Monitoring and Listening – StudioMicZone

Engineering Isn’t Easy

Learning to be a recording engineer is not easy. Like any other intricate craft, it takes time and practice. And buying more or better equipment isn’t going to make learning the process easier. In fact, it slows it down. Here are some hints to keep the process moving.

Build Your Listening Skills – Good listening skills are maybe the most important thing you need to do to become a competent recording engineer. Not only should you be listening on good speakers, but your room also needs to enhance the accuracy. The speakers need to be set up symmetrically in the room, and the room should have enough absorption and diffusion. If you can’t build a proper listening environment, then use headphones. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than a room that is poor acoustically.

Listen to recordings that are known for good mixes and learn what a well-done mix sounds like on your system. Then listen critically to different recordings. Try to identify the type of reverbs used, what each instrument sounds like, and how they fit into the mix. In the beginning, you need to do this for a couple of hours a day, every day. Critical listening skills are essential to your progress.

Keep It Simple – Avoid buying many plug-ins and keep the outboard gear to a minimum. The plug-ins that came with your DAW are probably sufficient. You’ll need an equalizer, a compressor, and a reverb at a minimum. Choose an equalizer that has multiple frequencies that are adjustable with boost and cut labeled in decibels. Choose a compressor where you can specify the compression ratio, the threshold in decibels, and the attack and release in milliseconds. Emulations of old analog equipment with arbitrary settings and not units and channel strip emulations from classic consoles are challenging to use and won’t help you learn what you are doing. The specialized emulations can come later after you learn the basics.

Don’t worry about having multiple microphone preamps. Simple, clean preamps do the job well. Avoid vacuum tube preamps and preamps with EQ or “color.” Again, if you wish, you can add these types of preamps once you have mastered the basics, and that means several years down the road.

Read and Watch Videos – Videos and articles by equipment and software manufacturers can help you, as well as training courses by reputable engineers. Be careful of recording forums; there can be a lot of inaccurate and misleading information on those sites. If you can take a recording course at a community college or a studio near you, this can help jump-start your education.

Practice, Practice, Practice – The most important thing is to practice. Try things and listen carefully to your results. How do your results depart from the ideal? This is the most challenging part, developing the listening skills to determine what is lacking in your recordings and then how to fix them. The answer is rarely better equipment.

Learning to be a recording engineer is a long and arduous process, just like learning a musical instrument. Persistence is your best friend.

5 Things You Need to Make a Great Recording

Many components come together to produce a great recording. Here are the 5 key steps you need to know.

Performance. You need to start with a good song, performed by great musicians. Legendary Memphis studio owner, Willie Mitchell, once said, “If you’ve got a hit record, you can cut it in the bathroom on a cassette.” If you are recording spoken word and you have a narrator that can’t read or an unreadable script, there is nothing you can do to fix it.
Engineering. The skill of the recording engineer is of paramount importance. You can give an experienced engineer a box of SM57 microphones and some essential recording gear, and they will make a great recording. Give an inexperienced engineer a closet full of expensive classic German Microphones and the latest equipment, and they’ll make a mess.
Listening Space. If you can’t hear accurately, you won’t be able to mix. Your room needs to be symmetric so you can hear stereo properly and you need to treat it to remove resonances and unwanted reflections. If you don’t have a functional space, you’ll need to use an accurate pair of headphones. Mixing on headphones isn’t ideal, but it is better than an untreated room. In either case, you need to calibrate your ears by listening to well-mixed recordings and know how they sound in your space.
Recording Space. You’ll need a space that is relatively quiet, big enough to hold the musicians you are recording, and having the sound treatment necessary to cancel any resonances and suck up the extra low frequencies. Doing close miking on all instruments can compensate for a non-perfect room.
Recording Equipment. Of course, you’ll need the BASIC equipment, DAW, preamps, and microphones appropriate for the type of recording you are doing. Remember, better equipment is not going to make up for any deficiencies in the four items listed above. Once you have developed your skills as an engineer, have a good listening space and the right recording environment, then you can think about expensive microphones and extra plug-ins to add polish to your already great recordings.

