BoSoxBiker
-
Posts
1,375 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
2
Posts posted by BoSoxBiker
-
-
I dig it, Lars! Nice job all the way around. You're really driving the vocals instead of the other way around. The song is very well written, conceived and implemented, and well performed material to boot. Much kudos.
-
10 hours ago, trailerman said:
I really like the effort put into this project. It would be nice to have a dedicated music room, however I live in an RV and would not wish to sacrifice my mobility for more room. As it is I only have room for my two Gibsons and that is stretching.
Welcome to the forum!
Just remembered this gem. It's all about dual purpose and hiding treatments. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/studio-sos-motorhome-studio
8 hours ago, 62burst said:Kudos to you for trying to make mobile living work for you. Have you tried doing any recording in your living space? I’m sure it records just fine – and while I am not a big fan of reverb, I imagine could always be added later, if necessary. Also- any problems with that recording might be easier to resolve then some of the complex technical issues that OP Patriots Biker has detailed in his project studio. And being mobile is nice – sometimes it’s easier just to find a location that records well, and hit the red button there.
Ironically, reverb is the one thing that was an absolute disaster with a bad room. My "Thank You' cover notwithstanding, some of the digital reverbs and room emulations do a really nice job. They still need pristine signals to sound like pristine signals. aka a real room.
-
This is just a somewhat off-topic note to Gibson more than anything, though it does aid in underscoring the somewhat confusing times a guitar purchaser has these days. The OP's topic of Price being a big part of that.
So, I'm a Gibson customer. I've bought 2 nice acoustics and an LP within the past 5 years. I have 2 non-Gibsons within the past 5 years, too. A Dove and a 335 will be mine before it's all over, and my all-purpose take anywhere $1k(ish) solid-wood guitar might end up being a Gibson, too. I'm a member of this forum, and I subscribe to whatever newsletter is on the site. I did not know about an "Original" collection until this thread. I looked back at my Gibson emails. Not a mention. I clicked on a couple of the links, including the NAMM recap and related materials. Not one word. On to the links at the top of the forum page.
The "Originals" page lists 11 guitars, but nothing at all about what the concept of the Original line-up is. Each description I looked at has a little blurb about the guitar itself - yay for new Doves!!! - but nothing telling me anything about the originals concept except for deducing that the guitar has been around a while and represents long tradition and Bob's your uncle. cool! I figured it out. So let's see what's on the Modern collection. J-45 standard is the 4th guitar listed. I am missing something, which should never be a surprise. It's not a habit for me. It's an MO. It's what I do. I miss things, and I admit that.
So a good 30 minutes of looking and I see nothing. I did not google "what is the original collection by Gibson?". Perhaps my first mistake. doesn't matter, really, because something like this and pricing should be very clear. I know something about guitars and it is not clear. Imagine the masses who are not into this as an obsession? Who could blame a non-enthusiast for going with brand-x.
In other words, to Gibson, please don't make it hard to be a Gibson customer. It's challenging enough to come up with the scratch to join the club to begin with.
-
1
-
-
I can dig it! I have an evil record button, too. I also have a someone hears you singing filter. The Ramone reference was from a world class rant following an Eagles song I bashed out in record time. Something about the last living Ramone calling and asking me to slow down so that the rest of the band can rest in peace. I'm paraphrasing, and I did mean no disrespect to the Ramones. and don't even know if where is one left. I covered that up at the end of the rant by suggesting that in all fairness that I might have been mistaken that that perhaps it was Howard Stern. But then again, I added, why would he be worried about the Ramones?
I do tend to get over myself in quick fashion with a good rant. Wish I could have had one last night.
I'm looking forward to hearing your cover, btw.
-
BK, Baggs has an AmericanaFest series via Newsletter from when I registered something online with them. Almost always inspiring, though I will sometimes let them sit in my inbox for months at a time before binge watching.
Good stuff and thanks for posting.
