For someone who reviews hi-fi products, a major perk of the job is getting to listen to a variety of music on great speakers and systems.
For a sneak peek into some of the tracks we use for testing here at What Hi-Fi?, you can head over to our Now Playing column.
Recently, while listening to music during testing, I started thinking about other professions that require a playlist of test tracks. Having trained as a sound engineer, which meant spending a lot of time in studios, I can recall countless mornings when an engineer would put on a certain ‘familiarising’ tune to settle into a room before the musicians arrived.
Which got me thinking, what are the people who make today’s records listening to?
To find out, I spoke to sound engineers who have worked at some of the UK’s most prestigious recording facilities, such as Air Studios, Real World Studios and Strongroom Studios.
With clientele ranging from Max Richter to Harry Styles, what follows are professional engineers’ favourite test tracks, alongside their reasons for choosing them.
I find it essential to ‘tune’ yourself into a control room that you haven’t worked in before. I play a few pieces of music I’m really familiar with at various volumes on the main and near-field monitors to do this. Some of the pieces are songs and titles I’ve mixed over the years and know sound good on any system. Others are songs that have certain qualities and attributes that can highlight deficiencies in the system in question.
You Get What You Give by the New Radicals is possibly the brightest record ever made! If it doesn’t take the enamel off your teeth and push you towards the back wall when you play it at a robust volume in a control room, there’s something very wrong with the monitors!
I know front of house mixers use the Nightfly album by Donald Fagen to test their systems because it’s very dry and punchy, so any reverb that’s heard is being generated by the room they are in. That record was originally mixed for vinyl so it’s bass light because vinyl couldn’t reproduce huge amounts of bass – certainly not the amount of bass used in music mixes today.
Similar to that is Don’t Start Now by Dua Lipa. The production is amazingly punchy and beautifully balanced and should sound good on anything. Even if you play it really loud, it never sounds harsh or too bright, but still sounds bright enough to be exciting, which is a testament to the skill of the mix engineer.
My first choice is usually Massive Attack’s Teardrop, mixed by Spike Stent, someone I’ve admired for years. It’s exceptionally well balanced: the low end feels deep and authoritative, the vocal sits forward without turning aggressive, and the arrangement holds onto space, depth and detail. On an unfamiliar pair of speakers, it tells you quickly whether the bass stays controlled, the midrange speaks clearly, and the top end keeps its composure or turns brittle.
I’ll also reach for Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero as a modern pop reference. Serban Ghenea’s mixes are remarkably disciplined, and I listen for balance between tight and punchy low end, full low-mids, and bright but smooth vocals.
My most useful references, though, are tracks I have worked on, like Pulp’s My Sex or recently Big Dog by The Last Dinner Party. I know what the source sounded like and my intention for the capture, so I can hear what a speaker is adding or hiding.
As an engineer listening to a new pair of speakers, I’ve found that no reference track tells me the whole truth. So I commit to making decisions in the room, and then verify them back in my own studio, on speakers I know intimately.
If I’m settling in and want to grasp a sense of a space, I find Slip Away by Perfume Genius quite helpful. The song starts with rich synths and airy vocals, then, about a minute in, kicks into this insanely massive chorus and the whole track steps up out of nowhere. It is incredibly dense and I love the way it hits you in the face.
There are so many elements to this track. The more I listen to it, the more I hear. It’s a prime example of a song that can punch you in the face without relying on excessive distortion. It is broad, dense and engaging, while resisting the temptation to be relentless throughout.
When mastering, referencing is an integral part of my workflow. It allows me to enter a ‘critical listening’ headspace, and consider what the track needs in order to translate onto whatever digital or physical format it will be released on. Context of listening is important to consider in mastering, so referencing current music is my usual port of call, to make sure my masters can compete within their genre.
