I am a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk, and his words have always resonated with what I try to with music and social media. Well, he recently posted a video blog with the title “Hey Mr DJ”, describing the way that DJs aggregate all the music that is out there and deliver it to you for one particular time of day or mood or party. He then uses the term “DJ” in a broad sense to describe the way that people are always looking for interesting content (not just music, but videos, wine facts, triathlon information, etc), but with the incredible amount that is floating around in 2009, people also need a recommendation system to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Many online streaming sites have various genomes / genius bar devices, but I believe that music fans connect better with real people, hence the rise of the DJ over the last 40 years. I have been a DJ myself for sometime, and believe that I have a knack for choosing records from the millions that are out there from around the world, and playing them to the right people at the right time. As an extension of that, I recommend albums and artists to friends and strangers via my online social networking profiles (such as Twitter or Facebook). Vaynerchuk takes this one step further, and suggests that there is great scope for those who can disseminate any kind of niche information from the web, and provide a place that people with a common interest can easily discover and connect.

This kind of tastemaking is, in essence, what we are doing here at music jobs. We offer not only direct job opportunities, but also select pieces of music industry news, single reviews, festival reports, UK music events, advice on your music career, being an independent artist, band promotion, the future of music, copyright issues, music marketing tips and much more!

The purpose of this post is not only to point out how we are here to help you with your search for that perfect music job, but to also point out that maybe you can do something of similar nature. Maybe you know everything there is to know about 18th Century string music, and so maybe you could make yourself the go-to source, not only creating your own content, but feeding out to other sources and narrating on similar articles across the web. Think about it – find your niche, and run with it! You can even start off by posting some interesting topics in our forums and see how many views they gather!

Here is Gary, with his video…

Gary’s original blog post is here, and if you are into social media and general web inspired banter, then I suggest you watch as many of them as possible!

Aside from our music industry forum and music industry blog, we share a lot more in our Twitter Feed or Facebook Fan Page, so feel free to follow and connect with us on there, for all your music career resources.

Lee Jarvis.

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I recently decided to invest in a pair of Sennheiser HD595’s. Since then I have found myself increasingly inclined to reach for my headphones when producing rather than switching my monitors on. This is mainly due to the somewhat poorer quality of sound reproduction that my monitors provide. I then began thinking about the possible effects headphone monitoring (as opposed to using loudspeakers) may have on my music. I think A good place to start here would be with the Bass. Low frequency sound waves take up very large areas. For example; a 40 Hz sound has a wavelength of just over 8.5 metres (assuming oxygen is the medium). So lets take this into account when using a pair of headphones that have drivers located, lets say; 1cm away from the opening of the ear. The lack of space will result in loss of depth and clarity which ultimately results in your perception of the sound being altered (not what you want). Bass needs room to resonate in order to achieve its full potential and for this reason you will find that certain headphones have noticeably muddy sounding bottom ends. I generally find that DJ style cans are notoriously bad for this.

At this point I would like to mention that if you are thinking of buying a pair of headphones for production purposes then you should look into the differences between ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ headphones and each of their pros and cons.

The next area I would like to look at is to do with panning. The human hearing system is in stereo, meaning we use two ears to pin point the stereo location of any sound which we hear. There are two collaborative ways in which our ears do this; level difference (ILD/ Interaural Level Different) and timing difference (ITD/ Interaural Timing Difference). Level difference being to do with whether a sound is louder in one ear than the other and timing difference being based upon sounds reaching one ear before the other. Whenever we hear a sound in the natural world, our brain will assign a direction and distance from itself to the sound source based upon these two measurements.

Now lets apply this to monitoring…

When listening to a pair of loudspeakers we can hear sounds from the left speaker in both the left and the right ear (though they will be relatively quieter in the right). Likewise, we can also hear sounds from the right speaker in the left ear (again, relatively quieter). This is what gives us that stereo location. Now lets think about what happens when listening on a pair of headphones. We only receive sounds from the right channel in the right ear and sounds from the left channel in the left ear. This causes an exaggerated representation of the stereo image and can therefore result in your final mix lacking overall width.
I would also like to make a quick point about room ambience and of the course the lack of it inside a pair of headphones. If you are lucky enough to have a beautifully shaped/ sized room with excellent acoustics and a pair of studio monitors to match then great, but if like me, you don’t have that luxury then headphones may provide you with a safe haven from the standing waves and nasty sounding echoes that your room might produce. You will ultimately be left with an ambient blank canvas ready for you to add your own digital reverbs.

There are a range of different pros and cons when it comes to using headphones to produce/ mix. And because of this I would suggest using both. You should try switching from one to the other and then back again whilst working. Close comparison is the key to great mixing. Also, remember that a really good pair of headphones will set you back a lot less than a really good pair of monitors. This for me was a very important element in my choice to buy my HD595’s. And my very last piece of advice for today is to always listen to speakers/ headphones before you buy them. This may sound completely obvious to most of you but you would be surprised at how many people go and buy monitors that have been simply recommended to them or even worse just on the fact that they look good.

Thanks for reading.

Liam Adams

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