Music Production – Monitoring
There are key aspects that are needed when starting to build your first home studio. One important factor is monitoring. Important for listening to click tracks and other instruments when recording, and producing a final mix.
Studio monitors are a professional standard when mixing, but can set you back a lot, so I recommend a pair of studio headphones for mixing, then these can double up as recording headphones too.
It is important to get a pair of ‘Studio’ headphones. These will provide a flat frequency response, to give you a true to the original sound. A standard pair of headphones or ear-buds will give you an untrue and emphasised EQ representation. Consumer headphones boost the high and low end to allow you to hear the overall sound better, but this is impractical for mixing.
Your headphone choice must also leak as little sound as possible too, so the sound from them doesn’t get picked up in the microphone, giving you a very difficult job in the mixing stage. I suggest a pair of closed back headphones to reduce this problem to a minimum.
Closed Back Studio Headphones can be priced for a few hundred pounds, but these AKG K44 seem like a great pair for getting started, at under £20.