Monitoring: A Love Story (feat. Dominic Armstrong)

Today we’re featuring a guest post, by the excellent producer/engineer Dominic Armstrong. You can hear his portfolio, learn more about his work, and contact him for advice at feverspeakrecording.com.

He’s worked with great artists like Alassane, Jon Rauhouse, Eric Bachmann, Hyperbella, and The Deadbeat Cousins. He was also a featured contributor in our publication, and if you look in the back appendices there you can find even more of his always enlightening thoughts!

Today Dom’s talking about monitoring, i.e. the systems that allow us to hear our music during the production process.

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Where are our judgments made? Is it with our instruments? In the DAW? At the tape machine? Using the compressor or EQ? Of course not, they’re made with our ears and with our tastes. And as such, what sends information to our ears to be weighed by our taste? Our monitoring.

Every single decision we make in the music creation journey is ultimately judged on how we hear it. What we release, what we play, what we delete, and what we buy are all dependent on the feedback mechanism we get from hearing it on playback. If we aren’t intimately familiar with our monitoring situation, can we be intimate with anything that comes before it?

It may not be necessary to spend a massive amount of money on our speakers, converters, and acoustics, but it is necessary to know what they are contributing to our outcomes and how they are influencing our decisions.

It may be the case that “if it sounds good, it is good” but what if we don’t know what “good” is, or what it can be? Here’s where the love comes in.

Our speakers, converters, and acoustics are arguably the least exciting part of our systems. But they’re there for us always. No matter how enticing our new compressor is, or how outrageous our new pedal might be, our monitoring will lovingly be there, recreating our work, with or without loving reciprocation. It’s time to look at our monitoring in its beautiful little face and say “I’m here for you, too.”

Monitoring = our speakers, our amplifiers (if using passive speakers), our converters (if digitally creating), and our acoustic environment. It is as much a part of our music and art, as the notes we play, the lyrics we write, and indeed us the creators.

We owe ourselves, our audience, and most importantly our art, a proper interrogation of this system. To understand our monitoring is, in effect, to understand our own judgments. We should encourage ourselves to test the limits of this system and explore its edges before we make judgments moving forward. Most importantly for the budget-conscious, your monitoring should be stringently examined before making new gear acquisitions.

[ED-obtaining a set of baseline data on the acoustics of your production room, before you add any acoustic treatment, will help inform which acoustic treatment to buy or make. And, it will tell you if what you’ve done is doing what you’re expecting it to after installation. Free programs like RoomEQ Wizard, combined with an affordable reference measurement microphone by companies like MiniDSP, can provide this baseline data at a reasonable price. Please read the RoomEQ Wizard manual in full, every page: it is rather dry and technical, but if you don’t have your measurement gear set up and calibrated correctly, the resulting inaccurate data will lead you to inaccurate conclusions. If you’re borrowing measurement gear from a friend, which is always encouraged, again make sure the calibration steps have been done correctly.]

The world of optimized system design, acoustics, and the other aspects of monitoring is dense and often confusing. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m happy to help or guide to the best of my ability!

Monitors, we love you.