The Making of Sungod Connecticut

April 14th, 2008 - It Starts Here

Hi there, and Welcome to my Studio Building Blog!

I recently moved to a new house somewhere in Connecticut USA. A key demand that I had was that the house include a space, preferably a basement, large enough to build a substantial and well laid out studio - I was prepared to compromise on pretty much anything else, but after 15 years of home recording, most of it in cramped rooms shared with treadmills, office equipment, cat food and the like, this time around I wanted the space to plan and build a facility that could take me into semi-pro areas as I poured money into it over many years.

In the event, we found a house that pleased both my wife and I, and very few compromises needed to be made. The basement was finished - in US terms that means that rather than bare concrete and pipes, boilers and oil tanks, the basement has been partitioned off, boarded and carpeted. I was prepared to do that myself (or rather have someone else do it at enormous expense) but fortunately that was not necessary.

Now the interesting work starts. In order to get a facility that is capable of professional results you need the right gear of course, but the story starts much earlier, in the very design of the space, and acoustic treatment.

In this blog I will follow the build from initial design through to completion hopefully, covering such aspects as:

• Acoustics (measurement & treatment)
• Workspace design
• Vocal Booth Design
• Wiring

In a couple of months, I have a friend and collaborator coming over from the UK with the express intention of doing the hardcore DIY portion of this, so a lot of planning needs to happen first!

April 22nd, 2008 - Where Am I Starting From?

Next lets take a tour of the basement. Some things are laid out well, some badly, but it should all be fixable. I’m prepared to do some fairly hefty DIY if necessary but it shouldn’t be necessary as far as I can see at this stage. I believe the bulk of the work will be in creating the vocal booth and getting the acoustics right.

Ok, here’s what I am starting with - the room is roughly square but has a bite taken out of it for the boiler room. The longest wall you can see in the picture below is where I plan to put my workstation:

Its a little clearer in this plan - that back wall is 15′10″ and will make a very spacious area for PC monitor, speakers, keyboard and outboard gear.

As you can see - the basement is carpeted, and paneled. The bottom half is white wood, the top half is an extremely dull and lifeless wallpaper. Its all white, so not very rock and roll, but once the basics are in place it will get a paint job and some appropriate decor - that is the last thing I am worrying about for now!

The room also benefits from an independent heating zone, meaning I can turn the heating down when it isn’t in use but keep things warm enough that my guitars don’t suffer. No air conditioning - shouldn’t be a problem as we are underground but it remains to be seen. I can open the door and the garage door to get some air in if necessary - worst case I can run an AC unit in and have it vent into the garage.

There is also reasonable lighting down here - I have added a couple of dimmer switches so that I can get the exact right ambiance for recording, whilst being able to have a lot of light for fiddly jobs like guitar restringing.

The stairs are unavoidable of course - having the laundry down here is a necessary evil as there is nowhere else in the house to put it - its noisy in use and I will have to work around it, but it will be partitioned off and won’t affect normal studio operations.

Also, having the heater in the basement can make a lot of background noise, so I am planning on switching the boiler off whilst recording.

Another interesting point is the suspended ceiling - again, I got this through luck, but I would have built one of these anyway. Routing of cables is made a lot easier - you just throw them up the wall, across the ceiling void and down again wherever you need them - this will become important later when I wire up the vocal booth.

Finally, having a bathroom easily available is of course a huge plus.

I have bought a book on studio design - I hope to get some tips out of it and we’ll see if my initial ideas make sense!

April 28th, 2008 - Some Initial Layout Thoughts

Here are some initial thoughts about where everything should go …

First, it seems like the long back wall is a good place to put the workstation - PC monitor, keyboard & mouse and all of the audio gubbins, most importantly the monitor speakers. An acoustics rule of thumb is that you are better off firing the monitors down the long dimension of a room rather than the shorter dimension, and despite the boiler room being a little in the way this seems to work out for this layout.

Monitor speakers for close monitoring at least are expected to be fairly close to your ears, so I am aiming to get them centrally placed along that back wall with a separation of maybe a couple of feet, angled in slightly. We’ll talk a lot more about the acoustics of this setup later, but this is my working plan for now.

A lot of workstation designs I have seen center around a keyboard, and indeed put it front and center on the desk, but although I have a full piano midi controller keyboard, it isn’t the most important part of my setup, so I am thinking in terms of placing it at 90 degrees to my right on a specially crafted additional piece of the desk.

The philosophy here is that you should be able to achieve as many tasks as possible without moving your ears outside of the monitoring sweet spot. If I am laying down a drum track or some additional chords or a pad on the keyboard, I can do that just by reaching out to my right and playing right handed, without even moving my head so I can continue to monitor the sound I am making. Of course, for more complex playing I will just swivel my chair and sit in front of the keyboard as usual.

To my left along the wall I will put the Guitar Library I currently have 7 guitars I regularly use, including a bass. The stands fit nicely along the side wall there, with pride of place going to my main axe, the Jem, which is in easy reach of someone sitting at the desk. I will also put my Floor Pod on the ground just to the left of my chair for easy access.

On that side wall I have also added a shelf and a series of hooks for hanging cables on - if you don’t store them somehow they get horribly tangled, and nothing destroys a creative moment more quickly than having to pick a particular cable out of a huge ball of other cables. In the corner of the boiler room on that same wall I also have a corner bookcase that I am using for storage.

Another consideration is that I need a video area. The area immediately in front of the guitar library will double up for that - I have some black curtains that I can throw up to hide the guitars and give a neutral backdrop, and there is enough space there to record what I need and also to accommodate my somewhat low budget lighting system!

Behind the workstation I have some empty space, and I figured it would be nice to out a table and couch there for relaxing and listening to music and generally chilling. I have an old coffee table already, an I have my eye on one of our couches upstairs that will eventually be swapped out for a new one when finances permit. At that stage I’ll grab the old one for the studio.

Finally, we get to the bottom left hand corner - it occurred to me that the small space between the boiler room and that bottom wall would make a fine Vocal booth. It will need some studding and a door and some acoustic treatment first, but this will help a lot with recordings since my PC is sufficiently noisy that it is hard to get really top quality recordings anywhere near it.

So, that is my overall plan, and you can see how I think it will look below.

May 2nd, 2008 - My Current Hardware Setup

I have had a studio for a while, so in hardware terms at least I am not starting from scratch. What I am really doing is building a home for my existing equipment. However, for the record, I thought it would be interesting to take a tour through the stuff I have and give some background in how I use various pieces of it.

First a little bit of history if you will indulge me … Over the 15 years or so that I have been recording seriously I have had 3 main generations of studio. When I first met Ant he had a Tascam cassette based Portastudio. This consisted of eight audio tracks that we then enhanced with the addition of a PC to drive Midi synthesizers and drum machines (A Roland U20, a Korg X3 and an Alesis SR16 respectively if you are interested). The quality was awful by todays standards - in those days you couldn’t expect to come close to a commercial studio without spending a lot of money.

We later moved to a hard disk recording setup (a Fostex D80) with a 24:4:2 mixing desk, mastering to a DAT tape machine - quality was vastly improved as we entered the digital age, and as a result we had to up our game in terms of recording and mixing techniques. At its best, this came somewhat close to commercial studio quality although we were limited by our cheap microphones, compressors and other outboard effects. Still, we formed an appreciation of the production process and learned that the most important thing is the performance in any case - at best, the studio should exist to transparently capture what you play - it isn’t there to correct mistakes afterwards.