-
It's BK Ramone! 🙂
Sadly enough, I did that to one of my own songs this week and my wife picked up on it. Good times. 😀
-
BK, you done pretty good to fit that song into your style and made it your own. Always admirable.
The question of lyrics and hearing the words clearly seemed to me to be only a question of speed and fitment. I'd never heard it before, but I found the version by Cold Chisel. Their first verse alone was 22 seconds long, and yours was 15 seconds. Someone put speed in your beer? 😁
-
OK, so I did another one. I got the urge after some more mic experiments. This one is a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Thank You", done ala Chris Cornell (RIP) with his solo guitar effort.
I did one three weeks ago right after I had gotten the room together, but before adding reflection, and then another a week later. Both stunk far worse than this one. This one's sound is in the neighborhood of what I've wanted for a long time with this song.
I did add some original Led Zep flavor with some heavy Reverb. The SJ-200 provides quite a nice sound for these antics. I need to get the 'bird up there soon.
Edit: Yeah, the irony thing just occurred to me. I do all this work to clear up the sound in my studio and then turn around and try to make it sound like it a big gymnasium and push the mid range to it's limits. my only defense is that, um, I got nothing. Sudden onset advanced age adolescence? 😊
-
4 hours ago, billroy fineman said:
PB - I'm lost with most of what you're saying and don't have the ears to notice specifically what changed, but feel I can tell something did change, for the better - and I think it's freakin' amazing. Looking forward to future recordings!
Thanks, Billroy. I am having too much fun with this room.
-
Hokey Dokey, the samples went over like a lead balloon. No biggie, of course. Were they even playable? I was going to ask if the differences were too subtle.
That notwithstanding, I've been in discovery mode this week. The biggest discovery I've made is that I need to re-learn how to track. Everything. And mix. Everything. There is no quick way to describe what I had to do to get even a semi-usable signal into my DAW. A sane person would have given up. I probably should have. I didn't, and am glad I stuck with it. Just imagine the classic advice of getting as much signal through the microphone as the exact opposite of what I had to do to come anywhere close to a clear signal. Just awful. Tracking like I was supposed to track meant all that comb filtering squelchy sibilance was perceived by the mic as the proper signal, and any AD converter I ever tried could not handle it and made it distort even worse.
OK, so back to discovery. Monday, before learning I could get even higher, I had a pair of Rodes MP5s a foot in front of the closet trap, aimed at my SJ-200's neck and bridge. The last recording of the day, and I was bored and felt like singing part of a song. So I did. This was by far, the best I have ever done singing and playing into a mic(mics) at the same time. The song is a CCR deep track(maybe?) called "Long as I can See The Light" as performed by Ted Hawkins on the album called "The Next 100 Years". (find this song on that album on your favorite streaming platform for a real soulful, rootsy treat.) I don't play this style guitar much, and it shows. I also do not sing well, and that style is WAYYYYY out of reach. I had also not rehearsed it, though I do play it once a week or so. I added some studio effects in my DAW. Compression, EQ, Reverb and a teensy bit of echo. I did, just because I could, add 2db at 800Hz or so, and did nip the bottom end a bit in the DAW. I also gave it a small, but wide boost at 3kHz. It did not need it, BUT, I have never, ever been able to do this on anything I ever tracked in this room before. So I made it a bit bright.
Remember, this is crude and I don't do this style well at all. <gulp> Oh yeah, and I forgot the words and kludged together a couple verses while playing and singing this 1/2 song recording.
Full of mistakes, breathing, etc.It's looking up and in the right direction, at least? I'm used to hiding behind full productions. LOL
-
Absolutely outstanding! Bravo!
-
Nice, yet again, Sal! Many kudos. Tough one to sing, too, I imagine.
-
Cool! I don't know the market on these types of makes, but the prices didn't seem that awful on his site.
