MACKIE CR-3: These speakers suck. They will wreck your mix. Very colored. They lack clarity and it’s nearly impossible to make accurate mix decisions with them. The entire point of audio monitors in a studio is to provide your ears with a precise idea of what is going on in your mix. If the monitors are treble/bass heavy, they lie to your ears and you end up with a mix that won’t “travel” (e.g. it sounds awful when played on any other speakers).

INSTEAD:
Get a set of KALI AUDIO LP-6. As Glenn points out, these monitors are about $300 a set and they are best in class. You’d have to spend at least double that amount imho to get monitors that are in the same league. I was fortunate enough to get one of the first pairs of these before they were available on the market and I’ve loved them ever since. I sold my KRK monitors as I just didn’t need them and stopped using them when I started using the KALI LP6.

ACOUSTIC FOAM TREATMENT: For the most part, cheap foam panels don’t realy work as intended. It does look cool in a home studio, but foam wedges just can’t work as effective bass traps. Your room does need acoustic treatment, assuming your working at home, as the space was never designed for audio work. I installed quite a bit of this stuff over the years in my home studios and I just like how it looks. It makes a bedroom feel a lot more “studio” than it would otherwise, which is important for stuff like youtube vids. So there is a cosmetic argument for using this stuff.

INSTEAD: You can build your own bass traps. Glenn has a video that will lead you through it step by steep. It’s not expensive and it’s a great way to treat your room so that you don’t get “standing waves” (resonant frequencies) that make it nearly impossible to do a good mix. Also, you can use a DIY solution such as getting some book cases, filling them with cheap books that you can buy by the pound at a local book store, and turning them around in the book case so that the pages face you instead of the spines of the book. This creates a natural, organic, diffuser that actually works.

D-DRUM TRIGGERS: Yes these suck. Drum triggers are a great idea, but these triggers are NOT cheap and they break quite a bit. They break so often that people will try to keep two entire sets on hand as they expect them to break during a session. Somehow these crappy triggers have become nearly a “standard” for triggers. It’s unfortunate as they are not a reliable bit of kit in general. Of course your mileage may vary.

INSTEAD:
Get a set of ROLAND triggers. These are more sturdy and and cost a bit less. They will work each and every time and they are from a reliable vendor. They won’t fall apart on you during a session when the drummer keeps hitting them with his sticks, each and every time he goes near them during a drum roll.

FOAM MONITOR PADS: These can be a waste of money but keep in mind that it’s just a piece of foam that is designed to separate your monitors from whatever they are sitting on. This is important because monitors can cause whatever they are sitting on to resonate. This means that your entire desk can become a resonant source and thus lie to your ears about what is happening in your mix. This is not to say monitor pads are bad, they perform a vital function and can help angle the monitors toward your ears.

INSTEAD: Use some of that acoustic foam treatment that you paid so much for to sit under your monitors and separate them from the desk. If you need your monitors at an angle, cut the foam to fit and angle them up. Any bit of foam will do the job, even an old mouse pad.

BBE SONIC MAXIMIZER: These units get a LOT of hate. I’ve used these units and they can help a piece of old rack gear sound a bit better. However, they modify a given signal so much that it can be difficult to get the signal to sit properly in a mix. So while they might be handy in a live rig, they are much less useful in a studio.

INSTEAD:
Get some real acoustic treatment and or build some of your own diy bass traps.

CHEAP CABLES/HIGH END CABLES: if your cables are very very cheap, they may not be durable. This is not to say that premium cables are far better, after all, it’s all just copper wire. However, mid grade cables are often worth the price compared to cheap cables for the simple fact that they are more durable. The soldering won’t come apart in the middle of a session.

INSTEAD: Bite the bullet, do some research and buy cables in the middle of the range. You don’t have to pay crazy prices buying the highest end cable as that’s a waste of money. Just avoid the bottom of the barrel.