External Noise Evaluation

I was aware of the possibility that I would occasionally have a problem with recording due to external noise that was beyond my control. It could be a lawnmower, chainsaw or any of a variety of outdoor tools and appliances, and it could happen at any time. I hadn’t had an opportunity to gauge the amount of threat that existed. Until last week.

There were several large maples and a pear tree that were shading my garden so much that I soon wouldn’t have enough sunlight to grow vegetables, so I contracted to have the trees removed. The crew worked quickly and efficiently and once enough of the trees were down, it was time to grind up the branches.

They parked the large chipper in my driveway, which put it 15-20 feet from my basement control room. If you have never been near an operating wood chipper, they are one of the loudest mechanical devices you will ever encounter. This machine would be the ultimate test of sound isolation for my new studio.

Once the engine was going and they were grinding branches and limbs on a continuous basis, I headed for the basement. I sat in the control room with the chipper less than 20 feet away, and although audible, it would not have been disruptive to a recording or mixing session.

I went out to the studio and listened. If I listened really hard, it was just barely audible. I can’t think of any close-miking situation where the sound would have gotten into the recording. That was excellent news! I was convinced that no matter what is going on outside, recording or mixing wouldn’t be disturbed. After this, if any outdoor sounds disrupt a recording session, I know that I probably have a lot bigger problems than an interrupted session.

Evaluation – Calibrating Your Ears & Checking Your Monitoring

So, I’ve finally finished my great sounding new studio. Now what? It’s time for calibrating my ears to the new room. I did this periodically in my old space, particularly after changes in equipment and any upgrades to the structure or sound treatment. And maybe most importantly, before beginning the mixing of any new album.

Every control room sounds different. Even the best studios with the best speakers sound different from one another. They have different speakers and speaker placements, different designs, different amplifiers and different equipment and furniture bouncing the sound around in the room. This difference will be even more apparent for non-professionally designed and sub-optimally constructed home and small studios.

I am assuming that you have been listening as you put your room together and corrected any major problems during the construction process.

Part of the process is knowing how well-recorded and mixed albums sound in your room. In a new space, it’s also about listening for any problems in acoustical design or the monitoring system and any quirks or deficiencies in the sound. Plan on spending a lot of time listening to music in any new control room or on any new set of speakers. I am talking about maybe 4 to 5 hours per week for a couple of months. Most of this time needs to be active listening, not background music. Listen to each instrument in the mix and how it sounds. Listen to the 3D field of the mix, where is each instrument placed and what the perception of the performance space is.

The playlist is important because listening to poorly mixed music is going to falsely calibrate your ears and lead you to bad sounding mixes. You’ll want to listen to music in the genre’s that you usually work in, and search for albums in that genre that are noted for their outstanding engineering and sound. A little bit of Internet research should help you formulate a list.

And it should go without saying that you should not be listening to any MP3 or otherwise compressed files. Listen to CDs or at least 16bit .wav files recorded at 44.1 kHz or higher. Compressed files sound fine for casual listening, but not for critical listening. Save them for when you are in the car or out jogging.

You should also listen to some of your favorite music as long is it is of good quality and again no compressed files. The last items on the list should be good quality music that you have produced in the past, assuming you are not just starting out.

Then start listening. Get it into your head how a well-mixed piece sounds in your room. Stand up, lean forward and back, move sideways in either direction. Is the sound consistent? Or is there a “sweet spot” you need to be in to hear correctly? Put on a track with a lot of bass and walk around the room. Listen for spots where the bass goes away or gets very boomy. If it’s a problem, you maybe need to add some bass traps in the corners of the room. At least you can have your clients avoid standing in those places when you are mixing, so they do not hear false bass.

