June 2010

About five years ago, I started looking into the art of composing and mixing electronic dance music on my PC, more specifically within the House and Dance genres. I knew nothing about music theory, equalizing, chords, melodies - and certainly couldn’t play any instrument to speak of.

Without this in mind, I rushed into trying my luck with some simple software that called itself to be a ”loopbased sequencer” which sounded cool, but meant nothing to me at the time. After a few hours of intense guesswork I had produced something that sounded amazingly bad. Frustrated, I shut down the program, threw away the project !le and didn’t put any more time into it for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I started listening more carefully to the tracks that I really enjoyed, trying to understand how they were built and how they developed. Naturally, a pattern began to emerge as I compared the songs with each other, and I became more and more interested in the theory behind EDM. It was astonishing to me that such a high level of repetitiveness could sound so dynamic, so rich and progressively evolve over time. By chance, I find out that my neighbor is a professional musician, and have been living of that for the past couple of years. Long story short, he introduced me to many things I needed to know to get started for real. This was about the time I really understood how complex seemingly simple tracks were, and how details could make all the difference in the world.

A couple of years passed, and I was spending a fair part of my spare time on experimenting with different DAW’s, virtual instruments, drum machines etc. Still relatively new to all the technical and theoretical aspects, I slowly began to grasp the basics and then more advanced approaches. I finished a few remixes and original songs that sounded fairly good, at least in my $40 headphones. That was the problem, I had no perspective on how my mixes sounded when I sent them to my friends and family. Most people said that they were pretty nice, but sounded ”too loud”, ”empty” or ”it doesn’t sound like other dance songs, something is missing” etc. At first, I partly ignored their feedback since I just supposed they were using the wrong settings, or bad speakers.

The realization that something was fundamentally wrong came to me by the time a DJ was playing one of my remixes at a party. When the transition from the previously played song made it over to mine, a lot of things were just wrong. the bass was too loud, the high frequencies were too loud, everything sounded a bit muddy and he had a hard time equalizing it to an acceptable sound on the huge speakers that were in use. The next day I immediately researched the subject, and after I while I realized that I needed a pair of high quality professional speakers. I had read about this before, but didn’t think it was worth the money.

A few days later, I had a long and interesting conversation with my neighbor, and he suggested that we should hook up my system to his Genelec 8040 speakers using an external soundcard, instead of the built-in model I was using at the time. We then loaded up a project I was working on, and hit play. This was an experience that I weren’t prepared for, I knew my songs were poorly equalized and mixed, but the sound that came out was just soulcrushing. You could hear every single miscalculation and mistake I had made, even some distortion that I had never heard before. After some embarrassing excuses, I asked him where he got the speakers, and how much he paid for them.

Scared off by the price, I went to my local Hi-Fi store and listened to nearly every set of speakers they had in the same category. After comparing back and forth, it was crystal clear, I didn’t want anything but the 8040’s. They sounded more crisp, more clean and just amazing compared to most competition. Saving every month for half-a-year, borrowing my neighbors speakers when he was on vacation, I finally had enough to buy a pair of my own. "is was the turning-point in my music production journey, and I can’t stress enough to anyone who asks me why they need such a solid foundation that the 8040’s provide. From being very skeptical, I can honestly say that if I hadn’t invested in them, I wouldn’t even be able to work as creatively as I am right now, and will be for a long time to come! Thank you Genelec, for making my everyday sound like pure gold.

Greetings from Sweden,
Johan Bååth