Man, this has been a HUGE learning lesson with a LOT of growing pains.
I've been sitting in here pretty much daily since I got these just trying to learn them. The first thing that became apparent to me; I waited way too long to upgrade. Advice for others- If you've been mixing for about 3 years and it's something you really enjoy that you want to take further, upgrade your monitoring situation so you're hearing the whole frequency range. Get your room in order.
Getting the settings on the backs of these, the Room Control and High adjustments is integral. Learning how those end up affecting the end result is also integral. The whole aspect of 'Robbing Peter to pay Paul' with frequencies is right in your face with these. The first thing I noticed when tracking; the click track started and as soon as the music came in the click track's perceivable volume dropped in half. I never even heard a change on my HS5's in the 6 years I used them.
Sometimes when I bite off big chunks I surprise myself when I succeed in swallowing them, so I took the biggest session I have, 70-something tracks, in a tuning I never use, and thought I would learn these speakers on that mix.
I was crushed when I bounced my first mix down! It was like I regressed 5 years (and I started 6 years ago). There's layers and layers of stuff and I'm just not experienced enough yet to make that song sound how I want it to, which is why I stopped trying to mix it 3 years ago.
Just getting a guitar tone was a hurdle, because I still wasn't recognizing how much fucking low end I had in my kick drums and how much headroom it was removing. Low end was just information that wasn't on my radar until I went in my truck to see if I hypothesized it right in my studio. The best analogy I've thought of yet was 'If you carve Mt Rushmore out of a block of butter, that doesn't make it a stone carving" and I was carving my mixes out of nothing but mids and highs previously with the 5's, with whatever shitty information I got from the non-correct sub.
They had to come off this shitty folding table before they fell off and/or knocked over the computer.
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Once they were spaced out correctly (with a tape measure) things started moving along quickly. Finally in the last week and a half I'm getting bounces I'm expecting to get. They're still not exactly how I
want them to sound, but it's getting there. Fab Filter just made some money off me as I want to be able to understand the shitty frequencies a lot better, that solo function on the Pro-Q3 is invaluable and that Multi-band comp is getting a workout with all the double bass sidechained to the bass. Stuff I was aware other people did, but never heard a need for it until now.
It was really frustrating at first, but I'm a bit more excited than I've been in the past because the
entire reason I wanted to learn how to record/mix on my own was a result of spending years in studios recording and never getting to hear a damn thing how I wanted it to sound.
