New studio, need advice.

BassChase

New member
Hello,

I'm putting together my first home studio. I purchased the Digitech Mbox 2 Mini recording bundle from musiciansfriend; I have a protools interface, a decent compressor microphone and some monitors.

Attached is a picture of my room. I plan on building a ghetto vocal booth in the corner between the desk and the wall. Any tips on doing this? Im very low budget and I plan on using mattresses and foam.



Lastly, I plan on running the studio off of my laptop. It is a Macbook with a 2 GHz Intel Processor and 512 MB of RAM. Is this nearly enough to run Protools or will it be too sluggish and laggy?

Thanks for all the help.

-Chase
 
my only advice to you would be to not worry about building a vocal booth, i know it seems like a cool idea, but more then likely it will end up sounding your singing in a box, unless you build it properly.

almost anyone here i think will tell you that you should treat the room itself, not worry about building a box inside the room to record in.

matresses are okay but really i used matresses for years and was always disapointed in my songs overall quality, soon as my room got some treatment, even the most cheap and basic equipment sounds like a million bucks in my opinion. the biggest improvement you will hear is that if youve done it right, you dont hear any outside noise for one, and your more in control of all general elements of the soundfield once reaching the mixing process. matresses just wont do that because thats not what there designed to do.

its okay for a temporary setup, but if i could give you any advice at all, its that you shouldnt get stuck keeping those matresses as your "booth" for the next three years just so you can save money for new equipment. invest in some room treatment and you will not regret it, it will improve your sound in ways you cant even dream of till youve heard it for yourself.

do a google search for DIY broadband absorber panels, bass traps, gobos, baffles, diffusers, acoustic treatment.
these are all cost effective ways you can create a better sounding room. you can do some basic treatment with $200 and a few days worth of work.
 
my only advice to you would be to not worry about building a vocal booth, i know it seems like a cool idea, but more then likely it will end up sounding your singing in a box, unless you build it properly.

almost anyone here i think will tell you that you should treat the room itself, not worry about building a box inside the room to record in.

matresses are okay but really i used matresses for years and was always disapointed in my songs overall quality, soon as my room got some treatment, even the most cheap and basic equipment sounds like a million bucks in my opinion. the biggest improvement you will hear is that if youve done it right, you dont hear any outside noise for one, and your more in control of all general elements of the soundfield once reaching the mixing process. matresses just wont do that because thats not what there designed to do.

its okay for a temporary setup, but if i could give you any advice at all, its that you shouldnt get stuck keeping those matresses as your "booth" for the next three years just so you can save money for new equipment. invest in some room treatment and you will not regret it, it will improve your sound in ways you cant even dream of till youve heard it for yourself.

do a google search for DIY broadband absorber panels, bass traps, gobos, baffles, diffusers, acoustic treatment.
these are all cost effective ways you can create a better sounding room. you can do some basic treatment with $200 and a few days worth of work.

Nice, man. That's great advice. :)

Frank
 
Thanks for all the tips guys! I'll definently start constructing my own DIY stuff :)

Any thoughts on running protools on my macbook? It has 512 MB RAM and a 2 GHz processor. Is this fast enough?
 
More RAM is useful almost always & the processor is OK. What you do need to do is a search online for twaeks to optimise your macbook for audio. There are lots of such tip sheets for PCs but I don't know of any for macs being macphobic myself. It really helps the perfomance of the machine though - & you can set up the tweaks in an account/preferences that you open when recording & open have another for net surfing, assignments etc.
Yeah the both is cute but pointless. There are some cute & useful ideas on making a little foldable iso box for your mic in the forums somewhere - have a searchOH, OH, outboard compression can be really, REALLY, bad if you don't have a handle on it. You'd be better off learning some mic technique & setting up your input levels that crunching signal that can't be restored.
Now, make music!!!!
 
Any thoughts on running protools on my macbook? It has 512 MB RAM and a 2 GHz processor. Is this fast enough?

How many tracks are you planning to work with simultaneously? Everything depends on this and the level of processing you're planning to use. 512/2GB isn't a lot...that's going to get eaten up really quick. I run 5MB/dual 3.4GB on a dedicated PC, and I start having to raise my buffer size at around 24 tracks with fairly heavy processing. That's partly why I work analog so often.

Frank
 
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