Finally, about 3 years ago, in preparation for my move to the USA, we sold our joint studio equipment and put the proceeds towards individual setups of similar specs so we could collaborate over the Internet. At the time of writing, my studio looks like this:

Audio Interface - I have an EMU 1212M PCI audio card. I picked this particular model because the “M” A to D converters were reckoned to be about the best in that price range. As an audio card it didn’t have many bells and whistles, it was just basically 2 ins and 2 outs, along with ADAT light pipes for expansion, but it forms a pleasing quality heart of my system. It also has fairly comprehensive mixing capabilities and some built in effects, and is a fairly powerful tool.

Microphone Preamp - My soundcard has no microphone preamps so I decided to buy a Focusrite Twintrak Pro. This provides me with an input capability similar to a mid range mixing desk - it has built in eq and compression and allows me to input signals at mic, line or instrument level. The quality is reasonable, and it has 2 channel strips, one for each input on the 1212m. The Twintrak also has a latency free monitoring section (it allows monitoring of recorded sound directly rather than feeding it through the PC with the additional delay that entails, sometimes making recording hard). I used this for a while, but later moved to a full mixer, and I now do my latency free monitoring through the 1212m mixer if I need to.

Monitors - I have been limping along with an old pair of hi-fi speakers for the last 3 years, functional but far from optimal. I recently ordered a pair of Adam A7s. Adam are a well thought of high end monitor company, and the A7s are an entry level model (although they still cost $1000 a pair!). I am still waiting for these but I expect them to revolutionize my mixing.

PC - My PC is nothing special. Its home built, in a special acoustic case with hard drive deadeners and a passive power supply. The CPU is an AMD 64 4000+, and I have 4Gb of ram. I will upgrade to a quad core or better at some stage as Reaper is among the best DAWs out there for multi core operation, but that will have to wait until long after the studio build is complete and I have saved up some money.

Midi Controller Keyboard - I play a little keyboard, and in any case find keyboard a very natural way to enter bass and the occasional drum part so I splashed out for a fully weighted, full piano size midi controller - an M-Audio Prokeys 88. It also has a few built in sounds so it can be used as a stage piano if required. It feels good to play as well.

Microphones - a very important part of any studio, I am slowly building up a collection of microphones for different tasks. I started with a Rode NT1-A. This is a fairly entry level Condenser Mic, but gives great bang for the buck and I would recommend it to anyone as a first vocal mic. Also works well for recording acoustic guitar. If you have only ever recorded with dynamic mics in the past, this is a huge step up in terms of clarity and transient response. Next I upped my game a little more with a tube Mic - again a Rode, this time a K2. This gives a lovely open clarity to vocals as it is an omni microphone compared to the cardoid NT1-A - owing to their internal construction, cardoid mics are often baffled which impedes airflow and makes them sound a little congested. This works well for some applications but I prefer an Omni for vocals. My most recent purchase is an SM57 - a dynamic mic which is a classic for micing guitar cabs, which is in fact what I bought it for.

In addition to the mics, I also have a Reflexion Filter - this is a portable piece of acoustic treatment that sits on your mic stand and isolates the mic from the room around it and removes any unpleasant booming or boxiness. My hope is that when the acoustic treatment is complete on the control and tracking room I won’t need this so much if at all, but time will tell. In any case it is useful for screening if recording more than one performer at once.

A/D Expansion - I also recently bough a Behringer ADA8000. This connects to my 1212m via ADAT lightpipe connections and gives me an additonal 8 inputs and outputs for a total of 10 ins and outs. This is extremely useful for a number of things:

• Reamping
• Talkback
• Recording multiple simultaneous performers
• Monitor Mixes

None of these were possible with my existing system and this adds a lot of flexibility to the whole studio. Although Behringer kit is cheap, I am a fan as you seem to get a lot of bang for the buck and I have never had any problems with them. The way I plan to use these inputs and outputs in any case are not for critical applications such as vocal recordings, I will rely on my higher quality twintrak and 1212m for than and use the ADA8000 for things that don’t matter so much such as monitoring.

Mixer - Although I mix “in the box” (meaning I mix everything on the PC and render it digitally to a Wav file for output) a mixer is useful in any studio. I have a rack mounted Behringer Eurorack mixer. I use it as a volume control for my monitoring and also to allow me to mix the PC, my PodXT and keyboard to the monitors for ad-hoc playing. Again, my philosophy is to use cheaper gear where it doesn’t matter so much, the mixer is not used for recording it is used for playback - and may have an effect on my mixes but I’m fairly sure it is minor at best. Even so, I will eventually upgrade this to a better mixer, maybe a Mackie Onyx series, since it was originally purchased as a temporary throwaway item to save space, and was cheap.

Headphone Amplifier - Finally, I have a headphone distribution amplifier that I will use for sending monitor mixes to vocalist. Again, a cheaper Behringer model, again where the lesser quality does not affect the overall result.

Software - Software is the heart of any digital studio, and the Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) is just the beginning. For a DAW I currently use Reaper, its cheap but unbelievably good for the price, in many areas surpassing the big boys like Cubase, and it does everything I need extremely well. In addition for backing tracks and production I have a lot of VSTs and VSTi - here is a list of most of them:

• Toontracks EZDrummer with DFH, Latin and Vintage expansion packs - I use these for all my drums
• Bournemark Broomstick Bass - My goto bass library
• Music Lab Real Guitar - nice patches for when I can’t be bothered to record guitar parts
• Izotope Ozone 3 - Great for mastering
• Linplug Saxlab - Good Sax sounds for occasional Use
• Wizoo W2 Stereo Reverb - My main reverb plugin
• Native Instruments Komplete 4 - the heart of my instrument collection, a collection of 10 awesome virtual instruments, including several synths, the amazing Kontact Sampler, Battery Drum machine and others
• Pianoteq - a physically modeled piano. Extremely light on resources yet to my mind it surpasses massive sampled instruments for playability and quality
• Native Instruments Massive - a cool synth
• Celemony Melodyne - great for pitch correction of vocals
• Garritan personal Orchestra - some great string snd other orchestral sounds
• Garritan Stradivari Violin - an extremely expressive solo violin instrument
• Garritan Gofriller Cello - a wonderful Solo Cello
• PG Music Band in a Box - generates whole songs out of a few chord symbols - great for trying out ideas
• Eiosis AirEQ - a really great sounding EQ for subtle tweaks
• Sonitus FX Compressor
• Digital Fishphones - The Fish Fillets - free but cool collection of compressor/de-esser/Gate

My Wish List - Finally there are a few things I need to complete my studio:

• A control surface for mixing - at the moment I want a Mackie Control Universal
• A Big Knob (not what you are thinking!) - this is a monitor control system that allows you to set the volume easily
• A new mixer, most likely a Mackie Onyx of some kind
• More Powerful PC
• Many more microphones - the list includes a U87, an SM58, a stereo mic or matched mic pair and some kind of ribbon mic. Also maybe a set of drum mics if I every get ambitious enough to try and record drums

May 10th, 2008 - Punctured Vanity

I started this process with a very clear view of how it was going to go - you know how it is, everything makes sense and you see the finished project in your head …

Well my last layout plan was well intentioned, but ultimately I think it would have been a lot of extra work with no good reason and also difficult to work with.

It all centers around the vocal booth - seems like an obvious thing to put into a decent recording studio right? Wrong!

The basic motivation for the vocal booth was appropriate enough - noise is a problem in my basement. Not a lot of noise, just the PC really, but it is enough to prevent me from getting pristine recordings, especially for the Voice-overs I am doing a lot of at the moment. The little vocal booth sized nook was appealing to me, seemed like a great solution to partition it off - presto, instant noise reduction!

However, I spent some time looking into this as I didn’t want to make any costly mistakes. I asked a question on the Sound On Sound forum and spent some time discussing the possibilities with Ant (my partner in crime), and read a book.