-
Up first is a sample of what a few pieces of pegboard and plastic does to the sound when recording acoustic guitar. This was done two weeks ago. I played my SJ strung with the D'Add Nickel Wounds using a Gibson Heavy pic. I played a short passage using a moderately heavy strum. The goal was discovery and learning, not to impress myself with smooth sound.
There are six iterations of the same passage, which I played in the same spot as my wife placed various components around following a script.
This is zero EQ, compression or any effects at all. Not even low freq roll off. I chose the basic Rodes NT 1 mic over the Myrtle because it has a much flatter below 200Hz relative to distance, making it more consistent for testing. Also, there is no big dip at 3.2kHz like the Myrtle has. If there's an issue, I want to hear it.
For the testing, the mic was placed about a foot from the closet facing front, and about 3 feet from the right wall. Mic 2-4 inches above the guitar neck and body joint, 2 inches to the left of the joint and about 20 inches away from the guitar. Guitar was slightly facing right at a specific spot for consistency.
Note: I did not cover it earlier, but I built the two rearmost sidewall gobos with pegboard on the back instead of both sides insulation like the rest. This was done to make them reversable. Also note that the closet-trap has it's top 2-feet covered with pegboard. This is done 4-inches behind the fabric. The mic is getting reflections back from this on every test.
Below are the timestamps and the items tested. Each test was built upon the one before it unless otherwise noted. In other words, if I put a piece of plastic up somewhere, assume it stayed there until otherwise noted.
Also note that the results are very subtle from one test to the next. I am testing different scenarios of the same sort of thing - reflections. Remember, this was all quick, semi-firm strums using a heavy-ish plectrum. This is also trimmed down from about 12-14 longer test segments done all at once, trimmed down to 8 smaller segments for ease of detecting differences.
- 0:02 - Standard position with the rear-most side gobos turned with the pegboard side facing towards the room for basic reflections.
- 0:18 - Added 24" x 48" sheet of VERY thin plywood to floor between me and the mic-stand.
- 0:34 - replaced plywood with pegboard - same size and thickness.
- 0:50 - Replaced pegboard with Bamboo Floor Matt - about 30" x 54" -
- 1:06 - Replaced bamboo with pegboard, added a 24" x 60" piece of plastic draped over the rear wall gobo and the two side-wall rearmost gobos. The latter meant the plastic went over the pegboard built into the two side gobos.
- 1:24 - Added an additional piece 24" x 48" sheet of pegboard - this time standing longways on floor behind the mic.
- 1:42 - Added a similar piece of plastic to the front of the pegboard added in previous step.
- near the 2:00 mark - Turned the rear most sidewall gobos so that the pegboard was facing away from the room, and draped the plastic over the side now facing the room. I call this the "softwode out" as opposed to the "pegboard side out".
Some basic analysis I came up with. Feel free to read or not read before listening for yourself.
- Each piece of plastic that went up added something to the end result, but sounded off until the 3rd piece was added. It got better, too, with the piece placed on rear-wall pegboard.
- I used plywood several times in testing. Each time it was used, the mids starting at 1kHz got a bit duller. Another way to put it is that it got less noisy. Time will tell. Test #2 showed this the best, which is why I included it.
- The bamboo had a finished surface, which I think is the cause for it to sound a bit brighter.
- Test #5 showed me a teensy bit brighter, but the 850Hz was much clearer and with a definitive mid-range growl.
- Test #6 showed me a little bit more direct sounding 1kHz - 2kHz response.
- Test #8 seemed like it was a bit more subdued than the rest. I might have even thought it to be thick at one point.
Lastly, this is the same file as before, except I was abusing it with many plugins, experimenting with EQ, compressors, sound FX and reverbs. While I heard the boomy parts in the studio, I did NOT hear the depth of these parts. Not until I got out of the room and had some fresh ears with different, non-studio headphones. I corrected the issue that next morning with pegboard, which is something I would call nothing but pure luck. Simply put, It's where it felt empty to me. I showed my wife after the fix what I missed and she was quite shocked that anyone could ever miss it.
