Yeah I'm a telecaster man.. its a '96 mexican tele'... Im not too experienced in guitar yet, so I bought it used for $200. Sounds great regardless.
Hello again Pentium. I've got some musical advice for you. DON"T get in the habit of just learning others guitar licks. The BEST advice I could possibly give you is to learn THE 60 CHORD SYSTEM from the git go. That is, if you want to be a musician instead of just a guitarist. I guarantee, if a
you get a handle on that, and then the scales, you will be WAAAAAAAAAAAY ahead of the game. Believe me. I played for 18 yrs before someone turned me on to it. If you are interested, I'll PM you some stuff. It's very hard at first because not only do you have to practice with your fingers, you have to practice with your MIND too. Do you have any teachers? Most guitarists I have met over the years were LAZY. They didn't WANT to work at it, only play blues licks, over and over and over. Same ole licks to every song. But, to each his own I guess. Not that ALL guitarists are lazy. Some actually DO become REAL musicians
Ok, about the desk.
The problem is that wall on the right. Do you think having the desk unevenly positioned on the wall will mess up the mix too badly?
Yes, bass build up in the corner will fool you. So will your stereo image. Monitoring should be done in a symetrical location. What is on one side, should be equal on the opposite. Otherwise, reflections, absorption, and diffusion will alter your perception of the stereo field. Nulls in the
are the primary cause of loss of bass in respect to your ears. If your ears or the speakers are in a null of some frequency, no matter how much EQ you apply, it will NOT improve. More on that later. I'll post some links too as soon as I can.
Studio monitors are another thing. Most consumer type and computer type speakers have a bass boost, and are not NEAR as flat in response as Studio monitors. So that will fool you too. MANY things will fool you. The point is to have a monitoring situation that is neutral as you can get, so you can hear the truth of your recordings. More importantly is that the room not fool you. If it adds coloration, so will your judgement, then when played in another room, it too adds coloration and you won't know what to trust. When you finally DO get the room corrected(to a point), the speaker and engineering position located correctly, and your mic'ng techniques improved, then you must LEARN your speakers. Once you can trust your monitoring, then translation on another system should sound pretty much the same, as MOST home systems on average have the same dynamics, and so do the rooms, although all are different. One of the best places to test your recordings is in a car too. Playback in a car is excellent, because of the absorpsion,
little or nothing to hold bass in, and curved surfaces that do not allow for the same reflection patterns as a rectangular room. But alas, my disclaimer stands firm regarding all of this.
It is simply my opinions. However, I think that it is pretty much standard advice around here.
but id like to kinda hang around this one if its ok, so I can read what you guys have to say about the studio setups.. Im kinda having the same problem, and my room is a really weird shape. Also,my creative sub.. it well.. stinks! Its a 22 watt RMS 5 1/4 inch he woofer, I had a 17 watt RMS 5 1/4 inch by creative once that did better than this one. I am thinking it might be my room? I have it in the corner, but when you leave the corner you can't hear the bass hardly and you certainly can't feel it like the other one.
Hey TMFK, these replys are for EVERYBODY to read. You can hang all you want
Guys, bass in small rooms IS the grandaddy of their acoustical problems. At least some of them. I'm no expert on this stuff, but let me try and explain some things as I understand them. Someone may contridict it, which is good. That way I learn what I've misunderstood too.
The dimensions of a room, have EVERYTHING in the world to do with BASS. This is because low frequency wavelengths that are comparable to the dimensions of the room create problems. There are TONS of books written on these subjects but I'll try to summarize some things in a VERY simplistic way.
First, imagine a sound outdoors. The sound leaves the source never to return, unless some obstical is in its path. And unless there is, the only reflection is from the earth. And if this is covered with snow, it is difficult to hear someone 20 or so feet away because snow is such a great absorber. Play music outdoors and it sounds thin, depending on adjacent reflective objects. Hence the use of a dome, or other type of reflector above and behind the musicians to reflect the energy out into the audience. However, when you hear bass, it sounds natural and tight, not boomy or overinflated. Thats because there is nothing for it to RESONATE. Bass frequencys in a car do the same thing, because they ESCAPE. Thats why recorded music sounds so good in a car. Nothing to RESONATE.