( Quick aside - for anyone interested in recording, Sound On Sound magazine is an absolute must - it is packed with reviews and recording tips, studio building tips, everything, and they have a great forum where you can interact with some pretty knowledgeable folks on various subjects )

The upshot of these discussions was that I have now decided to do away with the vocal booth concept entirely. Lets look at the reasons:

• The initial driver was to reduce background noise. So why not build a box around the PC instead of building a whole vocal booth? A lot simpler than building a wall, hanging a door, adding ventilation …
• If I built a vocal booth it would need some detailed acoustic treatment since it would have been a very small dark boxy room. We only have a week to work on this so getting it right would have been hard work and we want to also play and record in that time
• It would have needed ventilation, either that or I would risk suffocating my vocalist - more expense and complication (either to put in AC and a vent or to counter sue the family of the vocalist!)

If I am honest, it wouldn’t suit my workflow at all. Although I will be occasionally recording a vocalist, most of the time I will be recording on my own - usually acoustic guitar or spoken voice. Where is the sense in locking myself in a room 20 feet from all the controls? Of course I had plans to address this - remote desktop on a PC, as well as a video link and talkback to communicate with a vocalist in the room, but adding complications to make an initial bad decision work is not the right way to go.

Once I let go of the vocal booth, things became a lot simpler. This last decision is the punctured vanity I refer to in the title, that and the fact that I was initially resistant to moving my guitar collection from pride of place to a smaller area - but sanity in the shape of Ant prevailed.

Now things became a lot more sensible - the control room desk would stay the same, but the area immediately behind me in the corner of the boiler room protrusion would make a decent recording area with some advantages:

• Great workflow - when I am on my own I just need to turn around to access my recording area and will still be within reach of all the controls I need. When recording vocals with a vocalist, we will be in the same room - great for communication
• Easier acoustic treatment - since I would be treating the control room anyway, I might as well benefit from that in the recording area and save on some time and effort
• Less DIY - no partition walls to erect, no built in bass traps to build, no windows and doors to hang

All in all, a good choice I think. Now, if I had a larger budget and more space - I would absolutely build separate recording and control rooms - there are a lot of benefits to this, but in my situation with what I have available, and the likely usage of this studio I am very comfortable with the decision not to build the booth. However, your mileage may vary - it comes down to thinking about what you want to achieve and what you have to work with.

With that in mind, here is what the layout will look like now. Soon I’ll post some more detailed designs of the recording and control area, and start to talk about acoustics.

May 18th, 2008 - Studio Acoustics

Acoustics are an interesting part of any studio build. Unfortunately, they are the part that are most often skimped on or even ignored entirely. That’s not surprising because the average bedroom guitarist has no way of knowing of their importance as this subject only tends to get any sort of coverage in dedicated recording or home theater magazines.

The fact of the matter though is that without acoustic treatment you are unlikely to get stellar results in your recordings, especially if you are attempting to release a commercial quality offering, except by luck.

First though, a digression … Soundproofing.

Any studio worth its salt will be decently soundproofed. There are 2 very obvious reasons for this - first to stop noise getting in and second to stop noise getting out. Soundproofing is an extremely tricky thing to do well - it needs to be designed in at the outset and needs a lot of extra construction to build double doors, suspended ceilings, floating floors, and double walls. If this sounds like a lot of work, it is because it can be, and there is no way around it if you want to do a good job.

Fortunately for me, I got a break in this area. Firstly, the basement, as most basements are, is underground. Being underground is particularly good noise proofing because of the huge amount of heavy soil around the walls which has the effect of damping the sound. Getting the same level of damping above ground is very tricky indeed. This means that the only serious leakage either way I have is through my basement ceiling, and to an extremely small extent, through the downstairs door, through the garage and out the front. In practice, these are both manageable. My wife is particularly tolerant of the noise I make, and the bleed out of the garage is not serious enough to even remotely annoy the neighbors (most of whom seem to be guitar players in any case!). The only limitation is the occasional footstep as my wife walks around upstairs, and that can be managed easily enough since this isn’t meant to be a professional facility.

As a result of all of this I elected to completely forgo any additional sound proofing. If necessary, a few simple measures around gasketing doors and even doubling them up will clean up any spill outside - this decision makes the whole project a lot more tractable as proper soundproofing is a level above what I am prepared to do myself and to have someone else do it would I am sure be prohibitively expensive. An important decision to be sure but one I am comfortable with now I have made it. I was lucky here, but soundproofing is nonetheless something that anyone building a studio should strongly consider, both on the grounds of peaceful co-existence, and quality of recordings.

Now lets get back to acoustic treatment itself. There are 2 main activities in recording that are reliant upon good acoustic treatment - tracking and mixing.

Tracking refers to the activity of recording individual tracks. In fact, as a guitarists I am relatively lucky here. If you record through a multiFX unit such as a POD, your signal is entirely electronic, and the way the room sounds will make little difference. Its is of slightly more concern when micing an amp - depending upon exactly how you go about this, the room can be a significant factor, although most amps are loud and close micing is used which tends to minimize the effect of the room.

For vocals however, and also acoustic guitar recordings, the behavior of the room is extremely important. For an extreme example, imagine you are recording in a stairway (I know its silly but bear with me!). Have you ever heard that weird echoey ringing type of sound in a stairwell? Thats an artifact of the walls being so close together, and is caused by multiple reflections, cancellations and reinforcements. If you recorded there your vocal or guitar would sound very strange indeed. These effects are present in any room to a greater or lesser degree and there are various different types of problem that occur, and when recording that killer vocal, you will likely find that it is un-mixable due to the aforementioned comb filtering, or a boomy midrange, or a nasty echo, or a horrible room reverb …. the list goes on!

The problem is just as bad for mixing. In order to mix, you need a very accurate representation of what has been recorded so you can balance levels and make the mix work as a whole. If your stereo imaging is compromised, and your room has peaks and troughs in its frequency response you don’t stand a chance of getting a decent mix. As an example, if you have a boomy bass in your room, you will tend to compensate by making mixes with less bass in them. When played elsewhere they will sound bass-light and gutless.

Some rooms are naturally good, others aren’t, and its a lottery unless you are prepared to put some work into measuring and fixing your room up.

I have learned a lot of this over the years from a series in Sound On Sound magazine called “Studio SOS” in which the magazines contributors each month go to a home studio and fix problems in it. The average home room is not well designed to be a studio so the same problems tend to surface time and again, and SOS has some great tips on how to diagnose and solve them. I also supplemented this with a great studio design and acoustics book that I mentioned in an earlier article - Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros, by Rod Gervais, which I would highly recommend.

So lets take a look at a couple of common problems that I am expecting to come across.

Modes & Nulls - The Bass Response - One of the biggest problems in home studios is unevenness in bass response. This occurs when reflections throughout the room interact and reinforce or cancel each other out. This can be a very involved subject, but to cut a long story short, every room will have a characteristic series of modes. A mode is a series of one or more reflections about specific walls that result in cancellation or boosting of bass response. This happens a lot with bass because the sort of room dimensions we deal with are in the same range of size as the wavelength of the bass notes themselves. So for instance, one mode occurs when a wave reflects of all 4 walls in the room and gets back to where it started from. That length of travel corresponds to a specific frequency, and at different places in the room, as a result you will get peaks and troughs in the frequency response. Some modes actually resonate and trap energy meaning that not only do they cause peaks, but they take longer to decay than other frequencies because of this. Every room will have a large number of nodes, some more serious than others. Its possible to calculate the frequencies that modes will appear at using software, but pragmatically that doesn’t really help you unless you are designing a room from scratch. In this case, I have to go with what I have modes and all!

A null is a very severe product of a mode in which all acoustic energy at a point is entirely canceled out for a particular frequency and no sound is heard.

