should i even bother?

  • Thread starter Thread starter erichenryus
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erichenryus

erichenryus

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i wanna carve out a little oasis in a corner of my basement for this habit i have....

cement floor and walls in the basment so that will be on three sides of me. the existing first floor joyces (don't know how to spell that word) are about 7.5 feet up from the floor. the area i have to work with is roughly 9X7 feet. so basically i'm gonna wind up with a little box in the corner of the basement.

it's just me, my daw (the cpu will be on the outside of the area), my desk, about 8 units of rack gear, a v-kit, a guitar, and some mics.

my real concern is just getting a controlled area to record in. now that it's winter, the furnance fan makes using mics impossible. i'm only recording my voice and an acoustic guitar. everything else is virtual.

i'm not even filling the space right now without the walls so i know everything will fit but i'm wondering if that's going to be a bad environment for recording acoustic and voice or not.

any of you vets have any thoughts on that?
 
I wish I could comment, but I'm in a similar situation....except the difference is the space is 18' x 10', unfinished area, concrete floors, washing machine, dryer to the rear, heating to the right of the stairs. Been debating whether it would be even worth splitting it in half for a control room/recording area. Only non virtual tracks being recorded are bass guitar, rhythm guitar and vocals....Similar thoughts??
 
sounds like you both need a soundproof, acoustically treated space. One room for both listenning and tracking.

Have you done a search for both soundproofing and acoustic treatment?? There is heaps of info on both in the files. :)

cheers
John
 
i read the entire acoustic101.com site and have been doing quite a bit of research here and other places.

By the time I frame the space, apply a sheetrock/sheetblok/sheetrock sandwich and then paste up the wedgies i wind up with a space that is roughly 7'X6'X7'High.

Just wondering if that will wind up sounding worse or better recording vocals and acoustic guitar than a big open cement basement....and whether the mixing environment will be better or worse as well.

I'm also a bit concerned about suffocating! Not sure how long a human being can survive on 300 cubic feet of air. I'm picturing myself busting open the door between takes to gasp for oxygen!

I'm also tossing around the idea of just framing in the furnace area to isolating that noise, then pasting up some wedgies in the corner to cut down on the ambience while tracking.
 
I guess I got lucky. My furnace is right in my control room in a space under the stairs, and the furnace has a switch to turn it off. No problems, when I track or mix I reach in and presto, no worries.

try to do the best you can. John is very helpful and understands the limitations encountered in garages and basements, I find him to less dogmatic than many "acousticians", maybe its because John lives in the real world with working experience verses analytical assumptions.




P.S John, the ceiling joist baffle design you posted for me on Blackwoods Mastering Forum is 75% complete and its going to be beautiful. Im thinking about a purple stain on the Pine slats to keep the "gothic" vibe going :D I promise the pics are coming after I get problem fixed.

SoMm
 
John Sayers. Thanks for the info! That first link is very detailed. That's just what I was looking for! I'll be back with questions once I devour the info. Interesting to see what other people have done with their studios with the second link. I'll post my results here as I go.

s.o.m. good for you with the furnace switch. i'm afraid that's not an option for me unless my wife and kid don't mind waking up with chattering teeth in the middle of the night. gets pretty cold here and i have an old house with no insulation in the walls! furnace runs pretty much constantly in the winter.
 
gets pretty cold here and i have an old house with no insulation in the walls!
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looks like you'll spend winter in your insulated studio :):)

cheers
john
 
you know, spending the entire winter in my studio would be fine if i didn't have to share the space with THEM! I mean we're a close family with lot's of love but......

so i read a lot of the SAE sight and that's a lot to devour but I'm learning much i think. so creating a space for both tracking and mixing is a difficult problem and i guess that's why most real studios separate the two! Not my luxury, but I came up with a comprimise that I'm sure is full of flaws but I wanna run it by you guys (god I love this bbs btw, After reading your bio JS I can't believe you hang out here!)

My space is small as I said before roughly 7'X8'X7.5'H.

I'm attaching a picture of what I'm thinking. What would happen if I put the doorway direcly opposite the monitors and closed the door for tracking, then opened it for monitoring hopefully directing most of the energy out the door to diffuse throughout the basement? Stupid idea?
 