Anyhow, the awfulness.......
I have no idea if these differences are audible on builtin device speakers. I hope you can hear the differences.
-
5 hours ago, Salfromchatham said:
My god. I scratched my headstock changing tuners. I am as bad at home improvements as I am at fishing. I see this post and am in awe. Kudos!
........
Thanks, Sal! I am not good at that stuff at all. More like a perfect storm of stubborness and frustration. I prefer to call it persistence, but whatever works. LOL
5 hours ago, BluesKing777 said:The morons that built my house would have loved to have made it resonate badly like that, but they didn't know how!
And we picked the 'boutique' model...ha ha ha ha ha ha ahahahahahaha eeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh single story that took approx 40 times longer than the 2 storey next door. At one point, it was at last due for bricklaying and der dum....they didn't have a bricklayer handy.. so they used an apprentice or something and of course, he 'mucked' it up. And on our independent inspection, it was all pulled down!!! So the frame and insulation sat there in the weather for a year until they could get a bricklayer. And when that all appeared unbelievable and we were moving to get a lawyer and our money paid so far back......, I stopped by and they had given up on waiting for a bricklayer and were fitting out the interior!!!!!
So later I got a phone call and asked to come to the site to meet 'Jimmy'. I am sure by now someone is videoing me and I am in a comedy. Jimmy is about 3'6" and is the head of an independent building crew that our builder has hired to finish off the house as they were never ever ever going to meet the extended finish date. First thing Jimmy told me was that he did karate.
And of course, the lawyer I hired was as bad as the building group and had not even looked at the case.
Somehow Jimmy and his gang finished off the rest of the house in approx 1/2 an hour or so and we were notified we were good to go. Ha hahhahahahhahhahah eeeyyyyyyaaahhh.
We had a architect group do a pro inspection, $500 each time they went to site and they furnished us with a list that honestly, looked like the house should be pulled down again! It was unclear if they had remedied anything after months of phone calls and on the final inspection, the inspector took me aside and said the builder had fixed 'some things' but not all. We had a nice chat and he offered the sage advice: "You could go on like this until Doomsday and they will still never get it right - it is 'liveable', so if it was me, I would just move in and get independent repairs done as I can......"
Oh yeah - we were living in the in-laws rumpus room way down in the country and driving to town for work for 18 months while these fool did all this, so of course....
And here I sit in a house still that is probably un-sellable. A really expensive knock-down!
And the lawyer never billed me. After 22 years, I assume he plain forgot about us.
Oh well, it is a roof. There was a crooked man who......
P.S. How does that resonator sound in the boomy parts, PB?
BluesKing777.
That sounds like a horrid ordeal. I had my own issues with a crooked, lieing scum of the Earth contractor. I was actually going to have him build these, but I caught him being unethical on two big things at one time. I was MERCILESS in the two weeks of shaming that ensued. It was brutal. I am not a cruel guy, but I can be.
To answer your question, I have not played the resonator since starting this project. It was un-useable before putting up the studio foam this past April. That tamed it some, but it was still boomy and screechy sounding. My wife got me a lap steel as a partial solution last year until I was ready to properly attack the room. I've been playing the resonators outside almost exclusively just because of the house acoustics. I'm looking forward to hear what it can be.
So, I don't know if you ever caught any of the American late 60's Spaghetti Westerns and the like. The sound effects to sell that something was loud was to spike the meters. Like a guy yelling or a gun shot in close quarters echoing with a gawd-awful racket. That sound and my sound shared some similarities. Another one was the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where an animated God appeared from the heavens with a big, echo-laden thunderous voice. My vocals were like that, even with treating on the way in and after.
-
8 hours ago, j45nick said:
Frame houses where they haven't paid much attention to sound isolation and insulation can be like a big drum, especially multi-story building with open stairwells. The walls pretty effectively "breathe" when they reflect sound waves, just like your guitar body. Studded walls are just framed with two-pin-end columns that vibrate in the middle in most cases.