Listen to a recording where you know that the vocalist is centered, sit in your mixing position and close your eyes and make sure the vocalist is in the center. If the vocalist is off center, you may have a problem with symmetry in the room, or maybe the gain on one channel of the amplifier needs to go up or down a dB or two. Make sure the connections from the output of your workstation, to the monitor mixer if you have one, and to the amp are good. Make sure the switches in the monitor mixer are making good contact. On my Mackie BigKnob, I have a switch that occasionally goes flaky and upsets the channel balance. I flick it about 20 times, and it’s fine for a few months again.

If you have more than one set of monitors, do it with each set. In addition to my main monitors, which are JBL L100s, we have a set of NS-10 near field monitors, and I run these checks on both sets, though I do most of my listening on the L100s. After listening consistently for a few days you’ll get an idea of what well-mixed music should sound like in your room, you’ll also know if there are any serious deficiencies in the space or monitors that need fixing.

After a week or so of listening in my new room, I thought I had occasionally been hearing some brittleness in the sound. I finally decided that the problem was the tweeter in the left L100 which I replaced. The brittleness went away. The L100s have adjustments for volume to the tweeter and the midrange speaker. At this time, after a few weeks of listening, I made some minor changes to these settings for what I thought was the most balanced sound in the room.

For my regular checks, I have 6 or 7 songs in a file that I use for listening tests. They are a variety of styles and arrangements that let me evaluate my monitor system. I’ll do a listening test every few months just to make sure the system is working properly, checking for distortion, stereo imaging and any other problems that might pop up. I also spend a half hour or so listening before mixing a new project. I listen to the songs I use for testing plus some of the artist’s recordings. I may also listen to the recordings of other artists when my client tells me, “I want my songs to sound like Artist X’s new album.” That sometimes helps with the mixing.

Knowing what a good mix sounds like in your listening space helps you become a better engineer and produce a better product.

A couple of other tips on mixing and listening. During a long mixing session, there will be a point where everything sounds terrible no matter what you. This is the time to stop and resume again tomorrow with a set of fresh ears. When listening fatigue sets in, you are not going to be happy with your mix, so it is best just to stop.

When you have finished a mix, let it sit for a couple of days and then listen to it again and make sure you are still happy with the final product. Listen to it in the car and a couple of other home systems to make sure it sounds good there also.

Home Studio (Part 7 of 8) – Thoughts On the Recording Space

Most of my effort has been spent building a new control room, and the plan has been to do limited recording in my rec room. There was just not the budget or space to construct a dedicated recording space. My initial though was that the room was quiet enough and acoustically agreeable for a close-miked recording of one or two people.

So, the only thing we really did was to do a bit or re-arranging of the furniture, and run a 12 channel mike snake into the room and run lines for headphone monitoring using an existing Q-Mix box.

Shooting a segment for The Style Academy with Noelle Cellini.

Also, since I still do some video production, the room needed to stay adaptable for an occasional video shoot using a nine-foot paper background. We did our first video shoot in the space during the early stages of Control Room construction, and this gave me some insight into the sound of the room.

I shot a series of videos for Noelle Cellini of The Style Academy at my previous studio and continue to do that here in my new space. Noelle’s videos are focused on how to dress, and since she may wear several different outfits in the course of a video plus demonstrate accessories like scarves and necklaces, using a lavalier microphone would present a lot of problems. I typically use a RØDE NTG2 shotgun mike placed above and to her left or right, 3 to 4 feet away. I can hear a bit of room sound, but the recording is acceptable. There is just a little more room sound than the old studio, so I was encouraged that this space would work for music recording.

Recording with Lee Murdock

The first real recording test was with Lee Murdock. We didn’t have a lot of time, but I set him up as I usually do, seated, with two Shure SM-81 microphones on the guitar, one right above where the neck joins the body and a second one on the bottom of the guitar body opposite the neck. Then I set up a CAD Equitek E200 for his voice. We recorded a couple of songs, and the results were good with no noticeable coloration of the sound. It’s what I expected, but it was good to verify it. We were both happy since Lee has an album project to record next year.