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After reading your bio JS I can't believe you hang out here!)
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this is the only forum where people listen and learn (myself included) and the egos don't get in the way. I wander off occasionally to other forums but it's not the same as good'ol HR. ;);)

That's cool for your room - open the door and you've got a bass trap. ;)

cheers
john
 
I'm in the construction phase of my 8'x8' room, so thought I'd share my idea on this. I'm locating my mix position on a diagonal, with a corner bass trap behind the console and monitors and bookshelves built into some wall traps that are based on some of John's DIY units and Ethan Winer's traps. I picked up a box of Auralex wedgies and diffusers for $40 at a Mars that was going out of business, so will spot treat with those, probably on the door which is opposite the mix position and ceiling.

I did this to avoid the complications of treating parallel walls, especially in a fairly square room. Hopefully it'll suffice.

I'm going to try attaching my layout.

Have fun!!
Darryl.....
 

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cool ddev. another small room guy! i'm gonna think a bit more about your design. seems it's a little more economical than mine cause i'm currently losing a lot of space by centering the desk in the room. and if i angle that door just right in my case i wind up with an excellent trap when it's open. the resulting reflective angles in the rest of the basement basically eat the energy.

so are you dropping your ceiling from joices(how do you spell that damn word?!?!?!) from a floor above or building your own ceiling?

in my case i'm gonna build a separate ceiling from the one above cause above me is a 75 year old wood floor that i just refinished (so it's never getting carpetted!) and you can hear every footstep from above. it creaks something nasty.

also, what are you doing with your cpu...or do you not have one of those? all dat based?
 
It may be small, but I'm just glad to be able to have my own space. It took a leak in a water line in the finished basement ceiling to get me to sell my wife on it ("honey, its cheaper to build my own room and throw in any old carpet on the floor than to re-carpet the whole basement"). My setup will be cramped, though, so it will really be pretty much a one-person room.

My ceiling is pretty much already finished, so I'm stuck with what's there, which is sheetrock attached to the joists. My only problem will be if the dishwasher is running upstairs directly above me. I won't be doing much actual recording here, though, mostly mixing what I record remotely, so I didn't consider that as a primary design requirement.

At this time I don't have a PC in the studio. I have a laptop for work that I may use on occasion, but the only thing I currently use a PC for is my psuedo-mastering (ie. I don't consider it real mastering; I trim fade-ins/outs, apply minor limiting to allow me to adjust and equalize audio levels for matching from one song to the next) and CD burning. If I do decide to add one at some point, I have plenty of space underneath the mixer to build an iso-container for it.

Darryl.....
 
This is great. Like DDev and erichenyrus, I, too, have a small space to utilize, as posted above. Currently the studio is here:

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/picshere/studio.html and my rough floor plan is attached. This is gonna remain a project/MIDI studio, 'cause I don't think I have enough room to record live drums (so far all MIDI, guitars and vocals are going into a Mackie 1202VLZ/VS-880 VX digital recorder combo).

I've been over to the recommended site: http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html, but have resigned to building a "room within a room". Behind the vocal booth wall will be a washroom and outside along the entrance wall are stairs, under the stairs is storage and to next to the storage is the furnace. Looks like I'd like to adopt erichenyrus' direction (from his 12-12-02 .gif attachment) also. Comments?
 

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gtrplaya,

i am NOT by any stretch an expert but your picture looks like your monitors are placed kind of right in the middle of the room? is that asking for phase cancellation trouble? i'm not sure. someone who is can feel free to call me an idiot. i'm basing this on about 1 week of self tought acoustic education.
 
Not an idiot by any means...it goes to show that good research pays off...I didn't even stop to think about phase cancellation. I will say that the science of room tuning and such is totally foreign to me. Fortunately there are a lot (and I do mean a lot) of resources...I need to get to reading. That being said, eric, how should I reorient my mixing desk to avoid that?

Thanks.
 
gtrplaya said:
I will say that the science of room tuning and such is totally foreign to me. Fortunately there are a lot (and I do mean a lot) of resources...I need to get to reading. That being said, eric, how should I reorient my mixing desk to avoid that?

Thanks.
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I have no idea how to stop phase cancellation. I'm way out of my small sphere of knowledge in this forum. Hell I don't even know how to recognize phase cancellation when it's happening. Could happen to me everyday and I just haven't figured it out yet.

You might be fine with your speakers right where they are. Maybe there are some reccomendations in the books you're reading? Maybe someone with a better grip of this stuff will come along and comment on your question? Maybe I shouldn't have said anything about a topic like this on which I have almost no experience?

For some reason reason it always seemed better to me to flush mount my monitors if at all possible. Like I said though, I'm very new at this and that could be a bad assumption.

On the SAE site, you'll note that the bedroom studio has the monitors pretty flush to the walls and all of the pro studios seem to have the monitors with a bass trap right behind them.
 
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