Finishing my 1st studio in San Francisco: in-person advice?

[rch427]

I've been putting together my first attempt at a home recording studio for a while now, but I'm stymied by confusion over how everything hooks up together, and I just can't seem to wrap my head around it. Disclaimer: I'm not really a musician (just sort of an instrument collector/hobbyist/noisemaker) and I don't really know what I'm doing.

Here's some of what I have so far:

--> Isolation booth with mics, control surface, computer monitor and powered monitors inside the booth

--> Dedicated computer (outside the booth) with various outboard gear (compressor, equalizer, preamps, reverb, patch bay, etc.)

--> 1/4" reel-to-reel deck; TASCAM cassette tracker

--> Cables and jacks connecting some of this gear together

My confusion mostly comes from trying to figure out how all of this is supposed to interface, and what hardware bits I might still be lacking. The hooking-up of the patch bay has me particularly perplexed.

What I'd like to find is someone in here San Francisco (or the Bay Area in general) who is experienced with sorting these things out, who would be willing to come over for a couple of hours, take a look at my set-up, and give me some advice. I can't afford to hire a professional, but I'd be happy to pay for your expenses (parking, gas, etc.) and throw in a couple of six-packs of the beer of your choice/bottle of good whiskey/whatever your particular vice is.

Anybody game?

 

[WhiteStrat]

I admire your bold approach of asking someone to come over and help. Assuming you find someone willing, it'll be the best way to learn, and maybe even make a friend. If I were in San Fran, I'd give you a hand. But alas, I'm nowhere near there. Good luck!

 

[rch427]

I admire your bold approach of asking someone to come over and help. Assuming you find someone willing, it'll be the best way to learn, and maybe even make a friend. If I were in San Fran, I'd give you a hand. But alas, I'm nowhere near there. Good luck!

Thanks for the encouragement, WS, but I wouldn't call my approach "bold" as much as "desperate"! Despite looking through countless "Home Recording for Dummies"-type books, I just can't seem to figure out which cable should go where, or in what order. I suppose I could try posting each individual problem here, with photos, but that would probably piss people off with the sheer volume of my questions more than it would solve the problems.

What I need is for someone to come in and say "Oh! -you need to plug this plug into that jack, you've got this thing in backwards, you're missing the cable that should go there, and you can't get a interociter to derascinate that." Or whatever.

Really, I think that someone more knowledgeable than I (read: just about everyone) could probably make sense of my chaos in an hour or so. But will they come? Stay tuned...

 

[Yonce N Mild]

I suppose I could try posting each individual problem here, with photos, but that would probably piss people off with the sheer volume of my questions more than it would solve the problems.

That actually could be helpful for people that are running into the same type of problems. I doubt you would piss anybody off.


In my experience with things like this it quickly becomes overwhelming when you look at the big picture. Break it down into pieces and start from there.

What's you audio interface for the computer?


Lets see some pics. We're all gear whores here. Let's see some gear porn.

 

[Jeff_D]

I'd swing by too, but I'm 3,500 miles away...

 

[suprstar]

'A booth' eh...... A lot of times a booth hinders more than it helps. I think usually it's because they're made far too small and don't have any kind of acoustical treatment. And you freely admit you dont konw what youre doing, so I'm skeptical but I'll hold off judgement until more info surfaces I'da felt better about that statement if you said an 'isolation room'

Anyway, I'd just ask questions here, we can probably point you in the right direction. The main thing I'm not seeing in your gear list is an audio interface - the device that takes your analog audio and sends it to your PC via USB or firewire.

Which kinda leads into this q: Are you intending to record on your R2R or Tascam, then get it into your PC? Or are you looking to record tracks on your PC and do all the editing and mixing on the PC? If you're going the PC route, you may not need your tape machines. If you want to go with tapes, you may not need much of a PC setup at all.

 

[rch427]

What's you audio interface for the computer?

It's a PreSonus FireBox. For the rest of your questions, please scroll on down...

 

[rch427]

'A booth' eh...... A lot of times a booth hinders more than it helps. I think usually it's because they're made far too small and don't have any kind of acoustical treatment. And you freely admit you dont konw what youre doing, so I'm skeptical but I'll hold off judgement until more info surfaces I'da felt better about that statement if you said an 'isolation room'

Well, I may not know the nomenclature, but it's a freestanding booth, inside of a room. Looks like a booth to me, anyway. Some photos follow.

