Songs To Test Out Studio Monitors

clipfish

New member
"Just pick the songs you know really well."

Now I've got the most generic answer out of the way,
I'd like to ask the people of this forum for song recommendations that have a nice amount of distinct frequencies, a decent variety of instrumentation if possible, a nice amount of lows, mids, AND highs.
If anybody knows a few songs that'll really bring out a pair of monitor's true colours (It's ability to provide a flat response) I could check out that'll be swell/awesome/great/fantastic.
 
How are you going to be able to make that call if you're listening to tracks you haven't heard before? The most generic answer is the one I'd give you, because listening to a track that you're not really familiar with doesn't sound (to me anyway) like it's going to do you any good in this matter.
 
How are you going to be able to make that call if you're listening to tracks you haven't heard before? The most generic answer is the one I'd give you, because listening to a track that you're not really familiar with doesn't sound (to me anyway) like it's going to do you any good in this matter.

*Sigh*... It's not like I was planning on not listening to the songs beforehand and then listening to them for the first time through monitors.
 
When i first listened to my Adams the very first song I listened to was Andrew Rayel-Dark Warrior

I was scared as hell because it sounded like my speakers were broken/blown but then I just realized it was because my speakers really brought out the distortion used in the song along with all the saw waves etc.. EXTREMELY clear, it wasn't until i listened to other songs that I realized it was just that song.

So listen to that song, if it sounds buzzy or something is wrong with it, you've got good speakers. Because there IS something wrong with the recording of the song. But it took listening to it on high quality speakers to notice, I mustve listed to that song 100 times before that and never noticed it on any other platform.
 
When i first listened to my Adams the very first song I listened to was Andrew Rayel-Dark Warrior

I was scared as hell because it sounded like my speakers were broken/blown but then I just realized it was because my speakers really brought out the distortion used in the song along with all the saw waves etc.. EXTREMELY clear, it wasn't until i listened to other songs that I realized it was just that song.

So listen to that song, if it sounds buzzy or something is wrong with it, you've got good speakers. Because there IS something wrong with the recording of the song. But it took listening to it on high quality speakers to notice, I mustve listed to that song 100 times before that and never noticed it on any other platform.

Hahaha, duly noted.
I have one or two songs that I'll be using to listen to the monitors, but I'm also going to get all kinds of different song suggestions from this forum to really test the waters.
 
I've got about 4 CDs worth of reference material that I cart around (now 1 USB stick) of various stuff, from whole mixes to songs in which I like the piano or the acoustic guitar. I found it very useful as a freelancing recording engineer working in a range of studios to get there early and sit down for 20 - 30 minutes and get my head around the room.

Not to sound self involved or anything, but quite often I use my own mixes to test new studios / monitors / monitoring setups... Mainly because I know them very well, and know what I don't like and what I had to do.

I do have a few overall mixes that would be among the first to get thrown up through unknown monitors, and they're usually not the music that I would choose to listen to outside of that purpose. Here are a few:

If I Were A Boy - Beyonce (Mixed by Spike Stent) - Such an open and beautiful mix with an amazing balance, just listen to the bass sound and that vocal ffs.

Rolling In The Deep - Adele (Mixed by Tom Elmhirst) - Very vibey, quite warm and aggressive with a tight vocal. A great balance of dynamic movements between sections.

We Found Love - Rihanna (Mixed by Phil Tan) - Love the sizzle and mid edge in here on synths/vocal/percussion, and the balance on that against the low end when it drops is killer. It's not silly slammed in mastering either, still punchy dynamically.

I hope that helps.
 
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