Dos wrote:Acoustics are important because you need to hear exactly whats coming from your speakers and not from the room.
Sound reflects around the room, ie reverb.
You need to control your room reflections to get an accurate representation of your mix. Otherwise you'll hear the speakers and various refelections at different times (ms). This causes the attenuation and accentuation of certain freqencies.
There's so much more to room acoustics, like room modes etc., that i'm not going to go into here but basically you do need to understand room acoustics to hear what your beat actually sounds like.
The most offending refelections are usually from the surfaces nearest your speakers, like the back wall and the desk. All surfaces are absorbant of some frequencies and refelective of others.
Carpet is a great absorber of high energy while quite bad at absorbing low frequencies.
Glass on the other hand is the opposite.
Most of us will be setup in a room with walls that lie somewhere in between.
Room modes, caused by two parrallel surfaces, also cause attenuation and accentuation of certain frequencies. Thats why you will notice that professional studios have no parallel walls or ceiling to floor.
Room modes generally affect low frequencies due to the longer wavelengths and you can clearly hear them by walking around your room and listening to the bass lift and dip. In bad acoustic environments all you have to do is move your head to hear this, thats why it's important to get your room acoustics right.
Try it, try walking to the corner. A typical corner will increase the bass by 6dB!!
This is why bass traps are important.
I could go on forever here. Do you need to know about room acoustics to make a beat???
Basically it comes down to how serious you are about the sound of your mixes.
If you're not that serious then, no.
If you are then, yes.
Yes acoustics are important, but not to actually making beats, which I think was the initial point.
A beat maker is a musician, and should be focusing on making music. Sure, it's interesting to know the basics of acoustics as matter of musical culture, but that's clearly not fundamental to making beats, nor to making any music for that matter.
There are numerous unemployed sound engineers that know ten times more in this field that we will ever be able to assimilate as dilletantes.
On the other hand, IMO anyone serious about making beats or any other type of music, should take the time to study harmony and orchestration, at least to have a basic understanding of how it works.
That's something that fundamental to making music, and that may save you from the embarassment of having an arranger re-work your beat to accomodate a melody change, because you're incapable of doing it yourself.
In other words, as a musician, no one is going to hold you liable for not knowing shit about acoustics. Same is not true for the fundamental rules of music theory.