Then with the Control Room partially complete, I started a project with Danielle and Bill from The Crickets Duo. We recorded Vocals, keyboard, acoustic and electric guitar and ukelele. Again the results were encouraging, with no coloration problems on any of the recordings.

The only thing I am doing acoustically in the room is to cover up the television and a barrister bookcase with blankets since they are highly reflective. I also unplug my wine cooler and turn off the heating and air conditioning while we are recording. As I stated in an earlier post, all of the lighting is LED, so the room doesn’t heat up too much when the A/C is off.

Recording with The Crickets Duo

We plan on pushing the envelope a bit and seeing what is possible in the room. We have a drum recording session scheduled for the Spring, as well as a session with a choir. Look for a report on this in April or May.

So, when the control room is complete in the next month or so what are the plans for this room? We still use this room for entertaining during the Holidays and occasionally during the winter, so It needs to be easily transformable back into a rec room. And since I still do some video shoots down here it needs to be quickly convertible from a recording studio to a video studio and back.

Right now, this is the biggest problem as this transformation takes at least a couple of hours in each direction. My first effort will focus on cutting this time down. Better storage of lighting equipment will help. Also, I currently set up my paper backdrop on stands which is time-consuming. I’ll be looking into a way of hanging the rolls in the ceiling so the paper can be pulled down when needed and then rolled back up into the ceiling when done.

As far as acoustical treatment, I’d like to add some ATS absorptive panels to the walls as well as some diffusers, similar to what I built for the Control Room. I think stuffing the ceiling with fiberglass insulation above the dropped ceiling might even out the low-frequency response of the room and compensate for the low ceiling.

But, at this point, the room is working for what I need. Once I try recording drums and some larger vocal groups, we’ll have a better indication of what we need to do.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 8)

Home Studio (Part 6 of 8) – More Testing and Diffusion

Cedar diffusion structures on the back wall.

Frequency response and evenness in the room are pretty good, but the stereo imaging is still not very good. I had been in a quandary as to what kind of diffusion I should put on the back wall and was not happy with the options I explored. I found some commercially available molded-plastic diffusers that weren’t overly expensive. They could be painted, but I wasn’t thrilled with the look. What I wanted was wood, but the pre-made diffusers were ridiculously expensive, and I wasn’t happy with the ideas I was having for making my own.

One night I was playing around with some leftover pieces of cedar that we had, and it hit me. I would make a four layer construction of cedar strips, so including the wall it was attached to, there would be five reflective layers or different depths to diffuse the sound. I played around with the idea on paper so that each layer would have approximately the same reflective surface area.

Close-up, four layer wood diffuser.

I quickly cut and screwed one together and was amazed how good it looked and how well it fit into the decor of the room. I found that if I built the layers in reverse order, I could put the screws in from the back and they wouldn’t be visible. I bought the wood the next day, and in one evening built the four diffusers, assembled with both glue and screws. I attached them to the back wall and closet doors and then did some listening.

It made a significant difference on the stereo imaging. The room sounded very nice, and the stereo imaging was tight. I was pleased with the result. The room sound was way better than I had hoped it would be.

I hadn’t added any diffusion to the right side wall, and I probably didn’t need much since that wall had the equipment racks, an Ampex tape recorder, and a cabinet with a lamp on top. But since there were a few feet of wall that was reflective, I added some strips of cedar with several different layers of thickness. It might have been more for looks than sound, but it looks great and adds a bit of diffusion on that wall.

I also wrapped the heating duct in sound deadening material and then framed it in acoustical tile and cedar. I put sound deadening material behind the register that feeds air to the room. We had previously moved it from the front to the back of the room to keep the sound of the air as far away from the mixing position as possible.

