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eddie1261

"Looks like" you could use some wall treatments. Your mixing position looks very "live". If you clap your hands and you can hear "reverb/echo" . . . room treatments will help a lot. This is specially true for any recording environment if you record.

For everyone:

A good STUDIO Headphone is an ABSOLUTE MUST !! Buy one that was DESIGNED for STUDIO use and spend at least $100 on one. AVOID consumer and DJ models. Average consumer models are usually NOT designed with a flat frequency response. DJ models have a heavy hump in frequencies that help you hear the headphone in a loud ambient environment . . . like a night club. My personal choice is a Sony 7509. I know this headphone intimately because I've used this model for many years.

Everyone can hear. There are far fewer number of us who has LEARNED TO LISTEN. Yes, CRITICAL listening ability IS AN ACQUIRED TALENT . . . and it takes as much time, effort and PRACTICE to develop this talent as it takes to become a good guitarist.

Everything we have ever heard in our life time is a result of the sound source and ITS REACTION to the environment. This is the difference WHY you sound different in the bathroom compared to the living room.

If you do not have a properly "treated" Listening room (where you mix your music), the headphone eliminates the "environment" to a minimum. The only "environment" left is the air space between the headphone diver and your eardrum.

Each HEADPHONE sounds different . . . even within the same "model number". The more you pay . . . the less are the minor difference within a "model number". Flatter response you get from a good pair of headphone is usually not as pleasing as listening to a nice stereo system. This is because the "pleasing environment" we are used to has been eliminated. "Consumer" headphones have built-in EQ curve to replicate the "missing environment". So, if you mix to a "consumer" headphone and you play the result in your stereo system, some areas of the EQ curve can become over or under emphasized.

Once you buy your "reference" headphone, its time to start the learning process. This is a LEARNING process and it requires many hours of listening. You need "REFERENCE TRACKS". You need to select CD tracks from your CD collection that you think they SOUND great to you. These tracks don't necessarily be one that you are fond of . . . just the ones with production quality you want to emulate. These reference tracks should contain a wide range of genre. Include few examples from Orchestral music like Movie soundtracks to solo acoustic instruments and everything in between. If you decide to burn a reference CD, make sure you do in a WAV. file format so there are no digital compression is involved.

Now its time to spend MANY HOURS of LISTENING. Concentrate on trying to isolate and listen to each instrument or an area of frequency range. Learn to listen in parts of the sound as well as the whole. eventually you will learn YOUR headphone's sound and begin to trust it.

It is often helpful to listen to a reference track while mixing to check your progress. If the production quality of you mix comes close the the production quality on your reference track . . . then the audio CD you burn should translate well in your stereo system.

If you compare your work against a reference track from a "Big Label CD" . . . through YOUR headphone, then your work should come very close to or equal a commercially produced CD !!

If you can not come close enough to your satisfaction . . . then its time to think about equipment upgrade. Blindly spending money on equipment is hardly a good solution. Always do plenty of research before spending your hard earned money.

Studio Monitors and Control room . . . that is a different can of worms.

Its easier said than done but . . . . . Learn you headphone and trust it.

Hope this helps someone. Just my 2 cents worth.

Ed Layola

PS: click on my studio web site below to see my "studio photos"

Yoda, with anything but the vocals it's all line level so there is no concern about room echo, and when I record vocals I am behind a carpeted partition that sits 90 degrees to an open door. Totally isolated, and covered with a thick moving mat, and it's totally dead.

I WILL indeed have some treatment as I bring players in and record with live mics. I have some foam that I collected from other studio builds I assisted on, and there is also a love seat that gets moved into that room. With angled ceilings, do I need baffling ON the ceiling or where it meets the flat wall? I have seen it both ways. One thought is that on the flat wall it catches sound as it rolls. The other thought is to keep it FROM rolling. Right now though, the room sound is just for me to hear and none of it gets recorded.

It's a fairly small room and not much foam is needed for the ceiling if I put it there.

eddie, you should also have some acoustic treatment in there so you can hear those monitors in the nearfield without room reflection or standing wave probs.

First rule of thumb, that will not break the bank, is to have about 50/50 soft and hard reflection on all six surfaces (six meaning walls, floor and ceiling). One can get away with a lot by hangind tapestries or rugs centered on each wall such that there is a border around them of reflective plaster that is about the same surface area ss the tapestry. A throw rug can account for the floor. Ceilings can be a bit tricky, sometimes hanging netting, etc. can help stop the ceiling ping. And, of course, Bass Traps for that Standing Wave. A nice old couch can be pressed into service, when pulled out away from a flat wall a couple of feet or so. Not precise, but rather amazing what such can do. Pinewood bookshelves (without rattly stuff on 'em.) with books on 'em can also serve as ersatz Helmolz filters on a wall or two of the home studio, breaking up undesirable reflections.

Don't laugh, the original Dreamworks studio used Tapestries as described and they made a helluva lotta movie soundtracks in there.