There's a reason we used to take our guitars into the dorm stairwells to play in college. Lots of hard surfaces to yield natural reverb.
In high-end yachts that always have vibrating machinery running--such as pumps and generators--you start by isolating that vibration from the main structure with the type of mounts you use, and work out from there, including de-coupling other sources of vibration and sound from structures that enable transmission. We use a lot of high-density foam with de-coupling layers of very dense material--lead in the past, high-density composites more commonly now. There's a whole segment of the marine industry dedicated to this stuff.
In conventional structures where sound attenuation is a concern, you often use a similar de-coupling process, but you rarely see that in home construction except at the very high end. If you're lucky, you get fiberglass insulation in the bathroom walls, but rarely in the spaces between floors.
This is all both art and science.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, the group I worked with had a short-lived contract with Mercury Records. I was pretty awestruck the first time I went into their midtown Manhattan studios. For all the sophistication of the studio's isolation components--including a lot of movable screens and booths, since they had to accommodate everything from solo artists to groups with big brass sections (these were the days of Chicago Transit Authority and Blood, Sweat, and Tears)--they also had a huge pile of what were for all practical purposes just moving blankets, which could be draped over anything and everything.
It was a fascinating experience for a guy who never did anything more sophisticated than engineering live concerts with a primitive home-made board in venues ranging from small rooms to noisy brick-walled clubs in the Village, with the occasional college gym or auditorium thrown in.
It wasn't always an easy job. I used to get a lot of nasty glares from the chick lead singer/piano player, who was a classically-trained opera singer and pianist who was, shall we say, picky about how she sounded. She was good, though.
I really admire PB for taking on this project. Don't forget to play your guitars, however.
Thanks! I appreciate that. And yes, I actually made it a point to play every single day during the project. Early on, I thought about the irony of getting the room done with lost callousses. LOL
That explanation makes total sense to me. I did find the whole experience to be fascinating on many levels, including the planning and then subsequent adjustments. One quick example. There was a definite low hum/rumble at the front wall The picture of that one soffit trap set on the bottom right corner reduced it so that I could not hear it. I brought it in and out of the room many times just to be sure.
The one type of trap that delayed the start of the project was researching something called a VPR trap. Big results if it works, but moderate success rate and HUGE expense due to the special foam used and being hard to source. Sounds like something similar, perhaps, to the marine material.
-
2 hours ago, billroy fineman said:
Nice PB! Hoping you can redo a couple clips you did with the old set up and put up an A/B at some point... if you're sitting around wondering what to do now that your home project is done 🙂
Thanks, Billroy. It'll take some time to find a good "before" track that wasn't shaped on the way in, and that has decent notes on mic type and placement, pic, guitar used, etc, etc. I do have a before and after vocal take using the test gobos that told me to go forward with this project.
I'll post a couple things later today or tomorrow, though. One is a semi-subtle variances on different reflective material in various places for using the room to track acoustic guitar. Another showing something I missed when bouncing a test track due to flat center image.
-
2 hours ago, BluesKing777 said:
My music room is approx 10ft x 10ft, but a 'built-in wardrobe' takes up almost 2 feet along one wall, complete with fake wood sliding doors! I have contemplated digging out to the property line but it would probably easier to ........eek....sell some guitars........👹
On the other side of that closet wall is a bathroom, sep toilet, laundry...... each would be the same size as my music room except for the hallway that runs to my music room.....(which has a row of guitars in cases on stands). There is a door to my room and also a sliding door at the end of the hallway. On the other side of the hallway is a living space type of thing.
There was an ad I saw for a guitar - computer interface, and the acoustic guitarist was sitting in the middle of fully minimalist totally empty music room and plugged to his laptop. I looked for the ad to show you but can't find it. It left me a little hysterical when I first saw the photo......
