QuadCore
"I'd also recommend a sub to go with your near-fields and correction with ARC as well." ... ... ... ... Funny, Danny, I was just looking into getting a subwoofer yesterday at a music shop. ... I know it is real helpful for modern metal, rap, hip hop, dubstep, and so on. ... Do you think a subwoofer would help with good old fashioned rock & roll mixing?
Most definitely. The thing with subs and why they aren't recommended by quite a few seasoned pros is, people over use them or don't know how to set them up properly. It can be the death of you if you're not careful. However, when you get it right, you'll wonder how you lived without it.
Whenever you hear a song that is mixed bass light, 9 out of 10 times the mixer is hearing all the wrong low end out of near-fields so they over-compensate and remove way too much by high passing all the good stuff out. Some near-fields DO accentuate bass, but it's not in the right area where a sub WILL give you the right amount of kick in the right places. You just have to know where to set it in your particular room.
When you hear a song that may be bass heavy, this is also because there wasn't a sub present...so people over-compensate with low end thinking their monitors really aren't putting out enough bass. Case in point...grab a pair of old NS-10's. I can't mix through them to save my life without a sub. They just have no bass response to my ears. Every mix I've ever done with them was bass heavy and muddy because everything sounded so thin with them.
From there once your sub is in place, ARC does all the rest. At the worst case scenario Quad, even if you read about ARC like mad and become skeptical like so many others, the one thing it will do is flatten your monitors....which needs to be done anyway. Every known studio in the world has a guy come out that scopes their room with an analyzer. You supply the eq (usually a Rane works best in my opinion) and he sets the eq to where your monitors are sending him flat response on his read-out and you never touch that EQ setting. This alone can solve mixing problems by 75% or more. If your monitors are pushing certain frequencies that they shouldn't be, you're at an instant disadvantage no matter what type of room correction you may have installed in your place. Room correction doesn't eq/flatten monitors. To me, properly eq'd monitors are more important than any room correction you can buy.
That said, rooms DO come into play with messing things up depending on your situation. But let me tell ya man, I've worked in some nasty rooms when I've been hired to work in other studio's. Quite a few didn't have any traps or anything....but old ARC helped me out and I still was able to do a great job every time. It's only failed me one time with a set of NS-10's that were not connected to a sub at the time. I ran the NS-10's through a sub, redid the correction, and they are as good as anything else I own.
But yeah, definitely get a sub. Just be careful how much you use. You'll need to experiment a bit with it of course, but you should be able to dial it in within a few mixes. ARC actually curbed my sub a bit too much (and I do mean a little bit) to where I was mixing a little bass heavy at first. Nothing that was really bad, just a bit more bass than I felt I needed in my mixes. So I turned my sub up one little notch and that totally fixed my problem to where it forced me to mix a little bass lighter because the low end was being heard the way I felt it should be heard.
Just remember, the key is to use it in moderation to just add a little good low sub low end to your mixes. If you can feel it or hear it, you're using too much and will probably end up mixing bass light. Hope this helps...best of luck. :)
-Danny