[Bob Womack]

A few notes from when I started my career as a recording engineer, thirty-five years ago:

1. Monitors are quite often simply overlooked as one of the most important part of the recording chain. It's just a fact of life that people often forget how important they are. Your monitors are more important than your mics because your perceptions of your mics will occur through your monitors. Think about that.

2. Monitors are like glasses: Through them you will "see" your whole world. If the prescription isn't good you won't see the world right and will make bad decisions. My ophthalmologist once prescribed for me and sent me to his in-office glasses shop where they made my glasses. I put them on and everything looked really weird. I asked the doctor and he chortled, "Give them a couple of weeks. You'll adjust." I immediately experienced severe eyestrain. Within a short time I had a headache. That day I misjudged distance and fell down a short set of stairs. I had trouble drawing a straight line. The symptoms continued rather than abated. Within a few days I went back to the doctor and asked him to check them. After he checked their correction he cried, "Good grief! These aren't what I prescribed at all!"

It is the same with monitors. If there is a resonance or peak at a certain frequency that annoys you or fatigues your ears you will instinctively try to take it out of your recordings so they don't annoy you. But your recordings may not need that frequency removed. The opposite is true for a missing frequency or band of frequencies.

3. Transducers (mics and monitors) are the most expensive thing in the signal chain to get right. Buy the best monitors you can afford... and then a little.

4. Once you get a set of monitors, play lots of recordings of the kind of music you will be working with on those monitors. Those recordings you think are the best? Play them repeatedly on your monitors. Familiarize yourself with what greatness sounds like... on your monitors. And then when you are starting a project or beginning a mix, go back and play those recordings again to acclimate your ears to greatness. There is no substitute for knowing your own monitors, both their strengths and weaknesses.

5. "Shop" your mixes around to as many different monitors and speaker systems as you can. There are six control rooms with eight different types of speaker systems in the complex where I work. I shop my mixes around onto as many as I can and take them out to my own and my wife's car systems as well.

All the best,

Bob