Sounds....... to me, my guitars sound 'correct' when playing in this room. The four or five other places in the house that I can play sometimes, probably while next door beasts have gone on holiday, include my TV room (carpet, semi dead room) where I play with on my chair with a window to my left - sounds depends on curtains open or closed. I often grab a guitar while working in my computer area if I am waiting for a call or software fix etc - I get the fully reflected sound of the guitar from the screen and a closet to my right, interesting but a bit deafening with a big guitar....
Before I set up the music room, I would sit on the end of my bed or the chair - this is a great way to kill your neck or back, but now again I do it for 'old time sake'...stare out a window while playing!!!!! ( I sort of miss a house I rented for a while where I sat by these windows in a sunroom on the side of a slight rise - I could watch all the goings on while picking! Of course, I could park by my front window and play if I wanted to but all the local neanderthals can see me and probably want to break guitar, eat the guitar or get me to attempt to teach their little Johnny or Jilly. Being a vampire muso guitarist ex rock and roll and shift worker, back to my music room/cave I retreat!
If the Boss is at work, I can play in the living/reading area facing a back garden. A totally different sound with a big glass window and slider door and fully different with the glass door open. A lot 'smaller' sound. It is nice to sit and play there, but there are a list of garden jobs needing to be done that I can see. I have also seen small faces hiding behind a tree branch watching from over the back fence. They could be interested in learning a bit of guitar but the blood curdling screams and massive amount of noise I hear as they play on their fort or in their pool leads me to believe they would rather break my guitar, eat my guitar or even see if it floats in their pool. More suited to being drummers, possibly. On the next house over is the enemy of recording, drummer, plays in garage with all doors and windows open. Can't play to save himself, lasts only 10 mins before doing a hamstring injury, normally. But if he has been drinking....well.
I use to like playing on/under my back veranda/pergola, totally different sound outside but there are swimming pools in 3 adjacent houses now and the constant ring of pool filters and pumps. Thanks, arsenstikens! There is no peaceful guitar playing out there, unless they are all on holiday!!!! But back to my cave....
Over the years in bands, I did all kinds of thing in studios from demo tapes to projects and a few unpaid sessions. At the beginning, I went from a small Sanyo recorder to a reel to reel to a Tascam with cassette!!! My piano player friend (RIP) caught the 'record bug' from me and bought all kinds of contraptions including Protools and a Mac tower and mics. I was his guinea pig - his gear was in his piano room and I sat in his lounge room in front of a wall of mics and leads...I have played in all kinds of situations but that one made me break out in a sweat. I am telling you this because he would sit there for months editing his recordings , down to microscopic level. For example, he would zoom in on any chair, clothes noise, mouth clicks, hair flicks, rustles and do little fades to hide them. A car backfiring out the front of his house while I was playing/recorded nearly broke his heart!
So I have not the patience for that. I leave the mics on their stand in the SAME place, ready to roll! My mouth noises stay and every recording I have made recently has my chair squeaking at the end! I have enjoyed recording with the mic boom fully extended straight up and the mic pointing down at me....one take, vocal and guitar together. Organic!
BluesKing777.
Oh, wow! I always imagined your music room was somewhat bigger due to your recordings. Interesting, too, is that small, square rooms are supposed to be tough rooms to control, acoustically speaking. You're the second person I've had mention to me a room of that type that does well recording. Far better than my room.Perhaps some day I will learn what it is about this house that sounds so boomy. Everything. Dogs barking, talking, TV, speakers, etc, etc. It's like a giant reverb chamber. As a Migraineuer, it can be murder.
I have two main spots I play guitar, but it doesn't really matter. It's going to be heard in the house. My normal spot to play guitar is in a sort of a formal living room. It's right behind the Hummingbird in the pic below. The storage pic shows the semi-open floor plan. Sound travels. If she's not at work, she is almost certainly sitting directly across the room from me on a loveseat with her back to loud 2-story foyer. It's a flutter chamber. Sometimes she'll hang in the studio with me and a little portable beading station to make jewelry. I almost never play acoustic in the studio with her in there, though. It's too much. she's polite about it, but I don't want to run her off either, so I'll play electric at lower, more reasonable volumes. Mostly, it's right here on the couch without the opposite wall to bounce a massive reflection back at me.
