The art of listening—controlling your listening environment

Now for listening. Laptop music makers are headphone people. When out in the world, we want to shut the world out so we can work. When we're in a quiet environment, clarity and accuracy is key.

I am a huge fan of in-ear buds for when I am out in the world. I would suggest anything by Ultimate Ears or M-Audio. If you think you're getting good quality from Skullcandy or Apple earbuds, you are gravely mistaken. Be picky about your earbuds and try to research where they come from. Most earbuds come from the same manufacturer and are simply renamed and repackaged. Avoid these at all costs.

When looking for earbuds, I suggest you look first for isolation. How well do they cut the background noise down? When on a plane, train, or automobile, you'll want earbuds that attenuate the outside world at least 30 db. You don't want to be turning your earbuds up to compensate for outside noise. Doing this could damage your hearing.

Once you've found earbuds that are good at isolating, listen to the mixes you are familiar with. The better the earbuds are, the more extended the low end and high frequencies will be.

If you are in a more controlled environment, I would suggest a set of open-ear headphones for referencing your mixes. My favorite low-cost high-performance headphones are the Grado SR80 headphones. These were suggested to me by audiophiles and mastering engineers. They are under $100 and sound wonderful. I've actually mixed on them and been happy with the result. The other thing about these headphones is that you can actually talk to people in the room while you have them on. They are an open-ear design, which means that you can be aware of your surroundings if you have someone over that's asking you how the mix is coming along. I don't know how many times I've been mixing on closed-ear headphones and hit the ceiling when someone tapped my shoulder to get my attention.

It should be said that you need to be very, very mindful of your headphone volumes. Don't blow your ears out listening to mixes. Try to find a comfortable listening volume and stick with it so you get some consistency to your mix. Listening loud means that you could be distorting the mix or getting an inaccurate read on what's happening.

So that's about it for the laptop! You don't need much to get by in that configuration. It's somewhat important that when you are writing on a laptop, try to sit with good posture in a comfortable chair if you can. Sitting in a cafe is cool, so long as you aren't hunched over the laptop with your arms cramped up. This is how you get bad tendonitis of several kinds. I had bicep tendonitis, and I have to say that it really sucks.

Keep in mind that computers are noisy and sometimes even the power in your room can cause noisy recordings. In a perfect world, your computer should live in a climate-controlled box, or if you have a large, airy closet it can live there. As for hum and buzz, try separating your audio cables from your power cables. Many times hum is introduced into audio because the electricity flowing through a power cable will jump into an audio cable.

Many of these noise issues can be taken care of with filters and audio programs that are commonly available, but I highly suggest that you get good, clean recordings in the first place.

Try to minimize corners in your room. Put something dense in them to take the corner out. A popular material for taking out corners is Owens Corning 703 Insulation. It's very sturdy, doesn't shed much, and if you cover it with cloth like burlap (usually used to make potato sacks), or other simple heavy-duty fabric, it makes a great bass trap. We don't need to be fancy. Just put the 48x24" panel in the corner and see what happens. The results are pretty great. If you can't find any Owens Corning 703 nearby or on the Internet, there are alternatives out there that are still very good. Most insulation will work fairly well as long as it is dense and is well covered, so that you aren't breathing fiberglass. If you find it hard to find fiberglass or it's cost-prohibitive, try packing old clothing into the corners tightly. If you can get it to stay in place, you will still get the advantages of bass absorption.

You see, corners in your room amplify bass frequencies. This means that when we listen to mixes, we hear more bass than what's actually there. This may sound cool when we're listening, but when mixing, accuracy is key. We want our mixes to be accurate so that when we go play our mix in the car it translates.

If we are living in an older building, we might have hardwood floors. Hardwood floors look really nice, but they are very reflective. This can cause sound waves to bounce between the floor and ceiling. Putting a rug down makes a world of difference on hardwood floors.

Like our floors and ceilings, we need to try and minimize parallel surfaces whenever possible. Sound waves will bounce from these walls and sum together in the center of the room, giving us a boost in certain frequencies. Creating uneven surfaces will minimize this effect. Even having a curved piece of wood on the wall will help keep the negatives of this effect down.

