After reading countless discussions about acoustic treatment and studio monitors online, I started to doubt my room and monitor choice a lot in the last weeks. I nearly started to blame it for my lack of progress, although my studio is reasonably treated. Today I had the idea to look at some of my favorite, and some of the more famous Techno producer´s studios, and to be honest I am quite surprised.

The discussions on online forums make it seem like it´s impossible to produce good music with bad monitor placement or lack of acoustic treatment, that bigger speakers are a waste without bass trapping, and that acoustic foam is a crime, yet many of these studios don´t even have first reflection points treated, no bass trapping, have monitors sideways, in corners, and so on. But tracks of those artists work very well on any soundsystems, even in the biggest clubs and festivals..

This makes me wonder if I, and many other people are overthink the whole thing? Or are all of these producers mixing on headphones/in other rooms? Is room treatment only relevant for the most clinical mixing choices that don´t matter in electronic music? Is it possible to learn the room well enough to produce #1 tracks in untreated rooms? Or is there another secret behind it?

Pictures:

Space 92, multiple #1 Peak Time Techno tracks, no treatment at all:



Sam Wolfe, multiple chart positions, releases on 1605, Phobiq, Senso Sounds. Desk in the corner of the room? No acoustic treatment?



Sam Paganini: His track "Rave" is one of the most successful techno tracks of all time, and he had multiple other #1 tracks in the beatport Techno charts. Without room treatment?



Sisko Electrofanatik. Also had #1 tracks, no bass trapping, first reflection points not treated




Rebel Boy: No acoustic treatment other than a little foam, interesting monitor placement (Not really apparent from this angle)



And my very favorite workplace, Tony Romanello: Had multiple #1 tracks in the Peak Time and Hardtechno charts:



I saw many more and even worse studios like that, but only posted the ones of the bigger artists. Close to no studios I saw on social media were fully treated. What is the secret behind this?

At the very least, I learned that I should´nt worry too much about my room anymore, and focus on getting better with my music

 

Something like this .. reeeeverb

 

i am going to comment but it's just a total guess, so take it with a grain of salt. BUT if it were ME i'd be sending my tracks to professional sound engineers- who i would expect to have properly treated rooms and such.

 

Maybe... just maybe these ppl are creating, composing, "producing" (whatever that means nowadays) music..
..not mixing it, not mastering it.

But yeah, 90%+ of the music forums are more about cuts and boosts and ratios than artistic value.

 

No.

As Macros mentioned, most of these tracks go to professional mixing engineers or at the very least go through a professional mastering engineer (either via their label or independently). You can't accurately mix or master if you can't hear what's happening and you cannot accurately hear in untreated rooms with 2-way nearfields.

On mastering rigs (and club speakers) its immediately apparent when someone has mixed or mastered on near-field or two-ways - the bass is either out of control or its lacking and theres a distinct lack of clarity in the midrange. The latter is mostly due to crossover distortion and the excursion of the cone itself. With smaller cones, the RMS value alone exhausts the excursion of the cone so when you add peak values it creates low level distortion that completely skews your perspective.

 

@Spartan

but basically that still means one is capable of constructing the main beat solely in rooms/ on systems like shown above?
Because i'm still wondering and figuring out how to generate some of those massive techno rumbles you hear in their tracks and im guessing
it has to be either
-pretty painful to send a track to mastering and get back a vibe that has been extracted from the original but is so far from the mix because youre essentially not able to distill that out with your setup
-pretty lame to use working templates for the sub-region to get that kind of rolling movement and actually being able to work on a
given arrangement since you wouldnt get that kind of energy, constructed from the ground up, condensed in a way which is translatable

Or there actually is no problem in getting the idea to an alpha mix which is near done, but still needs some even-warming and dynamics treatment to get that "drumcode"-polish (-flatness. but still its deep and the subs work good on their own)