The way to treat modes is simply to prevent those reflections in the first place. If you prevent or at least reduce those echoes the reinforcement or cancellation just can’t occur to the same extent. This allows you to still hear the bass directly from your monitors (or amp if you are tracking), but since there are reduced reflections, the frequency response and time domain response is evened out. The way to prevent bass reflections is to install one or more bass traps. Bass traps are fairly large acoustic absorbers, usually made of a dense yet permeable material that moves in response to the bass waves, but rob it of energy as a result. Because of the way modes are setup, bass traps are generally more effective if placed across room corners. They are usually around 4′ by 2′ and the thicker the better - 4″ is a good starting point depending upon the material in use.

Reflections & Imaging - The higher frequencies - Of course, not just the bass is problematic. Higher frequencies can cause all sorts of problems as well. The main culprit here is problems in stereo imaging. Room reflections tend to destroy the illusion of a stereo sound stage making it a lot harder to mix in stereo and get a decent result. In addition, the higher frequencies can cause audible echoes and other artifacts such as comb filtering. Now some reflection is desirable - in the 70s, most recording studios had completely dead rooms and added ambiance artificially in the mix. These days the philosophy is to have some life in your room but not too much! Pragmatically that means adding some treatment and tweaking it until you get a sound that you like.

Treatment for high frequencies is easier than for the bass frequencies we mentioned earlier. High frequencies can be easily absorbed by thinner material, or diffused by an irregular surface, or both simultaneously. A popular treatment is use of acoustic foam tiles that are stuck to the walls of the recording area and have an irregular surface for diffusion.

So now that we know what we are up against, the plan is to measure what I have (I already know I have some problems with modes) and then figure out a plan to fix it - and the likelihood is very high that this will involve bass traps and acoustic tiles!

May 24th, 2008 - Workstation Layout

Just as important as the overall layout is the layout of the actual workstation area. From building several studios before, when there is enough space there are a number of principles to be taken into account to build a functional work area.

I like the “Spaceship” approach - in which you wrap controls and instruments around you so that you need hardly move to perform any major function. This is particularly appealing in a studio that most of the time will be used by one person on his own. With that in mind, I needed to find a way to lay out the following:

• Monitor Speakers
• Keyboard & Mouse
• Monitor
• MIDI Controller
• Mixing Desk (Future)
• Control Surface (Future)
• Rack Gear

So, as previously mentioned, the desk itself will go along that back wall - that’s my starting point.

Next in terms of importance is positioning of the monitor speakers as the workstation will be built around these. For stereo imaging purposes, it is optimal to put your speakers in the middle of the room, so they will be along that back wall, focusing on the center point, but of course to the left and right of it. Since I will be using close monitoring (best for accurate mixing and obligatory for smaller studios), I need to look at the configuration of the speakers and set them up so that they form a rough equilateral triangle with my head when I am in the listening position. Since the listening position is also the working position, I need to set this up so I can reach the keyboard mouse and control surface without moving my head too much. I’ll be sitting a little over 3 feet away from the wall (the desk will have 3′ of depth) so I will place the speakers about 18 inches either side of the center point to make that equilateral triangle.

The Computer Monitor will fit nicely in between the 2 speakers. I have a 28″ LCD panel and have the choice of standing it on the desk or even wall mounting it. I’ll probably just let it stand though as we are planning a 3′ deep desk, and the space taken up by an LCD screen is negligible compared to this.

The next obvious thing to think about is the Computer Keyboard and this presents a problem. The obvious place to put it is squarely in front of the monitor, and indeed that is where it will go initially. But thinking to the future, I plan on having a control surface there - a Mackie Control Universal if I manage to save up enough, or maybe something smaller if I don’t. When I have this, it really needs that spot in front of the monitor for mixing, leaving a question mark over the keyboard. When it comes down to it I may be able to put it in a keyboard tray under the desk, or move it to one side since it is wireless and fairly small. The mouse of course will follow the keyboard wherever that ends up. Another possibility is that 3′ will give enough depth to put the keyboard in front of the control surface.

I currently have a Rack Mixer but in future I plan to replace this with a higher end flat mixer. I will be looking at an 8 to 12 channel model, so it won’t be too big. I plan to put it to my left, angled at 45 degrees, and slide it under the left monitor speaker as there should be sufficient clearance.

To my right, as previously discussed, will be the Midi Controller Keyboard within easy reach - the desk will be extended with a corner island to accommodate this specifically as you saw previously on the plan.

Which leaves only the rack. I don’t have a lot of outboard equipment at the moment but I expect that to slowly grow over time. In one previous studio we had an actual rack - since then I have just been piling equipment on top of each other due to space limitations. Again having a real rack space will add to professionalism an ease of operation and setup.

At the moment I have:

• Twintrak Pro (2U)
• Mixer (3U)
• ADA8000 (1U)
• Quadraverb GT (1U)

These are currently in an 8U standalone rack which is placed to my left - this is however unsightly and takes up a lot of room. So the plan is to build a floor standing rackmount cabinet that can be slid under the desk - out of the way yet easily reachable, and as a bonus, most of the cables will be hidden under the desk. It is possible to buy just the rails for a rackmount very cheaply and I will get a pair of 12U rails and Ant can build a cabinet for them, I’ll also get some blanks to hide the empty slots and keep things tidy.

In the future I expect some changes in the rack:

• Mixer will be replaced freeing up 3U of space
• I’ll probably get a rackmount headphone distribution amp (should have got one in the first place)
• The Quadraverb GT may be replaced with a more up to date outbound multiFX unit
• I’ll probably add a power conditioner at some point
• And almost certainly 1 or 2 patchbays to help with wiring and routing although I am still researching this
• Maybe as time goes on I’ll add another ADA8000 and a firewire interface to replace the 1212M - my ultimate aim is to get a 16-24 in/out system in place (the number of outs is a lot less important than it used to be in the old days of analogue mixers, but at least 16 ins will let me track drums and a whole band together if I ever need to do so - the 10 ins I currently have is just a little on the low side)
• Maybe I’ll add more and better boutique mic amps and perhaps some high end dynamics processing eventually

By the time I have added this I have run out of my 12U, but this represents years of pouring cash into my studio, so it seems a good place to start, and if required I could add a second cabinet to my right under the keyboard!

And that finally is the layout as I expect it to look! To get a rough idea of how this works in practice, I have wall mounted the speakers and put the keyboard to my right. I can’t put the rack under the desk yet though. The result is messy for now, but I have been using this setup for a month or so and it seems to work well.

And to the left of and behind the workstation you can see where my vocal area will be - in easy reach.

May 26th, 2008 - More Acoustics - Initial Room Measurements

As a first step to fixing up the acoustics of a studio, its wise to figure out what problems you have initially. Measuring the characteristics of a room may sound daunting but it isn’t hard, and gives you a way to figure out if you have actually improved anything after the treatment is complete.

I have been using a program called Room EQ or REW to measure the existing acoustics of my studio and figure out what needs fixing. Its a free program and you can find it here. It was written by a home theater enthusiast - home theater setups share a lot of the same challenges as recording studios in terms of room treatment to get a good response so this is not at all surprising.

The idea behind this program is that you generate a signal out of your speakers and measure the resulting sound using a mic or sound meter. The response of the room is then calculated from this signal and can be visualized.

Before I discovered REW, I already suspected that I had a problem with modes, and had attempted to characterize it with a signal generator and microphone. This pointed out some peaks and troughs in the frequency response but didn’t help much with the time domain. REW is a lot more sophisticated and a lot easier to work with too!