LINE 6 SPIDER: This is a crap amp. I’m sorry if you own one and love it, really, I’m sorry. It’s just a bad amp. Even the best, newest, spider, is still to be avoided.

INSTEAD:
Try the free versions of your fave guitar plugins and or just buy a decent guitar plugin like the OVERLOUD THU suite. For the price of a crappy amp, you can have just about every amp you’ve ever wanted and you can change the amp in real time during recording or mix down. You can’t beat that.

NEEWER MICS: These are CRAP. Pure and complete crap. They look nice, but they sound awful. They are very inexpensive which is nice, but crappy sound is never worth saving a bit of money.

INSTEAD:
Spend a bit extra and get a decent mic. You can get a SHURE SM-57 for about $100 and it will work on just about everything and last until the end of time because they are bullet proof.

A CRAP LAPTOP: Do your research before you purchase. Saving money here can cost you a LOT of time on the back end. There is a reason that so many music pros use Apple products for music production. That reason is THEY ACTUALLY WORK. Not to say you can't get a good windows machine to make music with, you certainly can. Just to say that you can't go wrong getting a late model Macintosh for music production. It's the only platform that will let you use both LOGIC X and REAPER on the same machine.

INSTEAD: Find out what people you respect use as the foundation for their own home studio. People that have been doing this for a while have good reasons for using the gear that they use and it can save you a LOT of headaches.

CHEAP MIC STANDS: It's worth paying a bit extra to avoid really cheap mic stands which may fail while holding your nice mics. SAMPSON makes very solid stuff.

INSTEAD: Spend a bit extra if you've got really nice mics and get a Tama Ironworks stand.

Here is an example of the "Library Diffuser"
Click to view attachment

*Killer vid from Glenn on crap gear.


Check out this vid in the GEAR series by Ivan.
https://www.guitarmasterclass.net/ls/gear-t...arshall-tsl601/

Your desk will resonate even if you use foam pad's. Their purpose is so the speakers won't be affected by the desk

Well said!!! Thanks for checking it out. Feel free to add any CRAP GEAR to the thread

Exactly. That's why I prefer to have my desk space narrower than the "ears" with monitors. Even in a small room you can have reasonalby flat low end response in the spot you sit in (further you will experience wall reflections and bass boost anyway but as long as you know the physics of sound, you can avoid some mistakes in mixing


BTW - really nice post Todd. In general at this field saving money most often ends up as frustration on things now working as expected. Mic stands the most funny of this but soo right ....Cheap one can't handle overheads casue the loose the grip and let the mics fall.

I agree with Darius wholeheartedly!
"Good" guitars and amps and pedals, mic pres and comps, etc. can be subjective. A lot of student model and just plain shitty guitars and amps, etc. have been used to make some really great and iconic recordings but rarely if ever was there a shitty pair of monitor speakers and a badly treated room involved.
Most of the time - I'll wager 100% of the time - when you cheap out on all the stuff that Todd mentions, you just end up buying it all again (and hopefully learning your lesson). As my wife says, "you can pay now or you can pay later".

*One of the reasons, probably the main reason the Sennheiser HD-280 headphones are so popular in recording studios is because they seal/isolate really well around your ears and allow practically zero click bleed into a vocal mic, or a flute mic as I was doing yesterday. *They are not great for mixing though.

**If you have 'standing' waves and low end buildup in your recording and/or listening space, even an $8000.00 vintage Neumann U67 and a pair of Adam S5vs ($14,000) will sound like crap. You'll make a better recording with an SM58 and pair of those Kalis Todd mentions in a room that's just treated enough to get rid of really negative elements. It doesn't have to be complicated or expensive to fix your space. Use book shelves and clothes racks. Get rid of or cover reflective surfaces. Ball up old sweatshirts and tack or tape them into the ceiling corners if you need to. Is it pretty? No. Could you have a paying client over? Probably not. Does it work. Absolutely.