One other item causing a problem was the pipe from the well. Every time the well turned off, the pipe would bang, it also radiated some noise when the well was running. I wrapped the pipe in sound deadening material and added a couple of pipe hangers to make sure it was well supported. I found that the pipe was banging against another pipe in the furnace room, and by supporting both pipes properly, I solved that problem. Finally, I sealed the space around the water pipe and furnace duct where they went through the wall into the control room with spray foam. That cut down on a lot of noise. If the room is quiet, it is still very audible when the well turns on, but if music is playing, the sound isn’t noticeable.

Finally, I installed the last of the equipment in the rack. Nothing critical, but a couple of pieces I use once in a while like a turntable and a cassette player.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 7)

Home Studio (Part 5 of 8) – Initial Testing

After a bit more listening, I still felt that the low-end evenness in the room left something to be desired. After thinking about it, I decided that the best way to compensate for the low ceiling was to make it as absorptive as possible. So I filled the space between my ten inch deep joists with fiberglass batts. Now the room was starting to sound decent, although the stereo imaging was still not acceptable. But there was still no diffusion on the side or back walls, so that would be expected.

I really wanted to do a full test including live recording, so Lee Murdock came in and did a brief recording test, and loved the results. Danielle and Bill from Even the Jackals agreed to be guinea pigs for testing the studio. They have a new group that plays acoustic music and go by The Crickets. My initial recording results with them were encouraging.

Ceiling tile and grid.

I still wasn’t sure what to do for final ceiling treatment. A dropped ceiling with absorptive tiles would likely be the best acoustical choice, but I couldn’t afford to lose five or six more inches of room height since the ceiling was already so low. I finally found a tile mounting system that has a grid like a dropped ceiling but could be mounted right on the joists with no space. So I bought the grid and ceiling tiles with the best noise rating that I could find, (NRC = .8) and began the installation.

Installation of the panels was a real pain and generated lots of cursing since the plastic rails bent and warped. If I had it to do over again, I would have installed wood furring strips first and then put the rails on those which would have made things a lot easier, but again, hindsight is always 20/20. It took a couple of days, but it looked good at the end, and the sound of the room went up a notch as well as the look.

I also needed to add some absorption to the front of the right side wall next to the right speaker. I probably could have built something, but with many things yet to be completed, I decided to purchase a couple of 2-foot by 4-foot panel diffusers from a company called ATS Acoustics.

ATS Acoustics sound absorbing panels installed on the right side wall.

This company has its act together. About 2:00 in the afternoon I placed an order online for two panels with a custom color. I paid a few bucks extra for expedited delivery and expedited it was. The panels were on my front doorstep by noon the next day! That’s less than 24-hour delivery! And for a custom color. The panels came with a full-size paper template with printed instructions on the template for mounting the z-clips on the panel and the wall. I used the template to drill the wall and the panel, attached the z-clips, and the panels hung perfectly on the first attempt. Wow, one more item to scratch off the list.

These panels are opposite the control room door, which should also be absorptive, but can’t be because it is mostly glass. If the door is closed, the stereo image moves slightly to the left because of the reflective door, but an open door is like total absorption, so I leave the door open for mixing, and my imaging is fine. A slightly skewed stereo image is not a factor when tracking with the door closed.

Now, I needed to finish a lot of cosmetic and practical items. I installed trim strips on the front wall to cover the staples and seams in the burlap. Lee came in and installed the oak rail on top of the half wall, and we installed trim strips to cover the staples and seams on that wall.

I built a cover to hide cables going from the ceiling to the rack on the right side wall. I also made cable hangers on the left side wall and installed a cabinet that we moved from the other studio below it to hold microphones. These items will provide diffusion on that wall.

There were a variety of other trim items done at his point including staining and varnishing the control room door. The next major item will be to decide on and install some diffusion on the back wall to break up reflections and improve the stereo imaging in the room.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 6)

Home Studio (Part 4 of 8) – Starting Equipment Installation

Console and controls installation on the desk.