Whilst you can use a microphone with REW to capture the generated signal, microphones themselves vary a lot in frequency response and in theory need to be calibrated to get accurate results. Rather than worry about that, I bought a cheap SPL meter from Radio Shack:

It cost around $50, and most importantly it has a line level output. SPL meters such as this have a known frequency curve so are in effect pre-calibrated. Actually in acoustic terms there are a variety of frequency responses in use, and they are switchable on the meter - some are optimized for human hearing ranges for instance. I will be using the so called C weighting profile as REW is setup for this.

So, after reading the instructions, as a first step I measured the frequency response of my soundcard by connecting its input to its output and running a test. This allows REW to factor this out of the equation and focus on the response of the the room and specific interactions between the room and the speakers. The curve was impressively flat which it should be for a high end sound card like the 1212M - some cheap motherboard soundcards won’t be nearly as flat. I saved this as a calibration file and used it moving forward in all future measurements.

Although the speakers are part of the equation here, they will not affect the underlying modes, however different speakers may highlight different modes to a greater or lesser degree depending on their frequency response, most notably, whether or not the low frequency roll off is steep enough to render some of the lowest frequency modes a non-issue due to the lack of acoustic energy at those frequencies.

Next I calibrated my meter using a test signal, then ran some measurements - I ran 3 in series to cancel out any anomalies, and they all turned out pretty much the same. The frequency response of my untreated room looks like this:

Its pretty ugly and shows a couple of serious dips at:

• 34hz (not too serious as that is pretty deep bass and I would normally shelve that out of a mix anyway)
• 144hz (a bit more serious as that is in mid bass range)
• 353 & 855hz (not so problematic since these are higher frequencies and easier to treat)

In particular, that 144hz is going to be the one to focus on. As you can see, it takes a while to dip, and then rises again to a peak at around 161hz. what that does in effect is blanket out the first octave of the guitar, and then cuts back in with a mild peak at just below middle E. To compensate I play louder, and that subjectively sounds like a nasty resonance right in the middle register of the guitar. This is the frequency that has been bugging me and has made mixing of guitar extremely hard - this above all is the problem I want to fix, I need to flatten out that whole dip and as much of the rest of it as possible. The way to address this of course is to use bass traps - this is a fairly large deviation, so I am going to need a lot of them.

Another thing I could look at with REW is the time domain response of the room - that is to say how it behaves over time when a sound is made. In an ideal room, once a sound has been created, it should decay at a similar rate across the whole frequency band. When modes are involved however, certain frequencies will stick out and take longer to decay. That same set of measurements can be analyzed in a different way to produce what is called a waterfall graph - its a 3D plot with frequency on one axis, volume on a second, and time on the other. It ought to look like a pitched roof, with all frequencies falling away at the same rate. If it looks like a mountain range you have problems! Mine of course looks like a mountain range …

If you look at the front edge(the 300 ms mark) you can see this. That nasty 142hz frequency is in evidence - it is higher than the rest and looks like a ridge, meaning it falls away more slowly than the rest. We also see a ridge for that 161hz frequency showing that not only is it a peak in the frequency response, but it is also falling away more slowly meaning it is a mode as well - modes resonate and store energy so sound longer than other frequencies.

So there you have it - I knew my room sounded bad, now I can prove it! I’ll be talking about the specific treatment I will be using in a future post.

Now a word on room EQ - REW has the ability to interface with a couple of different multiband graphic equalizers. The idea is that after you measure the room it can generate a set of filters to even things out. This is a deceptively simple approach and is gaining in popularity - who wouldn’t want to spend $150 on an Equalizer and have it solve all those studio problems without putting up any room treatment? Seductive as this approach is, it is ultimately not the right way to do this in my opinion, here is why.

By their very nature modes, which are really what this technique sets out to cure, vary all across the room. A low in one area will be compensated for by a peak in another area. Treatment by EQ can only really help in a specific location, or can compromise by working less well in a wider area. If you EQ for your mixing position that is fine, but remember, this room will be used for tracking as well as mixing. There is a good chance that fixing the mixing position using EQ will make things worse elsewhere in the room.

Also, working this way only affect the frequency response, it does not help at all with the time domain response. Reflections will not be addressed, which leads to problems in imaging, and various unwanted sonic artifacts.

Finally, whilst EQ can boost a dip, it can’t do anything about nulls - if you have a null whilst you are recording, there is zero acoustic energy for that particular note. No amount of boosting will fix that.

All in all, when you look at this in an informed way, EQ is not the solution, so its back to bass traps and tiles! At best, EQ can be used to fine tune an already treated room but on its own it’s not the solution in my opinion.

And a final word on room measurement - I had a lot of fun doing this, but ultimately it told me what I already knew; I will need bass traps, and acoustic tiles. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of measuring your room like this, chances are that it too needs bass traps and acoustic tiles. You certainly can’t have too many bass traps - you can have too few. For mixing you almost certainly want to hit the mirror points with tiles (more later), and treat some of your vocal area as well. If you do this, regardless of whether or not you have measured your room, the chances are pretty high that you will improve matters, and you certainly won’t make them worse!

May 30th, 2008 - Acoustic Treatment Planning

This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of acoustics - previously we spent some time measuring the room and figuring out what is wrong with it, now we have to decide how to fix it!

As I said, this is going to revolve around bass traps and acoustic tiles, so lets take them in order.

Bass Traps - this is going to be the most important part of the treatment. I really need to get rid of those nasty resonances that will mess up both tracking and mixing, Bass traps will help! I figure that since the dip is so severe that I really need to go heavy duty here.

As I mentioned before, a Bass trap is usually a lump of flat material that is affected by bass frequencies and reluctantly moves in sympathy with them, enough to rob the waves of energy and therefore reduce reflections through absorption. Other designs are available (such as Helmhotz Resonators) but these work at very specific frequencies and I am after broadband treatment here. As a last resort, if the broadband treatment doesn’t take out that severe dip at 144hz, I may be forced to build one of these, not a task I am looking forward to, but we’ll see.

Since Bass traps aren’t particularly complicated to build, there are a number of different types out there, both manufactured, and in the form of plans for a DIY approach. I initially scanned the various websites for inspiration.

I had been looking at Auralex for acoustic tiles - they are pretty much the de-facto standard for these in the industry, and I noticed that they were selling a range of bass traps called LENRD (Stands for Low End Noise Reduction Device).

They are foam inserts that you place in the corners of your room and they act as bass traps. The idea of this was so appealing to me that I ordered several of these hoping for a quick fix. When I deployed them in the left and right corners of the room, there was little if any subjective improvement, although this was before I had made any measurements so I can’t be sure that there was no improvement at all. These devices get good reviews, but I believe they are just not serious enough to treat my particular problem easily, and I was a bit optimistic in buying them. I may still use them elsewhere in the studio, but I now need to plan some more serious bass trapping.

I liked the look of Real Traps Mini Traps they seemed like a good product, got good reviews, and they are actually based pretty close to me in Milford CT. I even briefly corresponded with one of the owners, Ethan Winer on the Sound On Sound forums without knowing it - seems like the type of company I would like to do business with but unfortunately, I have decided I need some pretty substantial treatment, probably 5 - 6 of these would be required, and at $200 each that would break the bank. So, a cheaper alternative was required.

Rod Gervais’ book included designs for a DIY bass trap, and there are also plans all over the internet for these (here is an example of a nicely laid out one). Ethan also features plans on his home pages. The DIY route is attractive because this is not a complex thing to do. Bass traps are really only a way of suspending an inert material in the corner of a room - in most cases Rockwool, or Owens Corning 703/705 insulation - these are both readily available construction materials that happen to have good absorption properties. In fact, Rod’s book gives detailed information on the absorption coefficients of various thicknesses of 703/705 and other materials - 705 seems to be marginally better than 703.