Now lets look at a room. In a standard rectangular room you have three sets of parallel surfaces. When the air between these parallel surfaces is excited by a source, such as a speaker, a resonance can occur between each of these parallel surfaces at a fundamental frequency determined by the speed of sound, and the dimension between these surfaces. This is because it is a "resonant" system, consisting of a boundary-air-boundary. Just as a pipe has a resonant system, rooms do too. These fundamental resonances are called "standing waves". A trail of other resonances called modes, tag along with the fundamental, at discrete intervals, defined by time and distance.
To add further confusion, there are three types of modes too but I won't delve into this though. Suffice to say, the rooms dimensions have a great deal of influence on the response of the room. It is the rooms LENGTH,WIDTH and HEIGHT dimensions that tell us what the modal frequencys are, and how closely spaced they are. They also tells us which frequencies are the problem frequencies, as resonance is a problem. This is why. Closely spaced modes BOOST the response of the room when IN phase, and CANCEL when OUT of phase. Among other things, these boosts and cancellations are what fools your ears into making incorrect EQ and volume adjustments. And since modes terminate in the corners of rooms, mixing at the intersection of two walls is the worst place you can do it. That is why you hear bass in the corner, only to have it disappear when you walk away. However, this is not the only place this occurs. Cancellation nodes are called nulls, and if your speakers, or head is in one of these nulls, no amount of eq will help you. Not only that, since standing waves appear between ALL 3 sets of parallel surfaces, this means there are NULLS front to back, side to side, and top to bottom.
There are so many of these modes, that correct identification of their spacing is time consuming, but the development of special computer spreadsheet programs to ease data entry and calculation have surfaced. Some of which I can link to. However, for my little explaination, here is the ramifications. IF, a musical note falls in between widely spaced modes, it will sound very weak, and will decay faster than other notes, as though it were outside, and the others were indoors. When music is played, MANY of these notes frequencies can be affected by the rooms dimensions. That is why absorption becomes your friend, but only if used correctly. A carpet on the floor does nothing for absorption of horizontal Axial modes. But like I said, I'm certaninly no expert.
Now, modes are only the beginning. To complicate things more, we have many other things that constitute the acoustics of a room. For example, reverberation time.
In a room, you have multiple reflection boundarys. Walls, floors, ceilings, furniture etc. IF, these boundarys were made of a highly reflective surface, such as tile, these reflections could last for many seconds. Look at a cathedral. Sounds reflect off of stone, and since little is absorbed, the energy is reflected over and over and over. And distance between these surfaces lengthens the time it takes to reflect again. If these reflections coincide with a direct sound such as speech, intelligibility suffers.
However, even a highly reflective surface will absorb some of this energy as will distance through air, and over time, the sound energy decays. It is this decay that characterizes the sound in the room. When a sound decays, it does so over time, and when it decays 60 db, this time is called the RT-60. IF a person slaps their hands together, and it takes 1.5 seconds for the sound to decay 60db, the RT-60 is 1.5. Understand? Usually, a "live room" is labeled as such because of a long RT-60 compared to that of a typical control room. The desirability for long reverb times for music, depends on the type of music, although some reverb is usually desirable for most music. RAP is not one of those types though, as it is based on speech, NOT PITCH.
Conversly, a control room will have a shorter RT-60, as long reverberation times will alter the perception of the direct sound being monitored, which results in unusually dry recordings. Which of course is subjective, yet the point of monitoring correctly, is to hear the RT-60 in the studio, not in the control room. Same with reflections. A control room SHOULD have a TIME DELAY GAP, longer than in the studio. Otherwise you cannot percieve the reflections picked up by the microphone correctly. This is the trouble with recording in the same room as the the monitors. How can you correctly hear what you are recording, if the speakers are in the same room as a mic. Impossible. That is the point of a seperate control room. Therefore, all you can do is wear headphones, and guess. Home recording enthusiasts who have the luxury of a seperate control room have other problems though. Like paying for it
BTW, when you speak or sing, your voice is produced by standing waves in your throat. When you pluck a guitar string, a standing wave between the nut and the bridge is formed along the string. When you blow a horn, a standing wave is set up in within the horn. An organ pipe also uses a standing wave to produce sound. So you see, not all standing waves are bad.
Ok guys, hope this helps a bit. I'll be back. Remember my disclaimer though. This is for general info only, not an acoustics lecture as I am NOT an acoustician by any stretch of the imagination. And is subject to correction by the real deal.
fitZ