Now that we had completed the installation of the desks, I wanted to get some equipment installed so that I could monitor what the room sounded like as we moved ahead with sound treatment. Although I had an idea of the way I wanted to do sound treatment, I’m not an acoustic designer and did not do any mathematical modeling of the room. The room is too small for proper design, but I believe I can still end up with a good sounding room. I know it will be deficient at the far bottom end of the audio spectrum, but most home systems will be far worse, and I can deal with that limitation.

My goals are a listening space that sounds good overall, with proper stereo imaging and somewhat constant low-end response at different points in the room. My previous room worked at the sweet spot right behind the console, but the sound anywhere else in the room was a crap-shoot, and there was massive low-end buildup in front of the console and near the back wall. I wanted to try to avoid that here.

Patch panel installation in process.

The first order of business was to set the speakers in place and run the wires to them. Then we set the two racks in place, screwed them together and began running the wires from the DigiDesigns 003 console and the Mackie BigKnob monitor controller to the patch panels. The racks are on casters, and I am making sure to leave enough extra cable so I can quickly pull the rack out from the wall and access the equipment from the back.

In the old studio, the racks were permanently mounted to the wall with no access from the back. If I wanted to make any wiring changes, especially to the patch panels, I needed to remove then from the rack and make the changes from the front. This was a real pain, and each time I did it, I ran the risk of unplugging cables from another patch panel. I won’t make this mistake again and will always install racks so that there is good rear access.

I installed the computer beneath the desk, I terminated the network cabled in wall mount boxes with RJ45 Cat5e jacks and plugged in the computer and made sure it connected to the network and the Internet. I then connected the Digi003 console to the computer and made sure that it was working with ProTools. I wired the remaining necessary equipment to the patch panels, fired up ProTools, and was able to play some music and verify that everything worked. The room was boomy, and imaging was non-existent, but that’s what I expected since there was no sound treatment on any of the walls yet.

The next job was to run the mike snake with 12 mike inputs through the ceiling into the recording space and hook it into the patch panel. After that, I ran the lines for the headphone monitors to a terminal block in the ceiling above the rack. A cable to the patch panel was then run up the wall and connections were made to the terminal block.

Insulation and burlap installation on the front wall of the Control Room.

Now that I had tested the equipment, we installed 8 inches of insulation in the front wall. In the corners of the front of the room behind the angled corner walls and speakers, we filled the space with insulation, probably almost 24″ deep at the corners. This was effectively a bass trap in each of the front corners. We then covered the front wall with burlap to protect the insulation.

The sound of the room improved considerably with the bass trapping in the corners and insulation in the front wall. The low end was tight and fairly even across the room, much better than I had expected at this point.

Finally, to complete this phase of the project, we installed two pre-hung doors into the back wall of the room to close up the closet.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 5)

Home Studio (Part 3 of 8) – Starting Construction

Cleaning out the storage room in process. Network and phone cables already installed.

The first and possibly the most difficult task was to empty out the storage room that had been accumulating junk for over 35 years. A good portion went into the trash, I donated some items, and the items that I decided to keep went into the garage or other parts of the basement. Finding a permanent place for things such as the Christmas Tree and decorations was going to be a real challenge. Then we disassembled the shelves and saved some of the wood for use in reconstruction.

My son Jeff had already run CAT5E cables for network and phone that connected to a new switch at the other end of the basement. I had new high-speed Internet service installed earlier, and the network was up and running, and the new phone service was working. That cable installation was actually the first step of this project.

Front wall of the new Control Room. Water pipe and electrical conduit going to the well are on the right.

After about a week of hard work, the room was finally cleared out. After a good cleaning, the first task was to repair some cracks and apply waterproof paint to the walls. This room sometimes gets a bit of seepage during unusually heavy rainstorms, so I wanted to take care of that before anything else. I chiseled out the cracks and re-mortared them and then applied to coats of waterproofing paint to the walls.

