The lows were clear, the highs were clear, the mid's were very clear. I could make 1 to 2 db adjustments in EQ on a particular instrument and hear it much better than before.

The Drive Rack module also comes with a few extra bells and whistles. You can simulate NS-10's and Auratone speakers, which are hard to find these days. And, you don't have to burn a copy of a mix your working on so you can hear what it sounds like in your car...you can dial up the "car test" patch and see how the mix sits on crappy speakers.

At any rate, this is just a suggestion for anyone working in a studio environment, whether it's in the home or in a dedicated professional space: tune your room. Your mixes will thank you.