Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Rodgre at the Tape Op forum just completed building an ISO box for recording electric guitars.
Built inside of a large road case, it houses a Celestion G10L 10″ speaker and a short mic stand on a baffle close to half way across the box. The purpose of the box is for recording loud electric guitar amps without all the volume and leakage. Its a great piece of gear for re-amping tracks as well.
I’ve been thinking of building one of these myself, those road cases are always on ebay or craigslist quite cheap.
The original post is here.
Posted in Acoustics, Gear, Tutorial | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
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.
Posted in Acoustics, Commentary; Rants and Jokes, Gear | 3 Comments »
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
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
Posted in Acoustics, Gear, Tutorial | No Comments »
Sunday, May 6th, 2007
I know this is hardly breaking news, but since I’ve never seen it before, you haven’t likely seen it either.
So here’e the situation, you want to build a home studio, you want it to be isolated from outside sounds, and have a balanced sound, and you want to build it yourself. Problem is, you have no idea where to start. Luckily Auralex wrote a handy practical guide for just this sort of thing. www.acoustics101.com is where to get it.
The pdf provides plenty of information on acoustic terms and construction materials, as well as building the floor, walls, and ceiling. It is a great guide to studio construction, and great acoustics primer for everyone else. Auralex also has an easy way to figure out which acoustic treatment package is right for your room here. They also provide free room analysis via email.
www.acoustics101.com
Posted in Acoustics, Tutorial | No Comments »