The next item on the agenda was the electrical work. There was only one outlet in the room and a single bare bulb, which was hardly adequate. The existing wiring was in conduit as required by code in Cook County, Illinois, so adding circuits and doing modifications is easier than with Romex. I added two more ceiling boxes for additional track lighting along with a dimmer for each box so that I could control the brightness as needed. I added a total of six outlets, with one inside the front wall in case we want to add a video monitor in front of the console at some point in the future. I also added a kill switch that would turn all of the outlets off except the one going to the computer.

Framing of the front wall.

The next task was framing the front wall which would hold the JBL speakers. The space behind this wall was to be filled with fiberglass and then covered with burlap to absorb sound and make the front of the room dead. We left the concrete block sidewalls alone and would add the necessary sound treatment later. Then we built frames for the doors in front of the alcove at the back of the room that would be a storage closet.

We found a nice solid door with lots of windows and built a new frame and installed it to replace the original hollow core door. Installation of the door turned out to be a two-day job as the concrete block walls were not plumb and getting the door to fit properly was a problem. But it was worth the effort, as the door adds aesthetically to the look of the space and allows a limited view of the recording area.

The desk and the half wall surrounding it were next. We had removed that wall in sections from the old studio, and the sections were fortunately screwed together instead of nailed. The part of the desk that sits to the engineer’s right was too wide for this room, so we ripped about 8 inches off of it.

Floor Installation

We also made the proper modification to the half-wall that surrounds the desk. We then screwed the half-wall together and fixed it to the concrete floor with Tapcon screws. I then installed the two outlets for the equipment in the half-wall.

Since this room had gotten some seepage in the past, I wanted a waterproof floor, so I installed a vinyl simulated oak plank floor in the whole room. The floor isn’t glued down, but the planks lock together, and the floor can expand and contract with the changes in temperature. Since the planks are removable, it will be possible to replace any that get damaged. With this flooring down, the look of the room was transformed, and I began to believe we were creating a unique and comfortable space.

Half-wall that surrounds the desk and console.

Now that we had installed the flooring, we put the desks back in place and attached them to the half-wall. We replaced the insulation in the back side of the half-wall, and I stapled a new layer of burlap over the studs, leaving the back of the wall acoustically absorbent. Since most of this wall faces the speakers, the fiberglass prevents any bounce-back of the sound into the room.

This completed the structural work on the room. The closet doors still need to be installed and appropriate sound treatment to the walls, but now we can install some equipment and start working on th sound of the room.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 4)

Home Studio (Part 2 of 8) – Design Criteria & Planning

We started the process knowing that there were going to be compromises due to the spaces available, budget and time. Here’s what I had to work with:

An unfinished storage room in the basement, approximately 14X15 feet, to be converted to an audio control room. Unfortunately, the room sits below a sunken living room, so the ceiling height is a little over seven feet. Fortunately, I am not a tall person.

The storage room sits at the end of a finished Rec Room which we will use for the recording space. The layout is such that a large window from the control room to the recording studio is not a possibility.

On the positive side, my house sits on a large lot in a relatively quiet suburban neighborhood. The construction is a brick veneer, and the walls are plaster instead of drywall meaning the house is well isolated from outside noise. The nearest train tracks are a mile away, and even though we are sometimes on the flight path in and out of Chicago’s O’Hare airport, planes are not audible in the basement. My kids are married and out of the house and my wife works during the day, so the house is very quiet other than the usual appliance sounds.