The good news is that if the Control Room is made to sound good for mix playback, it ought to sound good for the occasional Tracking Session as well.


--Mac

Thanks for all the replies guys, this has been very helpful in getting me up to speed. Last question ( at least for now), what do you guys use to build the midi tracks, the computer keyboard or a midi controller? I assume most are using a midi keyboard, any suggestions appreciated.

Search Keyboard suggestions or recommendations in Forum search box (upper right); there have a been a few threads recently .. lots of input.

Acoustic room treatment and room design philosophy are dime a dozen. Other than the basic acoustic principals, even the professional acoustic designer can differ greatly from one to another. None of them are truly WRONG . . . Some work better than others. The best solution depends on each individual space.

I don,t feel too comfortable giving advice about room acoustics without hearing the actual room, so I won't.

Here are the basics. Your PRIMARY GOAL is to make your MIX POSITION as accurate as possible. That means, at the very least eliminate DIRECT reflection (first order reflection) from reaching your ears at your mix position. Direct reflection from ceiling, side walls and floor needs to be minimized as much as possible. These Surfaces should be acoustically absorbent and not reflective or diffusive.

That usually means an area in all surfaces that are about perpendicular to the monitors for about 4 feet in front of your monitor. This is your critical surface area. Your monitors should be symetrically placed at least 12 to 24 inches from the side and rear walls. The center line of your monitors should converge at the mix position, horizontally and vertically. Your monitors should be pointed right at you. Your mix position should be about 4 to 5 feet in front of the monitors. This generally works for a small room (less than 12'x12' room with a 9' ceiling.) With a larger room, its time to think about moving up to some Mid Field monitors.

If you treat this critical area with foam, use at least a 3" thick foam. If you use carpeting use 2 or 3 layers in the critical area and hang them with about an inch of air space in between them. A single layer carpeting should NOT be glued to the wall. Instead, hang them with at least half inch space from the wall surface. These treatment should absorb frequency above 120 Hz. Most effective for frequency above 600 Hz. Surface treatments are not very effective for frequencies below 300 Hz. Generally, low frequencies are amplified in the corners. Low frequency requires mass. Foam bass traps do help but not a whole lot. A real bass traps are not cheap but you can build them. You can find plans available on the internet.

Once you do this minimal treatment, you will notice an improvement in imaging and clarity. The problem with small room is the small critical listening area. Usually about 24 to 30 inch sphere around the mix position. When you move out of the mix position, you will start to hear standing waves and acoustic distortions. Once in a while due to the room shape, you end up with a bad standing wave at your mix position. If that happens, you might have to re-locate the mix position or introduce a 31 band EQ in the monitor chain.

The wall behind the monitors is usually preferable to be dead.

Myself included, 99% of us can not afford to "build" a studio and have the rooms designed by an architect specializing in building recording studios. So we end up adopting existing spaces.

My control room and the isolation booth used to be an "extra bedroom" that was illegally built into a 2 car garage. Now that its no longer rented and renamed as a hobby room, I didn't have to tear it out.

I prefer rooms that are as dead as possible. I prefer not to hear any short reflection in the control room or the iso booth. When I mix, the first thing I do add "room ambiance" as needed before adding effects. If had larger spaces, I can start thinking about controlling room ambiance. For me, small dead spaces has always been a friend.

The best room treatment you can do, is research. Read about it as much as you can. Then do what your particular room needs. Just compare what you hear in your room against your reference headphone. The room is telling you what it needs.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Ed

Eddie, loved your pics. It inspired me to clean up my setup . Here is my home studio and my road gear. Actually found a great deal on a 32 inch plasma monitor in B stock at CDW. Brought it howm and no stand in the box so back it went- boy it would have looked great! Otherwise, my modest version of a home recording studio (..aka, spare bedroom )

Home


Road (before addition of VLT..)

Dan is that an old school Epiphone Riviera?

You people with clean studios embarrass me. I have notes and drives laying all over the place.. on my desk right now are three RAM chips, three DVD drives, two hard drives and about 17 CD's ..a few adapters .. PCM adapter with CF card in it ... a pen , and a cup of coffee. Oh, and two soundcards laying behind the stack of drives (I just noticed).

I need to do some straightening up. :embarrassed:

My wife doesn't come in here much because she's the same way. I just make sure to keep the door closed.

Some pizza and spagettii on the walls please. And beer stains.

You guys crack me up!

I'm not a power user like many of the folks here but right now my studio looks like a before picture from an episode of "Hoarders".

Jazzmandan,

Nice ! Looks like an efficient set up.

By the way . . . I don't see the MOST IMPORTANT item !!!!

LAVA LAMP !!!!

To all of you . . . Any self respecting studio engineer/producer/musician MUST have a LAVA LAMP !!?? It doesn't matter if the studio space is small, cluttered, dusty or even disgusting . . . We can say, "Well, at least he has a LAVA LAMP . . ."