Which kinda leads into this q: Are you intending to record on your R2R or Tascam, then get it into your PC? Or are you looking to record tracks on your PC and do all the editing and mixing on the PC? If you're going the PC route, you may not need your tape machines. If you want to go with tapes, you may not need much of a PC setup at all.

I just have the R2R and cassette tracker for being able to play around with different effects and media. I have a bunch more weird recording media that I could've mentioned (wire recorder, PlayTape, etc.), but I decided to not unnecessarily complicate things. But I'd like to have the option of being able to hook the R2R and tracker into the PC (via the FireBox, I presume), to facilitate playing around with them.

 

[rch427]

'A booth' eh...... A lot of times a booth hinders more than it helps. I think usually it's because they're made far too small and don't have any kind of acoustical treatment. And you freely admit you dont konw what youre doing, so I'm skeptical but I'll hold off judgement until more info surfaces I'da felt better about that statement if you said an 'isolation room'

I designed and built the booth to fit my largest instrument (and me!), so it's just big enough for my needs while still fitting into the room. Two of the walls are not parallel, and all walls and ceiling are faced inside with varying thicknesses and densities of foam behind fabric covers.

All walls and ceiling are sandwiches of 1/2" birch ply, an 1/8" layer of neoprene, 5/8" sheetrock, a 1-1/2" cavity filled with fiberglass batting, 3/4" acoustic fiberboard and 3/8" MDF. The floor is 1" MDF on top of 1/4" neoprene on top of 3/4" ply.

The door is the same sandwich as the walls, with a window made of 5 layers of acrylic, 2 of which are set at angles to the others, to prevent the transmission of soundwaves. The door surround is lined with rubber isolation strips and the whole thing closes tight with two dogs.

It's pretty damned isolated, and it's acoustically pretty dead inside.

 

[rch427]

Lets see some pics. We're all gear whores here. Let's see some gear porn.

Well, it's like softcore amateur shit, but here's the "workstation" and R2R rig:

(BTW, that silver thing in the middle of the top row is a Behringer Ultra DI, in case anyone is confused. And the PC is inside of the ply cabinet that the gear is in, with appropriate venting. It's a 2.6mhz Pentium dual-core with 2gb of RAM and a 750gb HDD.)

 

[oceanflame]

Hey! I have the same reel-to-reel 2 tracks tape! I'll say sorry for my english now, my first language is french. I'll try to say what I want to say:

Is your module (where the 2 VU meters are) attached to the part where the tapes are? Because mine is like on a rack with wheels. The part with the tapes are making an 45 degrees angle, and the module with the VU meters is attached to it, but is horizontal, like if it was on a desk.

I hope I was enough clear... I hate it when i can't find the good words... whatever...

 

[rch427]

Hey! I have the same reel-to-reel 2 tracks tape! I'll say sorry for my english now, my first language is french. I'll try to say what I want to say:

Is your module (where the 2 VU meters are) attached to the part where the tapes are? Because mine is like on a rack with wheels. The part with the tapes are making an 45 degrees angle, and the module with the VU meters is attached to it, but is horizontal, like if it was on a desk.

I hope I was enough clear... I hate it when i can't find the good words... whatever...

There's nothing wrong with your English; you're using the language just fine -- FAR better than my poor grasp of French!

The timecode unit on my Otari is separate from the deck. I pulled both of them out of a commercial recording studio that was upgrading to all-digital gear, and the deck was mounted horizontally, with the timecode unit mounted at a 45-degree angle above it, so it could be easily read from the engineer's chair.

I have a lot more affinity for old analog gear than new digital gear, so I want to try using the Otari for mastering 7" records. If it doesn't work well for that, I might try to use it to produce tape saturation effects in the digital chain, as suggested by Craig Anderton here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1996_articles/oct96/tapecompression.html .

How do you like your Otari? What do you use it for?

 

[oceanflame]

Well it's a nice piece of gear. I was using it back in 2004 to 2006. I used to record my demos on this, but the problem was that I could only make 2 tracks. I found a way to bounce a track to another so I could overdub indefinitely. But the quality of the first tracks were worse each time I would make an overdub...
And then I used my computer with a DAW, so the problem was gone. But the quality wasn't the same. I liked the OTARI, but with only 2 tracks, I can't do a lot of things with it. Sometimes I just listen to some old tapes for fun.