To build a bass trap you basically do the following:

• Build a frame to hold the insulation
• Put the insulation in it
• Cover it with fabric to hold it in place and improve the appearance

Its pretty simple, and well within Ant’s capabilities, although it would be a little time consuming to build 5 - 6 of these. I was in the process of ordering the OC705 to build this with when I stumbled across Ready Acoustics website. They sell OC705 and 703 in various sizes and that’s why I found them, but I also noticed that they make a line of Bass Trap Bags. The idea is that you buy the insulation, and then slide slabs of it into one of these bags to give a very cheap and ready built bass trap. The bag basically replaces the frame and fabric above and includes a loop and hooks for fixing. at $30 per bag, this was a great compromise. Much cheaper than buying real bass traps, much quicker than building them myself - a real aha moment!

I decided to go for a 4″ thickness of bass trap material, and ordered enough insulation and bags for 6 traps. The insulation was $130 for 6 48″x24″x2″ panels - I ordered 2 6 packs as I would be doubling up the width to 4″ per trap. So, $260 for the insulation which I would have needed anyway, and an additional $180 for the bags. I guess I could have saved maybe $100 or so on the bags by buying wood and fabric and building it myself but it would have taken a day at least and we will be on a tight schedule, so it seemed well worth it!

So now I have 6 bass traps on the way in an attractive grey color, where will I put them? At present the plan is as follows. I used a room mode calculator to check out the expected theoretical modes of my room, and it seems to show that there was a predicted mode at around 142hz associated with that back wall that the desk will be along. Given that, I am planning to concentrate treatment in this area. I am planning the following treatment:

• Bass traps in either corner floor to ceiling
• Bass traps above each monitor wall to ceiling
• A bass trap in the corner of the left hand wall and boiler room, floor to ceiling
• A bass trap in the middle of that left hand wall, wall to ceiling

I am really hoping that that amount of bass treatment will help to smooth out the response of the room.
Acoustic Tiles - a key part of any studio treatment, acoustic tiles are used to prevent higher frequency reflections which cause problems with stereo imaging, flutter echoes and comb filtering - all artifacts that will destroy a mix or tracking activity.

As previously mentioned, Auralex sell a wide range of acoustic products, and their studiofoam wedges are standard for this kind of treatment in studios everywhere. I decided on the 2″ tiles, and bought 24 of their 2′ x 2′ tiles, as well as 12 1′ x 1′ tiles - this should be enough to do all the treatment I need.

A key thing to get right is absorption of the so called mirror points - when treating a mixing room, you want to prevent reflections between the speakers and your ear, and these occur wherever you can place a mirror and see the speakers in it if you are sitting in the mixing position, usually left, right and above, so this will be the first thing I will do for high frequency treatment. The mirror points occur to the left, right, above and behind. I will definitely be treating the first 3, I may leave the behind portion since that wall is 20 feet or more away from the mixing position. If I have some left over tiles I might do it anyway. Tiles will also be required in the vocal area as well, but I’ll discuss that in a later article.

June 3rd, 2008 - Some Thoughts on Cabling

A pretty dull subject this, but also quite important - this is where we discuss cables and what we do with them. I initially expected this to be more complex than it was, but owing to the relocation of the vocal booth it has turned out to be pretty simple.

Lets start with a word on Audio cables. With the vocal booth sited on the opposite side of the room as was originally intended, I had the problem of sending Audio data both ways; from the microphone to the interface input, and from the monitor output to headphones for the vocalist. This is a very common problem to solve both in studios, and in a slightly different form on stage as well, and the well established and not too surprising solution is to use a stage box or snake. This is a pretty simple concept - you make a box with all your ins and outs on it, say 4 Mic Inputs and maybe a couple of Headphone sockets, wire them up and feed one thick cable out of it. The thick cable runs the distance required, and terminates in a bunch of plugs appropriate for plugging in to your interface inputs and outputs. Simple but elegant - you only have to run one cable the distance, and at the business end you have a neat mounting for all the sockets.

Snakes can be expensive of course, but I found a fairly modestly priced one made by Hosa, containing 6 XLR sockets and 2 TRS sockets (more abut XLR and TRS soon). The TRS are useful because they can be used to either run headphone outputs to the vocalist, or route stereo signals back to the mixer if that is ever necessary.

The version I got had a 50′ cable and cost just over $100. The plan was to route this up the back wall and above the suspended ceiling and down inside the vocal booth, and indeed I did that - it worked really well until I decided to move the booth! Now I have less of need for this with the new vocal booth location, but it is still a nice way of routing the cables and avoiding cable runs across the floor - I will route it along the side wall and behind the desk when it is built to keep the cabling nice and tidy.

A Digression : XLR, TRS, Balanced, Unbalanced - if the previous phrase sounds incomprehensible to you then you need to read this section before you wire a studio up! Knowing the difference between balanced and unbalanced cables can be important.

Regular, unbalanced cables are more common in lower end gear, and consist of 2 conductors, a signal and a screen. For instance, guitar cables are regular unbalanced cables. Balanced cables on the other hand consist of 3 conductors - hot, cold and screen. I don’t want to go into details here, but suffice it to say that balanced cables have much better noise and hum rejection characteristics and can run for much greater distances without degradation in quality for this reason. Higher end gear often uses exclusively balanced cabling; semi pro and project gear will often have the option of both.

In general, you should always try and use balanced connections wherever possible.

TRS and XLR are two different types of connectors used for audio connections. XLRs are most often used for Microphone connections and are always balanced. They are also used for higher end audio connections between gear when signals are low power (e.g. before amplification) and where noise is a concern - as it pretty much always is before amplification. An XLR plug looks like this:

You can clearly see the three connections there.

By contrast, a TRS connector, whilst it still has three connections looks a lot more like a regular guitar jack. TRS actually stands for Tip Ring Sleeve - the three connections you can see here:

Now, with TRS things start to get a little complicated so bear with me. TRS plugs are often used as balanced connectors in studios, but not always. They are also used as effect send and receive cables. When used in this way, they are carrying two separate signals, the pre-effect signal and the post-effect signal - the ground remains common to both signals. This allows effect inserts to be wired up with a single cable rather than two and is popular for this reason as it reduces clutter in mixing desks. A third use for TRS cables is to route stereo signals such as headphones, so be careful not to confuse the various different uses.

An additional complication with TRS plugs is that the plugs themselves are pretty similar to regular jack plugs, and the sockets are actually indistinguishable from the outside which leads to endless confusion. This is what they look like side by side:

As you can see, they look similar, both sharing the 1 (Sleeve) and 3 (Tip) conductors. The TRS though has an additional sleeve (2) and the insulating rings (4) differ between the two.

In practice, this means that confusion often reigns in amateur studios. One problem is that you can’t tell the difference between a balanced and unbalanced input socket (the plugs, yes, but not the sockets), you need to know, or it has to be marked, wheras with XLR it is very clear cut. This means that in practice, inexperienced technicians (that’s you and me!) often plug an unbalanced cable into a balanced input. This will actually work ok, since it is designed this way, but you are losing out this way on some noise rejection, especially if you hook 2 pieces of equipment together with an unbalanced cable when the equipment actually has balanced inputs and outputs. So, know your equipment and understand the difference between balanced and unbalanced.

Another common mistake is in trying to connect a microphone to a jack input. There are a couple of problems here. The first instinct is to run out an buy a an XLR to jack cable and indeed these are easily available but this is bad on 2 counts:

You should be hooking any microphone up to a microphone amplifier, not a line level input. Mic amps pretty much always have XLR inputs - if you don’t have an XLR input you probably don’t have a microphone amp and the results will not be good. Those XLR to Jack cables usually terminate in a regular unbalanced jack - you have just lost the benefit of the balanced output of your microphone.