Your friend's (RIP) obsession with the smallest of noises is quite common, from what I understand. While I've seen professional tutorials over the years where the presenter will make sure everything is as clean as can be, I've seen far more presenters simply reduce the offending bit. Personally, I like that approach and use it as first choice if the track is a keeper.
Where I
loselost time is taming unwanted distorted resonances turned into sibilances. The short version is that all that resonance that bounced around the walls without dieing became comb filtering (or various levels of phase cancellation) which replaced of the tone I spent vast amount of money on. (SJ, HB, 614,D41) I tried to turn that crud into music. Now I have glorious tone, and after the most recent reflections, I have depth and tone coming out of my monitors. All that becomes an expensive guessing game when tone is replaced by pitched noises.Here's the common playing spot. I will play outside sometimes, but no comfortable place out front and the back deck is highway noise. I'll play out there to enjoy the air, though. The top step of my front porch might work better if i brought a cushion out. Half the year is too cold or too humid, so it's limited. Lots of kids running around connects me to my younger years when my kid was a kid and not a Medic. I find it relaxing. Been here 23 years next month.
a bit of the open-flow of the house beyond my nice guitar storage cabinet.
-
6 hours ago, Lars68 said:
One heck of a project! Well done!
Before and after recordings would be cool to share here.
Lars
Thanks, Lars! I did have some thoughts to that end.
3 hours ago, Boyd said:That is quite impressive - nice job! 😎
I did some basic things to my space - curtains covering the walls at one end of the room, carpet on the walls at the other end. But I prefer the wide-open acoustics of my Little Theatre in the Woods. Not much I can do when plane passes over on the way to AC International though. 🙂
Thanks, Boyd! That is one of the better home studios in the history of home studios. I still remember the video you posted.
45 minutes ago, Red 333 said:Wow. I admire your ambition, persistence, and craftsmanship. And thanks for documenting it so thoroughly and so vividly. Very well done.
Red 333
Thanks, Red333!
-
1
-
-
I forgot to thank BK and j45Nick. Thank!
One other small note on the subject of.......
9 hours ago, BluesKing777 said:......
A guitar friend did all the soundproofing with spray foam so he could have really loud band practice/soundproof overdub and tracking recording. It was sure soundproof but he forgot the air! No air! Halfway though the first band song, nobody can breathe. No air! Smelled awful too.
.....
BluesKing777.
This was a real concern on many levels. I totally wrapped it all with 1/2" of Dacron and went for something less porous than burlap, though cotton was not a great choice as it sags and some of it needs to be stretched and re-staple already. Those layers were for odor protection and air-born particles.
As far as the air of the room with regards to sound reverberating around the room, reflection-free area was an option, but still is a partial concern. Part of the build would have had to include many large areas of calculated reflective surfaces and diffusion. My room and budget were both way to small for this. I had to do a reduced version of this, which is what you see. I'm going experiment more with reflective materials and do a song in there in hopes of determining any dead spots, noisy spots, etc. Once I have that down, then I will make more permanent additions facings where the end spots will be. For now, exposed pegboard and plastic.
As part of that last step will be the front of the closet-trap. I will make either a masonite cover that will have 24-48 inch alternating patterns of drill holes, a wooden slat system or a skyline diffuser system. All pictured below from a brief google-search. The slats and the random drill hole versions will both assist with reducing the 70Hz dip.
BAD panel - or Binary diffusion pattern
and a skyline style - smaller ones may be incorporated in the "live" half of the room.
The masonite or other very thin wood-based product thing with the carefully spaced holes will likely win out unless it's clear that the wood slat design will do more to help me with the 70Hz bass dip. In the end, I might just purchase a couple of skyline style diffusers for added audible air.
