Home studio house curves are there for you to create balanced mixes. Standard practice dictates that your bass should be elevated at your listening position, but not everyone agrees. Ultimately, you should start with a bass boost and experiment to see if that works for you.
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People say that well-balanced bass is the hardest part of getting a good mix, but why? Part of it has to do with room modes and how they create a lumpy response at your listening position. But even after you’ve added acoustic treatment and used some basic EQ, you still might mix too bass heavy. This is where home studio house curves come into play. In this post, I’m going to explain what they are, how they differ from other kinds of house curves, and how you can pick the best one for you.
Warped Incorporated
So what is a house curve? They’re a way of altering the linear response of your playback system from flat to some kind of changed curve. While they typically emphasize the bass, they can also alter high frequencies too. Other names they go by are target or room curves.
Specific Concern
But why this emphasis on the home studio? I’m doing this because most of the resources out there are targeted toward different groups. That includes: home theater enthusiasts, audiophiles, or even live sound venues or theaters. Even when compared to commercial studios, home studios have the unique property of being tailored to one particular engineer: you. Those facilities have different needs (like creating excitement on playback) and standards (Dolby and THX). Besides, many engineers may work at them. In contrast, you can find what works best for you and implement it at will.
Crooked Agency: The Y Crew
Besides being the natural way we perceive speakers in rooms, elevated bass is what we prefer. While it depends on our age, location & other factors, there are universal reasons at play as well. One such element is that we don’t actually hear bass that well: particularly when compared to 2-4kHz. For these reasons, it makes sense to turn the bass up. However, like gain staging, it matters where in your signal path you turn it up.
And here’s the crux: since we like bass but can’t hear it well, we’re bound to turn it up somewhere. If your bass is too low at your listening position, you’re going to turn it up in your mix. That will result in the dreaded overly-bassy, amateur-sounding mix. The solution is to turn up the bass at your monitors. This way your mix will sound more bassy and you won’t need to add as much to the audio itself.
You can think of it as a non-destructive adjustment layer, if you’re familiar with video editing. If you look through a blue gel, everything will look blue. This saves you from needing to paint everything blue and ruining it. Audio is exactly like this. The EQ nodes themselves are called filters (even bells which audio engineers typically don’t call filters).
By now, you know what home studio house curves are, why we use them, and where to apply them. At this time, let’s turn our attention to finding the best one for us.
Inspect Your Specs
My advice to you is simple. Use a house curve that emphasizes the bass with a shelf and gently rolls off the highs. This will create the effect of making you add less bass while adding more top end i.e. create brighter mixes. Despite the fact that this will probably work for most of you, not everyone is the same. For you silly deviants, you may indeed want a flat bass response. Let me shock you with my secret advice on how to find out.
Experiment! Yes, that’s right. While that might seem obvious, I can assure you it’s anything but. You see, you are me and I am you. I know you and I know you’re looking for answers. Something else I know is that you are here because you’re not an expert in these matters. In sum, you want the answer handed to you because you’re afraid to make mistakes or otherwise ruin your life. Fear not, it’s just EQ.
Obviously, I’m teasing you. We both know it’s just EQ. Home studio house curves are not going to make or break your career. Even so, take advantage of your liberty to experiment. Make a mix with a flat SPL response and listen to how it turns out. Too bassy? The answer is then to add a sloped or shelved curve. Like I said at first, using the default curves in Room EQ Wizard are the best place to start. They’re what worked for me after making all the noob mistakes first hand that I’m describing.
Trusty Tools
All this talk about home studio house curves, Room EQ Wizard, and pizza is making me hungry. What’s that? I didn’t mention pizza? Forgive me but I also didn’t mention microphones! That’s right, how else are you going to measure your room? With your shoes?
There are a ton of videos out there on how to use REW, including this one by Mr. Krause. If you need to EQ output pairs separately, read here. Mac users can click here for specific tools. But knowledge is not enough. Many beginners start off by asking whether they can use a regular microphone to measure their rooms. Let me tell you that the answer is no! No you can’t.
The reason why is because your microphone has an unknown response. Even if you do know it, you’ll need to manually account for it in your measurements while reading them. If you want to make filters based on these measurements, you’ll need a hack. Sorry but I can’t help you with that.
To get your measurements right, go to Amazon and buy a dedicated mic such as the Behringer ECM-8000. This is the exact mic I use. It’s affordable as all get out, and it’ll last a lifetime if you take care of it. Ethan Winer compared this mic to several others in a blog post. He included more expensive ones, and the difference is negligible for 99% of people. So, please, do us both a favor and buy that mic. If you prefer a USB mic then the REW site has an affiliate link for the UMIK-1. That mic is a bit noisy and the UMIK-2 is pretty expensive, however.
Kinky Combinations
In our exploration of home studio house curves, we’ve covered much ground. We’ve seen who uses them and why we use them. We’ve also seen how we can use them ourselves & how to tailor them to our preferences. Also, you know which hardware and software tools to use. Finally, you have links to step-by-step instructions by the world’s foremost authorities.
In this year of our great nation, everyone making music should be using corrective EQ on their monitors. I understand that it can be uncomfortable to learn about. Trying all this bizarre software & fiddling with esoteric microphones is daunting. It’s worth it, though, and isn’t that difficult. You kids have it easy! In my day…
Shout out to Audio Science Review for providing many of the resources I featured in my video. You can check out what Amir and co have done there. For more background, try this thread. To really geek out try this.
Once your brain has melted, check out my tutorials and original music. Both of which I give for free when you join my Hexie Dose Newsletter.
Thanks for reading and/or watching. My name is Michael Carrillo aka Hexspa and you’ve been HEXIFIED. What the hell am I saying? I’ve never said that in my life. Anyway, peace!