Many folks talk about sound-proofing a room. They usually mean making a room silent to the outside world and vice versa. In our studio, we're going to focus less on sound-proofing and think more about treatment.

Taking out the corners of the room and laying a rug down will help control the over-hyping of certain frequencies in a room. What we don't want to do is cover every surface of our room with sound absorption material. This can actually affect the way we hear a mix and will make the room sound lifeless. A good rule of thumb is to use absorption in the corners, floor, and ceiling, and on the back wall to use diffusion.

Diffusion is a way of scattering sound waves so that they lose their energy. The larger waves get broken into smaller ones that don't sum together very well. Absorption takes that same audio energy and simply converts it into heat and absorbs most of the heat energy. Absorption is generally used to control low frequency sound, and diffusion scatters the high frequency reflections in the room.

Using diffusion on reflective surfaces means we get to keep a bit of life to the room and our mixes will sound more open and clear. Diffusion panels are kind of pricey, but they are out there. It's good to do research on diffuser panels rather than try to make some of your own. Homemade diffusers can often do more harm than good. Good diffusion requires good math.

That said, let's say we need to save up for some diffusion. In the meantime, put a lot of stuff in your room on the walls. Books can be good because they have both mass and uneven surfaces. Load up the walls so that you have very uneven surfaces all over the place. As long as you aren't listening at insane volumes, you should notice a difference.

A good way to see how well our room is doing is to play a mix and stop it quickly. We may hear a bit of a tail. Did it sound low frequency? High frequency? Did it last long? If we hear a low tone after stopping, more absorption would be a good idea. If we hear fluttering echoes, diffusion is the answer.

The speakers we use in our studio are extremely important. When choosing your first pair of studio monitors, you should never pick a set of monitors simply because they sound 'good'. Sometimes speakers that sound good have less in the midrange, where our ears are very sensitive, or some other bias. We want monitors that are accurate. Accuracy is the king when we are creating music for the masses. Whether our audience is on a laptop or a high-fidelity system, we want our mix to sound good on just about anything, and our monitors are the key to giving us the truth about what's going on.

Monitor choice is very personal, but it can be expensive. In my studio I use Mackie HR824 powered monitors for my speakers. Since I do this stuff for a living, I spent a pretty large amount on them, because they are ruthlessly accurate. Speakers can be very expensive, but there are some manufacturers such as M-Audio, Logitech, and Bose that are trying to create smaller speaker systems for computers that still sound very good. I've been known to write music for advertisements from a tent using headphones, but if you can afford it, try to get the best speakers you can.

Speaker placement should be roughly an equilateral triangle with our head as one point and the speakers' cones as the other two points. This setup will give us the most accurate stereo image and center. Don't put a bunch of stuff over or between the speakers if you can get away with it. Also, we need to try not to have our speakers sitting on our desk or any large surface. Buy some inexpensive monitor stands to de-couple them. Anything a speaker touches will vibrate. The smaller and more isolated the surface, the better!

You laugh! No, no. I'm serious.

We are about to embark upon a long journey that is absorbing and intense. Time tends to fly by in the studio and before you know it, the sun is coming up and we're looking happy but bleary-eyed at the clock. It's ok to do this and it's invigorating to have one of those all-night sessions making music. The trick is to be able to do it again after a short recovery period.

If you don't make your studio ergonomic, you will suffer the same fate as those who get carpal-tunnel syndrome from writing too much code or crunching too many numbers. If you work in an office during the day or have a job that requires you to use the computer for more than just music making, you MUST make this a priority. Nothing sucks more than not being able to make music because your arm hurts too much. I've been through this kind of thing and it kept me from working for a couple of weeks.

If you have a good chair, don't hunch over and have your screen at least 3 feet away from your face, you can work longer and healthier. If you have a good chair, you can save your back as well. Hey, isn't that what Craigslist was made for? Get a good chair for cheap. We found mine hardly used on Craigslist for about $200 and it's an $800 chair. My health is worth it.