So think this through before you run out and buy that XLR to Jack cable - if you think you need that cable, it’s more likely that you actually need a microphone amp for best results.

Back to the subject at hand - my setup has grown organically over the last few years, and at least at the beginning I didn’t fully understand the importance of balanced cables and the subtleties of TRS. I decided to put this right and went through my setup. I was pleased to see that all my gear had balanced ins and outs so I bought the appropriate cables to make sure all the cable runs were balanced - notably from my soundcard to my mixer, and from the mixer to my new Adam monitors.

Next up is Power Cabling. OK, not too much to say here except that I try to keep computer and audio power separate, and wire things up in a star configuration as far as possible. That means pulling all power from a single point and coming out to distribution strips as far as possible - this is a good way to avoid Earth Loops. Earth loops are bad news in studio construction and can cause bad hum problems that are very difficult to trace. Sourcing all the power form a single point where practical helps to avoid this. I have had some thoughts about adding a power conditioner at least to the audio power side - this would help to filter the power and remove any spikes. I don’t have a problem here that I am aware of but I will probably add one in the future.

And finally, a word on data cabling. Again, not too much to say here - I have the usual monitor cable, the rest is pretty much USB. I have a single USB hub and will make stringent efforts to separate the USB and audio cabling as much as possible. With a built in interface as I have, unfortunately the audio cables are forced to come in and out of the back of the computer, although they are balanced. If I had a firewire or USB interface, I could move them further away, and this is one of my longer term plans. At the moment I do get some residual electronic fuzz through the monitors occasionally, and my USB disc drive is particularly bad. When the studio goes in I will be making efforts to troubleshoot this and get things as quiet as possible!

June 5th, 2008 - The Vocal Area

Now its time to think a little bit about the vocal area. A small but important piece of the overall picture.

Lets remind ourselves of what we have to work with:

As you can see, we are backed into a corner and have the workstation out on the other side. The plan is that the computer noise will be removed entirely by the addition of the soundproof box we will build - that is really the biggest concern here. At the moment it is impossible to record anything in the position you see the microphone, owing to the noise of the computer.

Once the computer noise is accounted for, the next consideration is acoustic treatment of course. This are will be used for recording guitar as well as vocals so there are a couple of extra considerations.

Firstly, the room itself will have benefited from the acoustic treatment I am doing for the control area. There will already be bass traps on that back wall and corners. For good measure, I will add a bass trap in the corner by the microphone and probably in the wall/ceiling angle of the side wall. With that amount of bass trapping I am hoping that boxiness and resonances will be a thing of the past, and it is my aim to be able to record without the Reflexion filter you see in the picture.

With bass trapping taken care of, reflections are the next order of business. I have mentioned before that a vocal area needs some treatment but does not want to be completely dead, so this will be a certain amount of trial and error. I am initially planning on treating the 2 closest walls from ceiling down to shoulder level, and probably the ceiling as well, but I will add tiles, test the sound, add more tiles and retest until I get a sound that I like.

When recording guitar, I will be sitting down, so the treatment will also need to go lower for this. For guitar, a certain amount of reflection can be desirable so I may well need less, or alternatively plan on putting a hard surface on the floor that can be removed for vocals, such as a piece of plywood or something.

The basic rule here is to try it and see, we will spend some time tuning this area to get the sort of sound that we want and then call it done!

June 7th, 2008 - All Change!

In this update we have a last minute and fairly substantial change to the layout - the reasons are good and I think this will make things a lot easier!

Building this studio is a little like building a house of cards … if you change the foundation, everything has to shift to suit or come crashing down. A few thoughts around the PC have caused a similar cascade effect in my thinking!

Removing the noise of the PC from the equation is a key part of this whole exercise - as things stand, the PC noise is obtrusive and prevents really good recordings, especially for demanding applications such as Voiceovers where there is no chance to bury any background noise in the mix. You can get away with this surprisingly well in other applications, such as rock or pop songs where the accompaniment will mask any background noise, but it does affect the overall result and should be avoided wherever possible.

So far, the working assumption has been that we will put the PC in a soundproofed box. On looking into this a little more deeply I was a little worried about the amount of effort that would be required to build this successfully. The design would need to be a box in a box, surrounded by some kind of acoustic absorber. In addition, we would need to vent it and extract the warm air somewhere out of the room - necessitating a long run of tubing with a noisy fan on the end, probably in the Garage. This probably would have worked but would have been a lot of effort to get right, and remember we only have a week for this, and that week has to include songwriting and playing - we really don’t want to spend more than 2 - 3 days getting the studio right.

With this in mind, I revisited the idea of putting the PC in the boiler room. I had though of this briefly initially, and was reminded of the idea by Bali in a comment to my “Punctured Vanity” entry. A very quick test in which I put the PC in the boiler room and booted it up proved the point - the studio was now blissfully quiet, so the sound insulating properties of the boiler room were ample, and on further reflection I believed that the Boiler Room would probably be ok heat wise for the PC. If not I could revisit this perhaps with a water cooling setup.

The next problem was that of extending leads. I would need around 25ft on all of my cables:

• Four balanced cables for audio in and out
• Two TosLink fibre cables to connect my UAD8000
• USB cables
• Firewire cable (for my video camera)
• Monitor cable

Balanced cables can run hundreds of feet with little problem but the rest might cause issues. The TosLink cables should be good for 25ft, but the maximum USB cable length is 15ft and Firewire is even less. Monitor cables didn’t seem to be happy running that far either. I checked into some higher priced alternatives for extending these various cables, but the price was escalating significantly and I was on the verge of giving up on it … if only I could put the PC on the other side of a wall but keep it in the sample place in relation to all the other gear …

That was the moment of revalation - It turns out that I can. All I have to do is redesign the space a little (this is where the house of cards analogy comes in - a small change in the PC strategy ends up with a redesign of the whole space!). So, I flip the whole desk counter-clockwise 90 degrees, and put it against the side wall, and put the PC just inside the boiler room. I run the cables through a hole in the wall and bingo, I have the solution I was looking for! To do this properly I will need about 10ft of cables for all the things mentioned above, but that is now no big deal, I’ll put the order in on Monday and hopefully most of it should be here before Ant arrives. The space will now look like this:

All else remains the same in work area terms, although I think the right hand side will have to go back fairly deep to keep the keyboard within easy reach - this could make a great work area for guitar restringing and such just by pushing the keyboard back and out of the way.

This does a couple of other things as well that I like - it opens up more space for the all important guitar library, and similarly there is more space for vocals. It will be a less enclosed space which should reduce any boxiness and help with the overall vocal sound.

In treatment terms this also means all change. Before I decide how to go about this, I will re-measure the room, as I now have a new position for the speakers, and new speakers as well. I could have a different set of problems, but we’ll see. Over-treating with bass traps would not be a problem, but as I only have 6 of these, it would be nice to put some treatment in the rest of the room to improve the overall sound for vocals and other types of tracking. As you can see, I have penciled in a drum area - I dearly want this studio to be fully functional and capable of tracking a live band if necessary, and part of that will be drums. For this to work I will need bleed control (you can get screens or even half booths to help with this) and of course now the whole room needs treatment for good acoustics. So now, the plan is to build the desk and retest the acoustics, adding the minimum number of bass traps necessary to get a great sound for mixing, then distribute the rest around the studio as necessary.

I am getting a little ahead of myself here though, as the main aim for the coming weeks activities with Ant is to get a good mixing environment, and a great vocal and acoustic guitar recording environment. Drums will come later and will require a lot more investment in equipment:

• Drum kit!
• Drum Mics
• More room treatment
• Partitions

Ant’s take on this is that we will aim for that next year when he comes over again, and maybe at that time we’ll gather some session musicians, either friends or hired to help us track a couple of live songs if we can get the studio up to scratch!

