Obviously for SP users, you have to utilize some mixing skills while you are piecing your stuff together (especially if you aren't using the sequencer). There's only so much you can do with using mastering effects on the final mix.

Just curious how you guys listen to your beat while you are making it. Do you make stuff with headphones or mix speakers? What volume are you listening at when you make your beats?

mixing has to be a part of the creative process or your end product will not be so great. Unfortunately, the sp's tend to have limited mix control, so it is important to choose your sounds effectively so that you dont end up with too dense of a concentration of sound in one particular frequency range. Also, if there is too much unnecessary stuff going on in a particular range, the stuff that you want to stand out wont.

one of the major criticism of mixing with headphones is that you dont hear the true 3d spread of sounds.

In my opinion, its ok to monitor with a decent pair of monitoring headphones on the sp because stereo and panning are sort of a moot point there...

at the end of the day, when it comes to sp use, you sort of have to use the really crude tools the box gives you or look elsewhere for more effective solutions.

I have to wear headphones 90% of the time I'm doing music stuff.. dont have alot of choice..

It makes it much harder to judge reverb and sub-bass, but I guess you get used to it

i'm entering this stage in music development too. having to put properly mixed songs up on the web is a whole new battle for me. something that might sound good through headphones may sound terrible once experienced through monitor speakers, i keep having to adjust eq settings and compression to get something that sounds ok and even then it's not the best example of a sound. i'm new to mixing and mastering though and i can see that it takes time to develop these skills and your ears.

Been said before-but imo monitors are extremely overrated. If you just have a reasonably good pair of speakers,all you really gotta do is pop in a cd you like and compare all the levels- if you get a pretty comprable sound level wise to a prefessionally mixed mastered cd coming through your speakers,you're good. You'd get the exact same comprable sound coming out of any monitors-it'll just sound better. Of course personally I love going as low budget as possible-I'm not saying it isn't helpful to have a good pair of monitors. Just not at all essential.What I really hate though is making a beat entirely on headphones-my new battle beat is a perfect example- the hats are too loud,snares a little too quiet, and bass imo too loud-but it all sounded nice coming through the headphones,lol..that shit can be really frustrating-so if at all possible-do every step of your beat making process through your speakers/monitors. But for real- it's simple-but a just a quick comparrison to something that has any kind of simmilar sound to what you're doing can be a huge help.You also don't wanna be banging that shit all out when trying to get a good mix- a somewhat low volume is better for mixing than loud.And when it comes to that final mix- I don't fuck w computers anymore but I did for a few months a while back- those plug-ins can make a good mix really simple, depending on the sound you're after-and software also makes it super easy to track out-but that's also something imo somewhat overrated and not really necessary-actually the main reason for hip hop beats being tracked out for the most part is so an engineer can re-arrange it if needed to fit an m.c.'s song.Somehow people have now made that into an essential part of beatmaking,period-but a lot of times it can suck the life out of your original sound/vision. Nice thread though,it would be cool to see how some more people handle this part of the process.Peace

I agree that monitors are sorta over-rated, you can get by without them by using multiple systems to test mixes, but the counterpoint to that is different home speakers are gonna sound different - because they have various ways of amplifying/enhancing certain parts of the sound - like bass boosting or w/e. Yea you can get a good mix by comparing to a properly mastered song on that set of speakers, but where you might run into trouble is when you play the song on different types of sound systems - such as car stereos, live venues, etc...monitors give you a nice flat "true" sound so that you can examine and sort out the frequencies. This is gonna give you a lot of consistency in the playback on diff kinds of sound systems. As far as monitors sound shitty, yea they can but the good ones like Yamahas have a mixing mode and a listening mode (basically just an EQ boost for the listening mode) so you can either mix or bang out.

for the original thread topic, I can't really shed light on how to monitor your mixes if you using an SP to sequence...I use mine for sampling/chopping, but on the back end I use them as efx processors after the mpc and mixer

What ad said about level is important.. ears fatigue quickly at any higher than "that's enough to hear everything" volume..

I would say the one advantage monitors have over other speakers is some cheap speakers have frequency holes - not just where some frequency range is a few db quieter than another, but where the basically is no response in a certain range, so you can occasionally miss things..

I use cheap speakers, and to overcome this I try to check tracks with a spectrum analyzer that will show anything out of the ordinary on a track, like a ringing hihat or muddy bass note, etc.. I also use a home-theatre sub to check sub levels.. You can't use it to shape a bass sound, because it has such a slow response time it can't pick up on the dynamics/attack portion, but you can still hear/feel what frequencies are being hit

I said perfessionally and comprable.Lol..anyway- couple more things- don't completely dismiss the sequencer by any means- you can get whatever it is you want once you get used to things,which doesn't take much at all. Personally I mainly learned on a machine that had a much worse sequencer,(when I coppied a pattern for the first time on the 404 I think I almost crapped myself) so to me, I've always found the sequencing on the sp to be quick and simple. And as far as it being too rigid-theres plenty of ways to work around it. Using the sequencer makes fixing up your final mix much easier than doing a re sample beat- and leaves mad other options open to you as well, besides just sample levels & overall efx. You can go back and adjust eq & compression of sepperate samples, make mutes,change ups of drums/add effects & filters to specific samples,fix up start/end points,completely re-structure certain parts..and all that comes just from starting with a simple 4-8 bar or whatever pattern you can copy as many times as needed.So basically you can make a super quick rough sketch of a beat if you need to- then after it's layed down, go back and do whatever you want with whatever samples you want-not an option w/ resample. The re-sample thing is cool and actually pretty fun..but it seems to be a thing that newer sp users have started doing- I'm assuming mainly cause they're used to faster sequencing like on stand alone sequencers, computers,mpc's,etc....of course I guess this all depends on what sound/style you're going after. Also- it's really not necessary to adjust samples thru a mixer when you got the sp's eq efx and isolater.

Thanks for all the advice.

My beef was that the style I seem to dig making on the SP is the resample method. In other words, creating loops from live chops and effects and resampling (sampling the performance). Then I piece a song from all the resampled loops i made. I know a lot of others go this route as well in lieu of the sequencer (overcomes the multiple effects issue and sounds raw). The downside is that you lose the ability to tweak individual sounds in the mix.