I am firm believer that listening to others’ test tracks are useless, especially since you are not familiar with the track itself. I am curious about yours though for the sake of listing tracks that you think, do “x” well. There are my few picks if I wanted to run something through its paces.
Female Vocals: Katharine McPhee - She Used to Be Mine and Loren Allred - Never Enough
Male Vocals: Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird American Mouth (Wedding version) and Finneas - Break My Heart Again
Imaging: Alex Weston - Grandma on the Roof and Daft Punk - Lose Yourself to Dance
Grand Scale: La La Land - Another Day of Sun and Hans Zimmer - Time
Business and Speed: The Weeknd - After Hours
Room Information and Microdynamics: Olafur Arnalds - Happiness Does Not Wait (Erased Tapes) and his Sunshine Session Album
Bass: Daft Punk - RAM album and Madeon - The Prince
Guitar and Timbre: Anything Rodrigo y Gabriela
Rhcp - Sir psycho sexy. This track is more complicated and ranges a wide array of sounds tha you might think. I use this one a lot, partially because I know its sounds so well and partially because of how broad it is.
Lorena Mckinnett - All Soul’s Night. A lovely song with soaring vocals and an unusual array of instruments.
Fleetwood Mac - The Chain. The most famous and instantly recognize able bassline in all of rock. Also Stevie Nicks on vocals. This is a must include track for me.
Deep Purple - the guitar counterpart to above. Everyone knows this riff, and the song is a banger to boot. I can’t not include this.
London Symphony Orchestera - Born with the gift of magic. A wide sweeping “Symphonic Poem”. This one will tell any symphony or classical lover what they need to know, and then some. Has the added advantage (to me) of being emotionally and developmentally significant in my own life.
Not that I’ve done a “lot” of demo listening, but these are the primary tracks I use to digest changes to EQ settings.
The best was their debut, but the newest one is better than their middle one, lol.
Also, check out Yiruma - The Rewritten Memories (since we talked about it a few months back)
Agreed. (Although I tend to use tracks from re:member, For Now I Am Winter and The Chopin Project) Will check out the albums you mentioned as I don’t think I got around to it.
Also really like to use Tony Anderson - The Heart of Man, ODESZA, and Kasbo - Places We Don’t Know/Aldrig Mer
I sometimes edit based on what I’m looking to test, but for the most part this is what I listen through. The last track, Breadfruit by Sons of Kemmet is a particularly good track for testing.
That Yello Habanera track is completely different than the one in the Yello 40th Annyversary album. Check that one out as I think it’s a better remaster. Shorter but they made it a bit more expansive, this one feels too inside your head, a bit congested. Curious to see what you think if you compare the two.
I had a much bigger playlist but recently it was accidentally deleted so I started from scratch. I crave songs that my speaker systems do a good job in completely disappearing in while playing. I also like to listen to the differences between equipment and some of these songs help. It’s a miss mosh, just like my thinking process is
Just a quick addition here. One I Always use to ck for vocal clarity and degree of forward
mids (or lack of) is Diana Krall’s Desperado, from her Wallflower album. That track seems like it was recorded in a different studio on a different day from the rest, and is not
as “good” a recording (tho one of my Favorite songs.) I have some upper mids/ highs
deficiency in my hearing, thus I can quickly hear differences in gear as to which gives
me the most clarity of lyrics. A real challenge.
If I want an already amazing quality vocal I just use “Birds” by Dominique fils Aimee, like @Andy77 Lol.
@dB_Cooper oh FFS, there’s a song called Zombie Stomp by the OG eater of Dove’s on the playlist…what more need that tell you of how genuinely devious and twisted my list could be😂. You know, like if I wanted to be younger Nick…older grey haired Nick is calmer, more relaxed. Less tense and trying to be stress free🤗
