More earbuds

When I'm mixing I use my Steven Slate VSX headphones which are kinda expensive and sound good, they can also emulate other headphone sounds which is great. I reckon you want to mix so that the song sounds good on any system - which is a compromise - but I have been surprised how little of a compromise it really is. As in, you can have a mix which sounds great on great headphones but sounds bad in a car, or with phone speakers...but with a bit of tweaking it still sounds great on great headphones but now sounds good in a car and on phone speakers as well.

Part of this is experimenting with cheap and budget headphones. Always wired, usually earbuds, and I avoid ones with built in microphones. As in, I buy them to test mixes to see what that style of headphone will actually reproduce. I reckon a lot of people are going to listen to a mix with built in phone speakers and it's never going to sound great on them. You aren't going to hear any of the textures or subtleties so the best you can kinda get is keeping the mix clear enough to understand the vocals and feel a beat. But I'm suspecting that many people will be using a budget set of earbud headphones, possibly some that came with their phone (is that still a thing?) so having a mix sound good on that is pretty important.

In my testing of budget headphones I have discovered a few things. Firstly, that there are good budget headphones. If for you headphones are a bit of a consumable, like they are for me - as in, you will get five years tops out of them before you have broken them somehow - then budget headphones can be a wise choice for casual listening. You can also have a few sets scattered around your house for quick and easy listening. My recent purchase exposed something to me that I guess I had always known but really stood out this time.

The real low end cheap headphones will reproduce sound but they aren't worth the money, even small amounts of money. They will do some electrical or mechanical trickery so that the bass sounds big (annoying - what are we, all gamers wanting to hear big explosions?), they will cut out the low mid muddiness but push the upper mid range so that guitars and vocals sounds crisp and clear. They aren't fooling anyone.

So the mid tier budget headphones will have a more natural flatter EQ, they don't need trickery because the drivers are better. I think back to the Sennheiser MX500 earbuds - the fit, the sound - it's earbuds so the sound is not going to be perfect, but they kinda got it right. The Apple ipod style were also okay but I was never into the Apple scene.

Which brings me to my point - the most recent budget headphones I have been using, when I'm walking around the house listening to mixes - kinda impressed me. Yincrow $AUD20(2025) earbuds, quite acceptable. I was testing $AUD30(2026) NiceHCK B40s. Both had a nice natural sounding EQ, there did not seem to be any trickery involved trying to disguise badness. In my A/B testing, the NiceHCKs had some edge over the Yincrows that I couldn't put my finger on. Sure, the NiceHCK has a slightly boomier bass and a slightly elevated high mid, but neither sounded "forced". The NiceHCK also had a slightly higher volume, I noticed the driver was slightly bigger so maybe it was pushing more air? Or just more efficient? I was nudging the phone volume up/down two clicks during the A/B test so to identify tone differences not volume differences.

I did some research (okay...lazy AI research...I didn't read and think through every subreddit post about headphones...) I realised what I was hearing was the minute transient response difference between the drivers. The NiceHCK must be able to respond a tiny bit faster and better articulate those tiny tiny harmonics and overtones present in the recording. So while they both had a similar frequency response there was some sort of time domain frequency smearing more apparent in the Yincrows. Quite the epiphany. Sound is complex, headphones are a compromise in reproducing it. Manufacturers are doing well with mid-tier budget headphones. Both these headphones are acceptable but the NiceHCK ones have an edge over the slightly older Yincrow, there is a lot going on in those tiny little speaker drivers!

20 years of YouTube

...20 years just clicked over last week - 28th May 2006 was the date of my first video upload. I didn't think I was an early adopter, YouTube had been around for a year. But in hindsight I was an early adopter. I was ten years earlier than Rick Beato who celebrated his ten years (I just watched his video). We had the same reason for using YouTube - it was an easy method to share videos with somebody. In my case it was for a fingerstyle forum (doesn't exist anymore). In 2006 digital videos were definitely a thing but not as easy as today's tide of smart phones. I had bought a Sony point and shoot camera capable of grainy video when my first daughter was born late 2003, in between hundreds of baby videos there are some of me recording myself playing guitar right back to 2004, so I was not stranger to it.

I never quite had that "viral video" moment like Rick did, however I had a lot of traffic - when I put out Canon in D it was getting thousands of views a day, the peak was 2010 when across my channel I was sitting at 7,000 daily views - enough to push Canon in D over 3 million views in those few years. Unlike Rick however, I didn't have much to offer - just an amateur fingerstyle hack (my original videos show the classic early stages of being a guitarist - it's just about moving your fingers fast into the next position and pluckin' them notes...it's missing musicality.) I never built anything around my YouTube channel, just arranged songs and played them, gave out my tabs for free (at least a hundred thousand downloads!) slowly got better while an ever-decreasing number of people watched. Not a problem, was never about being a star, was about sharing a hobby I was passionate about.

The stats - the early days show the rise - more and more people discovering YouTube. Then the fall - more and more people posting on YouTube. Those people, especially talented musical fingerstyle players, far eclipsed the increasing rate of people using it, hence the great rise and fall of my channel. In the later years it's the algorithm that decides who is going to see what - you can see a few blips along the way as events occurred, the one I remember the most was when Ennio Morricone died and a heap of people watched my Ennio video (I actually have two).

Black line = total views, Blue line = Canon in D, Green line = Here Comes The Sun.

Going forward? There is no "what happens now", I've always been doing the same thing! I get inspired to arrange a song, or something musical I'm interested in, and I record a video. Even back in 2008 I was talking about playing for audiences and how recording a video for YouTube is the next best thing, it forces you to finish a project - don't be a half-song playing guitarist. No more to say, I talked about YouTube statistics back in 2013 and not much has changed. I talked about how creators are at the whim of The Algorithm and not much has changed with that either.

So business as usual. I do have a backlog of songs to record but I'm not as single mind focused on just recording arrangements as I used to be...but that's okay. Just get out there and create - don't leave it to The AIs to do!