The first compromise, of course, were the small existing spaces with which we had to work. Next, was that the Yahama Grand Piano from the former studio wouldn’t fit. Thirdly, clients would have to walk through the house to get to the basement. My intent was to have a good room for mastering and mixing and to have limited recording ability, mostly for overdubs, using the far end of the existing rec room for a studio. The acoustics in the rec room were acceptable for close miking, with bookshelves, furniture and room shape providing diffusion and absorption. So, what we decided is to build a comfortable, good sounding control room and use the rec room “as-is” for a studio, using gobos if needed to control reflections and provide isolation. I would run mike and headphone lines permanently into the room. We decided to install a door with mostly glass in the control room to allow a limited view of the rec room. We could do any sound treatment needed in the rec room at a later date. There was one more requirement; the Rec Room still needed to function as a Rec Room. Fortunately, it only gets used only around the holidays and a little bit in the winter. We entertain on the deck or screen-in porch the rest of the year so the space could stay in recording studio mode.

Thus, we decided that the construction effort would go into building a great sounding control room. Being able to hear correctly is essential to producing good mixes. If the acoustics are flawed, it is likely that all of your mixes will reflect those flaws. Mixing through headphones is possible but very fatiguing, and the fact that just about all major recording projects are mixed on speakers is a testament to how important this is.

For the room we chose, really the only space available, I was concerned about the low ceiling. But this room was better shaped than my former control room, which was wide and not very deep and a few square feet larger. Other potential problems were that the water pipe from my well ran through the room and made some noise each time the well kicked on. Also, the furnace room was behind this room, but we would have a closet and concrete block wall between the two rooms which would eliminate most of the sound from the furnace. A heating duct ran through the room also, but I figured that could be insulated and deadened. Also during the recording process, it would be necessary to shut off the heating or A/C, which I also did at the old studio.

One of the problems in the past with shutting off the air conditioning was that in a studio lit by almost 20 PAR30 incandescent floodlights, the room got very hot, very quickly. We decided to illuminate the new space with all LED lighting, which produces very little heat.

Old Control Room. We’ll take the table holding the equipment, the JBL speakers and two of the equipment racks.

We decided to move the equipment desks from the old studio since they were quite functional and in good shape. They were surrounded by a 4-inch deep sound-absorbing partition, or half-wall, which we would also move and bolt to the floor in the new space.

We had four 19″ equipment racks that were about four feet tall. We decided to keep only two of them since our need for outboard equipment was minimal since making the move to ProTools.

I also decided to keep the JBL L100 monitors that I had been mixing on for the past 40 years. They were in good shape, and I know how music should sound on them, so I didn’t want to have to deal with different sounding monitors.

Also, for the design of the room, I decided that since we didn’t have a Control Room window, I would make the front of the room absorptive and the back reflective. I read a lot of good things about that type of design so I thought it would be a good choice, especially in a small room. For the best sound, I wanted the room to be symmetrical from left to right with the speakers equally positioned around the center axis of the room and the listening position along the center axis.

New Control Room Layout

So with these major decisions and compromises made, I called my friend and client Lee Murdock. Lee is an excellent carpenter in addition to his legendary music abilities. He had helped considerably with the remodeling of my former studio over 20 years ago, and I have also recorded 19 albums for him. Because of that, he knew the needs of the space quite well and agreed to assist with the design and construction of the new room. Since he’ll hopefully be recording his 20th album here, he has a vested interest in creating a comfortable and workable space. Lee has an uncanny ability to ask the right and sometimes difficult questions and play devil’s advocate when necessary. That kind of collaboration is synergetic and produces a better product.

After a bunch of discussions and measurements, Lee drew up a plan and we began mapping out the construction process. Not counting the closet, the room is approximately 14 ft. by 15 ft. Not shown on the plan are two movable equipment racks to the right of the console desk.

The biggest uncertainty in my mind was what to do with the ceiling. It was currently uncovered with just open joists. I considered maybe just putting some acoustical foam absorbers on the sub-floor and leaving the joists open to maximize the height of the room but decided to postpone this decision until later and see how the room sounded before determining the ceiling type. I also knew that I would need some type of diffusers on the back wall, but didn’t know specifically what kind.

(Continue to Home Studio – Part 3)

Microphones and Recording Techniques for Small and Home Studios.

Category Archives: Monitoring and Listening