KineticSound
The VOICE
I recently completed the studio at our new house in the Kansas City suburbs and thought I would make a brief post here on how it was made. This is my “combo” room... As is the case with many of you, both tracking and mixing are done in a single room.
The dimensions are not exactly ideal, but necessitated by the fact that we have a steel beam and post that bisect the basement room that was available to me. The are was previously a rec room in a “semi-walkout” - the basement sits below grade except for the top three feet. Here is the “before” photo:
The plan was to float a treated room inside. The walls and flooring sit on “future foam” padding, which is a material designed for industrial carpet installations. Ideally, one would build a floor atop U-boat rings, but my ceiling was a little low to begin with, so this would have made the room unworkable. The future foam padding runs the length of the walls and under the carpet to decouple them from the concrete. The interior walls were constructed of 2x3 studs, filled with R13 insulation, then a layer of United Plastics’ dB3 barrier underneath the drywall. dB3 is designed for home theater applications control noise bleed, and is essentially a heavy canvas grid injected with some sort of hard rubberized material. In my case, it is primarily for keeping noise out of the studio. Our HVAC is in an adjacent room in the basement, and I don’t want to shut it off each time I want to track something (nor does my wife want to go without heat or A/C for hours at a time). All of the audio cabling was run through the walls using shielded cable from RedCo Audio and into custom wall plates made by US Sound here in Missouri.
For the interior finish, I split the walls into treated and hard surface sections, with the top four feet being the treated area and the remaining space to the floor as painted drywall. A natural-colored 1x4 pine trim was used to separate the two surfaces and also used vertically in a few spaces just for aesthetics. There is a mixture of acoustic treatment throughout the room. Each corner received a 4’ bass trap, with a square absorber on the wall directly behind the mix desk and a 32” diffuser panel in the vocal tracking area. The remaining upper wall space was filled in with acoustic wedge foam to knock down high reflections, and I re-used the room’s original drop-panel ceiling. A small track lighting rig with adjustable flood lamps was used to illuminate each work area. I’m an Avid user, so a purple and charcoal theme to match my equipment seemed like a fun idea. The console was also custom-made to house my Artist Mix / Artist Transport, interface, and rack gear.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s not the biggest space, but it’s large enough for drum tracking, and it works great for voiceover work, which is the primary function of my studio.
Mac i5 running Pro Tools 9 + Logic 9. Avid C600 Interface. Avid Artist Mix. Avid Artist Transport. Avid AV40. Focusrite Platinum TrakMaster Pro. Focusrite Platinum ADC. Waves Maserati, Avid, BF, Focusrite Plugins. Shure Mics: KSM27 (x2), SM27, SM57 (x3), SM58, 55SH Series II. RODE NTG-1. Mapex Pro-M. Zildjian A Cymbals.
The dimensions are not exactly ideal, but necessitated by the fact that we have a steel beam and post that bisect the basement room that was available to me. The are was previously a rec room in a “semi-walkout” - the basement sits below grade except for the top three feet. Here is the “before” photo:
The plan was to float a treated room inside. The walls and flooring sit on “future foam” padding, which is a material designed for industrial carpet installations. Ideally, one would build a floor atop U-boat rings, but my ceiling was a little low to begin with, so this would have made the room unworkable. The future foam padding runs the length of the walls and under the carpet to decouple them from the concrete. The interior walls were constructed of 2x3 studs, filled with R13 insulation, then a layer of United Plastics’ dB3 barrier underneath the drywall. dB3 is designed for home theater applications control noise bleed, and is essentially a heavy canvas grid injected with some sort of hard rubberized material. In my case, it is primarily for keeping noise out of the studio. Our HVAC is in an adjacent room in the basement, and I don’t want to shut it off each time I want to track something (nor does my wife want to go without heat or A/C for hours at a time). All of the audio cabling was run through the walls using shielded cable from RedCo Audio and into custom wall plates made by US Sound here in Missouri.
For the interior finish, I split the walls into treated and hard surface sections, with the top four feet being the treated area and the remaining space to the floor as painted drywall. A natural-colored 1x4 pine trim was used to separate the two surfaces and also used vertically in a few spaces just for aesthetics. There is a mixture of acoustic treatment throughout the room. Each corner received a 4’ bass trap, with a square absorber on the wall directly behind the mix desk and a 32” diffuser panel in the vocal tracking area. The remaining upper wall space was filled in with acoustic wedge foam to knock down high reflections, and I re-used the room’s original drop-panel ceiling. A small track lighting rig with adjustable flood lamps was used to illuminate each work area. I’m an Avid user, so a purple and charcoal theme to match my equipment seemed like a fun idea. The console was also custom-made to house my Artist Mix / Artist Transport, interface, and rack gear.
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s not the biggest space, but it’s large enough for drum tracking, and it works great for voiceover work, which is the primary function of my studio.
Mac i5 running Pro Tools 9 + Logic 9. Avid C600 Interface. Avid Artist Mix. Avid Artist Transport. Avid AV40. Focusrite Platinum TrakMaster Pro. Focusrite Platinum ADC. Waves Maserati, Avid, BF, Focusrite Plugins. Shure Mics: KSM27 (x2), SM27, SM57 (x3), SM58, 55SH Series II. RODE NTG-1. Mapex Pro-M. Zildjian A Cymbals.