Getting them dialed in. Borrowed a dbx measurement mic and did several passes at pinking the room tonight. The room I record and mix in has a Murphy Bed. When it's open, it's a whole bunch of absorption and diffusion. When it's closed, it's mostly just some diffusion.

I EQ'ed the left and right monitor separately.

For those interested, here's the process I went through to pink the room:

1. I found an uncompressed, uncorrelated pink noise .wav file on the internet. Loaded that into my DAW.
Pink Noise and third octave analysis setup in DAW by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

2. I set up the dbx measurement mic right at my listening position - moved my chair out of the way to get it placed at the apex of my listening position
Pinking the room by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

3. Set the toe-in on the monitors - this is a shot looking down on the desk with a printed off 30/60/90 triangle.
Getting the toe in right by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

4. Grabbed the excellent 'Spectrum Analyzer' VSTi which uses digital filters rather than FFTs to give 1/3 octave levels (I could go into a dissertation why you want a digital filter implementation of the band filters instead of FFT, but I'll save you the time and math)

5. Made sure that the uncorrelated pink noise file was in fact pink noise. In this picture the bars are the 1/3 octave instantaneous levels when I did the window grab, the top line is a 3s peak hold, and the bottom line is the average level of the 1/3 octave filters. I'm shooting to match that flat average with my equalizing.
Pink Noise File through the third octave analyzer by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

6. Put another instance of the analyzer in my measurement mic track (track 2 in the DAW picture shot), and then pulled the track volume to zero. Also had to set the mic track volume on my Focusrite scarlett control to zero so that I wouldn't get feedback when doing the eq adjusting.
Here is the un-eq'ed result prior to setting the graphic eq. Actually not too bad to start off with.
Bed out closet open vocal gobo in place no eq applied by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

7. Panned hard left on the pink noise file.

8. Tweaked my 31 band EQ for the left side to try to get it as flat as possible

9. Repeated step 8 for the right channel.

10. set the pan to center, and grabbed an average of the mic channel. Then took a picture of the graphic EQ settings for future reference.
Bed put away closet open vocal gobo in place by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr


Final EQ setting with the bed put away by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

11. Went and listened to some of my favorite music for awhile.
Came here and typed this post after shooting the pix over to Flickr.

Some of the items that you might wonder about in the photo titles: I do not have a vocal booth, but something pretty danged close. This basement finished bedroom has a closet with sliding doors. I open one up and right there is a shelf loaded with pillows and blankets and what not. I also have a gobo I made with some acoustic foam on it which I set at an angle to the open closet door. It makes for a very dead recording space (if I remember to kill my monitors!) here's a couple shots of that.
Gobo and stuff in closet by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr


Gobo and stuff in closet by Lakes_of_Colorado, on Flickr

Last edited by rockstar_not; 05/06/18 07:18 PM.