Image-Line has finally moved to a phpBB forum for its users found at www.forum.image-line.com. This will only be available for registered users. They are currently in the process of moving all old forum content to the new forums.
If you are not familiar with Image-Line, they are the developers of FL Studio.
I think a lot of the readers (i don’t know for sure, you guys don’t comment much) are like me and do most of our recording out of a single room ‘studio’. If you are lucky you have a closet/vocal booth as well. While it does have a few, very few, advantages single room studios for the most part suck. Here are some reasons why and possible solutions to these problems.
Noise and interruptions: Even big studios have to deal with this, outside noise getting into the mics. Things like big trucks driving by and construction. Here I have plumbing, fans, garbage trucks, and neighbors to deal with. All I can really do is close all the windows and turn off all the fans, but then it quickly becomes hot in here.
Monitoring: If you are recording anything in a one room studio that means you are tracking with headphones on, both you and the artist. Remember to listen back both on headphones and on speakers, but remember to mute the speakers while tracking. Its really easy to ruin a good take with bleed this way, as I learned today.
Acoustics: Likely its a rectangle, you can’t do much to change the shape of it, but you can use some acoustic treatments to improve the sound. My recording room is a large rectangular room with big windows and hard painted concrete walls. Needless to say, its a little bright with a noticeable echo. To lesson the effect of the room on the recording, heavy blankets, Baffles, and close micing helps a lot.
Lack of isolation: Both you and the artist are in the same room, while he is playing you have to sit still, make sure you don’t cough, sneeze, or squeak your chair. Benefits of this closeness is being able to instantly give feedback on the performance and not need to worry about a talkback system as well as being able to give visual cues to the artist.
Space: You likely have very little space to spare, you probably don’t have room to record a drumkit. Maybe you love the sound of a cranked Marshall stack, lets sit right beside it, right thats a good idea. There really isn’t much you can do about this other than going to a real studio for drums or bed tracks.
Privacy: This is your home, how many band members are you comfortable with wandering around your home, clogging your toilet, eating your food, etc. You will need to limit the amount of musicians to one if you want to maintain any control.
These are just some of the many downfalls of recording at home.
Sound On Sound has a great little article on the effects of microphones on guitar tone with mp3 and wav examples. Its pretty interesting. They explore:
Room and positioning
Different types of mics
Mic placement
Miking different speaker cones
Ambient mics and The Vortex
Using Phase
Check it out here: Sound On Sound Magazine
Digidesign’s Advanced Instrument Research team has just released LE and Free editions of Structure the RTAS sample player. This is great news for PT LE users because you get a taste of the powerful Structure, and cheapskates like me don’t have to spend any more cash. The Free version can be downloaded after logging in to the Digidesign site.
Structure Free Features
64-voice multitimbral sound engine
Loads all Structure compatible sample libraries (native Structure, SampleCell, SampleCell II, Kontakt, Kontakt 2, and EXS 24). Full compatibility with all Structure versions (Structure, Structure LE), you can easily upgrade and still use your Pro Tools sessions created with structure Free. You can also open sessions which originally used Structure or Structure LE with Structure Free.
Sample playback via disk streaming or RAM
Support of all common bit depths and sample rates up to 24-bit/192 kHz
Easy real-time sound manipulation via Smart knobs
MIDI Learn functionality for quick and easy assignment of hardware MIDI controllers
http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=48&itemid=26780&langid=100&action=news_details