My go-to reference track at the moment is Why Didn’t You Stop Me by Mitski, mainly because it fits into a bracket of ‘popular music’ nicely. It has electronic elements, but also features electric guitar and more typical band elements. Mitski’s vocals are a driving force in the track, and vocals are often something that I am trying to enhance when mastering, as they are what our ear is naturally drawn towards.
When I turn the volume down, all the elements of this song still shine through, which is the sign of a well-balanced track. It is important that your reference track translates at low volumes, as well as on multiple devices, such as phone speakers and studio monitors. This track does exactly that.
One of the hardest things to get right when building a listening room is the low end – the frequency response and decay times are so dependent on the room (as well as the loudspeakers and their position). There is a wide range of songs I like to pull up when I first start working in a new space, but Beyoncé's Partition is one I keep coming back to.
The sweeping sub drops reveal any unevenness and there’s nothing too harsh. You can crank it up and it shouldn’t feel overwhelming. At the same time, it’s wide and very dynamic – different sections of the song help uncover different elements of the room. For example, the second half of the song has a lot of depth and the kick drum switches to be more midrange heavy. If I could only pick one song, it would be this!
It's not easy picking a favourite reference mix, since you are effectively asking “what is the one shoe to fit all systems?”
In truth, there is no such song. I typically jump around a number of tracks in my playlist, focusing on different aspects of delivery. Is the vocal clear, present and natural sounding? Does sibilance bite or is it smooth? Is the stereo image wide and open-feeling but still accurate with no smearing? Is the busy midrange body of the audio clear and not muddy? Is the low end controlled without being overly compressed, moving with the music and extending right down into the sub region without nulls / modes? How fast is the delivery system – are transients detailed and clear, not clipped or mushy sounding? Most importantly, arguably, are you able to ignore all of this and just enjoy the music? Because that’s what it’s all about, right?
Contrary to the above, I more and more find myself blasting Ellie Dixon’s amazing song Loose Change when setting up a room. Dixon is a formidable and unpredictable songwriter who is quite comfortable with mashing up genres and sonic references. Loose Change shows her at her best. The song is melodic and buoyant, yet frenetic and energetic, with huge jumps in timbre, tempo and time signature; you get about four songs for your money!
Concepts like this can only be achieved if the techy stuff is down from the dot. Dixon’s production is outstanding, as is Lee Smith’s mix and Cicely Bayston’s mastering. As a team they have applied adept technical control where necessary to push playfulness forward. While I can focus on the bass, the depth of field, or the smoothness of Ellie’s vocals, most importantly, the song is made in such a way that I can tune all that out and just have fun!
It’s so important to have some solid test tracks that you know well and can trust. I have a few songs that I like to listen to, either when I’m in a room for the first time or when I’m mastering. Some tracks that you know super well can be brilliant as a bit of a reset if you’ve got a busy day, or if you’re working on a project and feel like you’re starting to get a bit lost.
Partition by Beyoncé is such a good song for listening in a new room, especially if you’re trying to figure out the low end. I’m cheating a bit here because I mastered this song, but Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love) by Nadine Shah is also super good for getting to know a new room because it’s got sections that are super groovy and bass heavy, and then sections which are really guitar heavy as a contrast. Because I worked on this track, I also know it inside out, so I often use it as a roadmap.
Another song which I know inside out is So Says I by The Shins – the whole Chutes Too Narrow album was on heavy rotation when it first came out, so it’s another song that I know super well and can pull out as a roadmap, especially if I need a reference point for the upper mids in a song.
My go-to track for testing speakers is What Do We Do? by Bill Frisell. The chimey sound of the Telecaster guitar and the breathiness of the horns provide a good test of balance, especially in the higher frequencies.
Throughout the track, the stereo image is beautiful and impressively lifelike. One of the main reasons I keep coming back to this track is because of the striking sense of space in the recording. If a system is working well, you really feel like you can hear the air in the room.
MORE:
We asked top British hi-fi engineers for their favourite test tracks – this is what they said