-
28 minutes ago, Murph said:
Very ambitious project.
Studio B in Nashville had some dividers about 4 feet tall and some wood. And Chet.
"Machine Head" was recorded in an old hotel with mattress's for dividers.
There's no magic.
Damn good work my friend.
Thanks Murph! I searched far and wide for the magic. There's a $2,600(and up) contraption most easily described as a backwards sub-woofer.
6 hours ago, Holiday Hoser said:Photos look good to me but really I just some used old egg cartons and and some stained shag carpet I tore out of the pedophile neighbors van after he got hauled off to jail.
ewwwww!!!!!! stranger-danger! LOL
-
25 minutes ago, j45nick said:
I could never have given up that closet space. I would have changed out the closet doors to solid doors, and insulated on the outside face of the doors. It might also have required a removable soft cover you could put over the doors when necessary for recording.
This was a challenging project, and I admire your persistence.
I tried. I scoffed at the notion. I needed lots of depth somewhere, even with membrane-based traps. Back walls are noted low-end monsters(gathering points) and the SPL meter confirmed when sending out low-end sine waves. Putting 7-inch bass traps in front of the closet did nothing for the low end, though it did help starting in the low mids.
Nerd alert for anyone interested - a free to use web-based little online calculator that shows one the effectiveness of porous material (insulation, foam) and thicknesses needed and the frequency ranges affected. Use the default flow resistivity. Porous Absorption Calculator
-
7 hours ago, BluesKing777 said:
I only see the first 4 photos and the rest are blank boxes....
Anyway, is The Band with Bob coming to record or just you?
A guitar friend did all the soundproofing with spray foam so he could have really loud band practice/soundproof overdub and tracking recording. It was sure soundproof but he forgot the air! No air! Halfway though the first band song, nobody can breathe. No air! Smelled awful too.
So even though I can now hear (as I type) the very loud and selfish John Bonham wannabe over the back fence playing the same doom doom doom rat a tat tat, and have screaming screamers all around the street, I haven’t done anything to treat my music room and often play with the door open! My acoustics sound great (to me) in my room because I have a lifetime of my guitar stuff in there as sound deadeners....guitars in cases, amps, mixer, desk, computer, gadgets plus all my music books and dvds are like a soundproof wall! If I sit in my chair, I can spin around to everything.....front is music stand, mic stand, mics, amps with boxes of pickups, leads on top. Floor has preamps, just lean down and plug one or all in! To the left is a row of guitars in cases and a guitar stand for the selected victim and an office /visitor chair with currently a camera in its bag and the guitar bag that the J50 came in folded up, plus my soft leather briefcase to take leads and books and capos etc out.... Spin to my right and I have my mixer, computer, printer, battery supplies, headphones, in ears. And a pile of guitar tab/lyrics/songs that I am working through currently. Under the desk is a box with strings, humidity things etc, and boxes of mics, electronica. Etc. Behind me is a printer, a bunch of tins with with guitar cleaners, polish, inspection mirror, guitar type tools and next to that is a small plank I hammered some nails in evenly to hold my fave slides and bottlenecks.
I have to get up to select a guitar from its case or to select a music book or lead or...but surely I could invent a ‘selector’ ala George Jetson.
BluesKing777.
Indulge me. What are your room dimensions?
I hear you. I fought this tooth and nail. I even considered the previous round over-kill. It's difficult to explain how jealous I am of people who can record something nice without having to do a thing. The modal ringing was so bad that it effected plugged in guitars' tracked tone. Even those rubber sound-hole plugs failed. Electric guitars not even being plugged in caused this modal ringing.
-
Switched to two different services before I found one that worked. 'oy!!! Bed time for this old man.
Shimmed My Saddle!
in Gibson Acoustic
Posted
I'm glad to read that it came out. I bought one of the kits last Autumn, but ended up putting the UST back in. Still have not used it either. (kit and UST - have played the guitar often)