We're going to get the inside scoop with Drew Baird here.
So when you pick test tracks
for gear,
what's your process?
I have four different types of songs that I use to demo something.
I have to find one that's extremely complicated, which is why, like,
they don't have it on here.
But Patricia Barber, “Company” is the name of the song.
There is so much going on in that song and it changes from one minute
to the next in terms of the presentation and the instruments
that are being used and how dramatic it is.
I sort of call her the Pink Floyd of Jazz, and I know she's, you know,
you know, she's been given this sort of well, this is you know,
this is too audiophile of a musician for a lot of people.
But anyway, that one song, the important thing about her
voice is that she uses a lot of S's
and her S's can make
a pair of headphones or a pair of speakers if they aren't tuned correctly
and if they have any kind of sibilance, you're just like, Oh my goodness.
Right.
So I use that for that to find headphones
that might be too, too bright, too distracting.
Another one is Christina Aguilera. The song...
It's not one of her hits, right?
No, no, no. It's not one of her hits. It's
[You Lost Me] or something like that.
Anyway, it's it's more like an a cappella.
There's a little bit of bass and some drums in it,
but for the most sense, it's all female vocals.
If a headphone is very smooth and very musical,
I mean, her vocals are so liquidy
and so, you know, just hypnotic, right?
So I you know, that's the one that I sort of get the
the hairs on my arm stand up, if a headphone does that one.
Right. Gotcha.
Then I do Linda Perry, who she's not very well known
but she is one of, she's an amazing songwriter.
She's done songs for Christina Aguilera.
She's done songs for Sia.
She's done songs for so many other people.
And she came out with this one song that was actually used in the movie
The Crow, if I remember right.
And she sounds very much like Grace Slick in this song from Jefferson Airplane.
And when it originally this song was played,
I actually thought that that was Grace Slick.
It wasn't her.
It turned out to be her.
No, I mean, it's just it's like, yeah, what do you like?
What do you just hear for these individual things, you know?
Yeah.
These four songs I've used for 15, 15 to 20 years to test gear on.
So I know when everything is going to drop in the song, right.
And so it helped, you know, that's the way you have to demo a pair of headphones
or any kind of gear.
You have to memorize a song because just listening to a song
that you don't know real well, you're not going to be will pick out the nuances.
So like I said about the S's with Patricia Barber,
you know, I listen for that and I listen for the cymbals
and see if it's just too exaggerated and too harsh.
And you just you have to find those four tracks
and they have to be very different types of music.
You know, maybe one acoustic
one where you find somebody either a male or a female vocalist,
one that's really complicated, and then something that's just something
that gives off the different properties of the properties of the driver.
And if and if and if those four songs do so many things right
for you in whatever you're demoing, then you know, it's a good piece of gear.
If one of them fails, any one of the four fails,
It's not that you throw that to the side, but you know, if you're looking for that
endgame piece of equipment,
if it passes all those
four song tests, then you know, that's for you, you know what I mean?
So there you have it. Inside the mind of Drew Baird.
Man, this sounds good.