So there you have it - a 90 degree flip in thinking and in the desk as well, opens up the studio for bigger and better things !

June 11th, 2008 - A Studio Needs a Soul …

This post is a little digression, but important

One day, maybe 12 years ago, my co-conspirator Ant was out and about in the Birmingham Area. He happened upon a junk shop, and there he saw a sculpture or statue that reminded him of nothing other than an honest to goodness Sungod … fixated with this idea he rushed home and immediately composed an ethnic sounding song in honor of the strange being and called it “Sungod” of course. Although I remember it clearly, we never recorded it, it was just a tune made up of midi played through the synth we had at the time, with a lot of African drums and other esoteric instruments. We liked it so much that we decided to name our joint studio of that Era “Sungod Studios” - and it has been called that ever since through several incarnations. The grand task I am embarking upon in this blog is in fact the realization of Sungod Connecticut - the Connecticut branch of the Sungod Studios business empire!

Time moved on, we ditched the sequencer software we used to produce it, and although Ant still has the synth we couldn’t play the song anymore and memory dimmed it …

I recently came across the midi file for “Sungod” and decided to resurrect it … I was faced with a number of Midi tracks that were obviously percussion, and were complete nonsense unless you happen to know the exact patches used on the old Synth and the key mappings. I could figure out which were the melody and piano parts, but the percussion was impenetrable …

I decided to keep the melody parts and build a completely new backing for it. I added percussion, bass and drums and ended up taking what was an ethnic sounding masterpiece to a more upbeat and modern sounding piece - and it occurred to me that this was very much in keeping with the modern upgraded status of the new studio over the equipment we had when the original “Sungod” was written - so now my studio has a theme tune, and I offer it to you below:

Now the studio is coming alive, I am starting to feel the soul I am talking about in the title … a studio is a place of creativity in recording and mixing, and the feel of the place is supremely important. Little touches like this, although they may sound a little frivolous, all help with that. When Ant comes over I fully intend to take him shopping - we will do our best to find something like the Sungod that inspired the name in the first place, and we’ll bring it back to the studio and give it pride of place - and of course I’ll share a picture with you all!

Now, back to practicalities! As planned, Ant will be arriving tomorrow and construction will commence - things will move rapidly from here and I’ll try to keep you all up to date on a daily basis.

All the gear is here:

• Bass Traps
• Auralex Tiles
• Wire Tidies
• Rack Rails & Blanking Plates
• Adam A7s
• New Cables (with the exception of the monitor cable which is expected tomorrow)

In particular, the Adam A7’s sound miraculous even in the untreated studio. Like all good monitors they let you surgically pick apart any track. The result is that well put together tracks sound amazing, less well put together tracks sound bad - these speakers do not flatter, and if a track sounds good on them, then it likely is good - this is the real function of monitor speakers, to let you hear the individual parts of the music so you can construct a unified whole, and the A7s achieve this with flair!

In addition to the A7s, I bought a couple of additional items for the rack - I decided to get an 8 channel headphone amp to replace the non-rack headphone amp I currently have.

I also picked up a couple of patch bays to help with the wiring.

Both Behringer, and both good value for money.

Over the next few days, our list of tasks includes:

• Existing studio dismantling
• Throwing out the old desk
• Building a new desk
• Cabling the PC into the machine room
• Building the mobile 19″ rack
• Retesting acoustics for the new location and speakers
• Constructing and erecting the Bass Traps
• Applying the Acoustic Tiles
• Re-test the room acoustics and adjust if necessary

And perhaps just as important, there is a secondary list of things to achieve:

• Jam together for hours
• Write some new songs
• Record some new songs
• Drink Martinis
• Eat great food
• Relive past glories
• Work on our acoustic set

That last one we do every time we get together - we never get it finished but it is a lot of fun!

Point is, we plan to have a lot of fun as well as get some serious work done - I am seriously looking forward to this coming week!

June 14th, 2008 - Studio Build - Update

Ant arrived as planned, and we spent the remainder of Thursday in detailed planning and list making.

We put together a list for the desk and the rack, plus a couple of other side projects we wanted to work on after the studio build.

Friday dawned, and bright and early we picked up the rental van that we would be using to heave honking great pieces of plywood for the desk and long pieces of wood for studding. At Home Depot we spent a couple of hours grabbing everything we needed.

The desk area is around 10 feet acros, but we could only get 8ft ply, so Ant re-planned a 3 piece desk setup, we bought the stuff and headed home to begin construction.

The desk was planned to be 4 feet deep, but scooped out in the middle allowing access to the keyboard on the right, and the rack on the left. It took the rest of the day to cut and shape the pieces including a shaped shelf to put the monitor speakers on. Here’s a shot of an initial fitting of the desk:

Towards the end of the day we decided that we wanted to at least fit the bass traps as this would be harder with the desk in place. First however we had to build them. The idea is simple, you just slide slabs of fibreglass into bags. In practice this is however particularly nasty to do and we gave up after 3 as that was all we initially needed.

With the bass traps fitted then taken down again, we gave up for the night.

The next day (today) so far has been spent fixing the desk and shelf in place and applying a coat of varnish.

And that’s it so far - more in the next update!

June 22nd, 2008 - Studio Build - Update 2

Building has finished, Ant has gone back to the UK and its time for an update!

When we last spoke, we were varnishing the desk - and when finally complete it looked like this:

Ant spent the rest of the day building the rack. He had put a lot of thought into it and it had quite a few useful features:

• Fully covered on the visible side, but including a hole for wires
• Cut away at the top for very easy access to wiring form the other side
• Space for airflow at the bottom
• Wheels and handles to enable easy movement for rewiring
• A useful shelf at the back for coiling wires.

All in all, an excellent job, and it looked like this during manufacture:

And the finished and fully populated article:

After we had the rack complete, I rewired the studio - it made a mess of wires under the new desk, but I have plans to address that later. The next task was to figure out what audio treatment we needed, so once again, I tested the room. It was pretty much the same story, so I wasted no time getting the bass traps up - first one either side of the desk, then I remeasured. And then we put one in the middle of the wall between the wall and ceiling, and again re-measured.

Here are the results:

This is where you can really see the bass treatment in action!

The blue trace is the untreated room - quite a few dips there as you can see. Adding the first 2 bass traps (pink trace) smoothed out the dips at around 110hz and 230hz. In the final trace you can see our problem frequency at 144hz has really been smoothed out! So, whilst the final trace isn’t a straight line (it never would be in the real world), some of the most severe dips have been ironed out by an impressive amount. And of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or indeed the listening, and a spin of a few favourite tracks showed a great improvement in the sound of the room.

Next we placed Auralex 2″ tiles in the mirror points of the room, and then moved on to the recording treatment. In fact, this turned out to be a non-event. A few test recordings showed that the room now sounded impressively neutral, and neither too live, nor too dead. Vocals weren’t coloured by the room, but they did have a sense of space around them that wasn’t present when using the Reflexion filter. Although the reflexion filter is impressive in taking the badness out of a bad room, it still isn’t as good as using a good room, and for my purposes I now have a good room

A few final touches were put in place next - we put up a couple of shelves and some new hooks for wires and generally tidied up, and now the studio looks like this:

I hope you’ll agree it turned out pretty well!

There are still a few minor jobs to take care of :

• Shelving under the desk to hide the wiring
• I will need to add some power conditioning as my speakers hum slightly even when disconnected and turned down
• Although the noise floor is now very low, I might tinker and see if I can improve things further

We spent the last couple of days of Ant’s visit doing some vocal recordings and the results were great - I now have a fully functioning, high quality studio and the results are all I could have hoped for!

END