My Home Project Studio Project

[MorrisrownSal]

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!

 

unrelated, Boyd... I wanna hang at your gig garden!

[BluesKing777]

5 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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Edited February 2, 2020 by BluesKing777

[Boyd]

2 hours ago, Salfromchatham said:

unrelated, Boyd... I wanna hang at your gig garden!

 

Just send me a PM if you ever find yourself headed into the wilds of South Jersey, I'm not very far from Ocean City.  😀

[BoSoxBiker]

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.

[BluesKing777]

 

 

I saw this advertised on TV - I have no idea what it is like but if I was starting again, unlikely but - I would definitely look into building a dedicated space with this kind of board and the associated insulation:

 

https://www.gyprock.com.au/products/plasterboard-soundchek

 

If I moved house, for example, surely this stuff wouldn't be that tricky to replace the existing paper thin (read cheapo) wallboard stuff in a music room in an apartment, for example, or a different house?

 

BluesKing777.

 

 

 

 

[BoSoxBiker]

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.  

[BoSoxBiker]

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.

1. 0:02 - Standard position with the rear-most side gobos turned with the pegboard side facing towards the room for basic reflections.
2. 0:18 - Added 24" x 48" sheet of VERY thin plywood to floor between me and the mic-stand.
3. 0:34 - replaced plywood with pegboard - same size and thickness.
4. 0:50 - Replaced pegboard with Bamboo Floor Matt - about 30" x 54" -
5. 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.
6. 1:24 - Added an additional piece 24" x 48" sheet of pegboard - this time standing longways on floor behind the mic.
7. 1:42 - Added a similar piece of plastic to the front of the pegboard added in previous step.
8. 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.

[j45nick]

7 hours ago, BluesKing777 said:

 

 

I saw this advertised on TV - I have no idea what it is like but if I was starting again, unlikely but - I would definitely look into building a dedicated space with this kind of board and the associated insulation:

 

https://www.gyprock.com.au/products/plasterboard-soundchek

 

If I moved house, for example, surely this stuff wouldn't be that tricky to replace the existing paper thin (read cheapo) wallboard stuff in a music room in an apartment, for example, or a different house

That's interesting. Note that it isn't suitable for use in higher humidity locations, so the higher density part must be water soluble, maybe a cellulose fiber of some kind.

 

 

 

 

[BluesKing777]

It is 40% humidity at this moment here, but we had a massive thunderstorm Friday/Saturday and a deluge - humidity was 95% (online weather).

It drives my poor guitars insane.

So what happens with the Soundchek plaster stuff in 95%? Will the wall start doing a Salvador Dali?

And PB, I am working on the only computer left on the planet with no sound card, thanks Boss...I will listen later on my Mac laptop.

I remembered one of the worst acoustic guitar sounds I ever had was when they built my house 20 plus years ago and we lived (dog and bird too!) in the out-laws basement in a hillside rumpus room. I thought it was kind of them at the time, but the whole thing with the uncle living upstairs was some kind of comedy and really was an act of sadism to see if we/I cracked. I did, but it was mainly because after driving past my house on my 2 1/2 hour daily commute every morning and nobody was at the house doing any building, well.....seeing red; get home after long drive in traffic and then a nice zip through the country and the stupid uncle can't do a simple thing like....etc, seeing more red....have a microwave dinner, horrid again..seeing red...but the final straw was grabbing my acoustic at the time and sounding....awful. Just the cream on top, eh?

So, it was a large square room with a slate tile floor and a big full length window on the sunny side, room taken up mainly by a full size slate top pool table next to a bar with English taps but no keg, a baby sink, a massive refrigerator and a massive freezer box that sounded like they had V8 engines. And our bed jammed in the corner. And the couch cushions sank to the floor when we sat on it! So after all the driving, I get to sit on the edge of a busted couch and my guitar sounded horrid. I ended up not playing much and yelling at everyone!

All something for me to keep in mind - while my guitars sound good in my music room, the surrounding people are the worst morons I have ever lived near. True. So I have often considered ditching it at a loss and moving.

But what if we move somewhere fantastic and the guitars sound awful? Oh no! (The in-laws/outlaws? place in the country was  in a classic retiree to the beach/country area. It is a beautiful area with wineries, beach, everything but we were so tired that we never saw any of it.  Most of would happily live there if we didn't have to work....Lotto!!!!!)

Revenge of the Guitar Fairies!

 

 

BluesKing777.

 

Edited February 3, 2020 by BluesKing777

[BoSoxBiker]

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 

[uncle fester]

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!

[BoSoxBiker]

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.

[BoSoxBiker]

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? 😊

 

Edited February 7, 2020 by PatriotsBiker

[trailerman]

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.

[62burst]

1 hour 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.

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.

[Boyd]

Why mess around inside a cramped RV when the whole world is your studio? You can put together a very nice rig that can be setup anywhere and fit into a storage bin. That's what I do at my little theatre in the woods. 8-track Zoom F8 field recorder, a little effects processor for reverb, an iPad as a mixing board, pair of powered stage monitors and assorted cables and microphones. It's powered with a Goal Zero Yeti400 battery powerpack that will run eveything for 4 hours or more. 

Park the RV in some remote place, set it up and enjoy the perfect acoustics of the great outdoors. 🙂

Edited February 12, 2020 by Boyd

[BoSoxBiker]

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.

[BoSoxBiker]

This is why I went through all of this work, time and expense this winter.. This song is is after about 7- weeks of re-learning everything from tracking to mixing. The room came out big. Lots of warm tones that I ever imagined I'd ever get I used  a song from last year to learn the room again.  I'll post the old version below, if you want to hear the difference. 

So here it is. Me on everything except for the canned drums application called Superior Drummer 3. I start a sort of a Mastering process on Monday. I'll start working on 24 or so old songs in hopes of having a collection of songs I could call an album. We'll see. I the meantime, I'd love to hear ny notes and thoughts you might have to help me get to that next level.

PS- this is pre-Mastering and is about 6db shy, so may need to turn your cans up a couple notches.  Thanks!

 

 

And this is the version this past year; Just horrible. Ugh!!!

 

 

Edited March 21, 2020 by PatriotsBiker

[uncle fester]

Sounds good PB, to me - makes everything sound like it found the place it wants to be, and occupies it well, with the different instruments complimenting each other vs just recorded one over the other.  May you find many hours of happiness...  what was that 'hurricane' or 'storm' song you did - was well received with the old set up,  maybe got to try and redo that one?

[BoSoxBiker]

3 hours ago, billroy fineman said:

Sounds good PB, to me - makes everything sound like it found the place it wants to be, and occupies it well, with the different instruments complimenting each other vs just recorded one over the other.  May you find many hours of happiness...  what was that 'hurricane' or 'storm' song you did - was well received with the old set up,  maybe got to try and redo that one?

Thanks, billroy. The whole studio experience has changed for me. Being able to hear everything is golden. This track is "enjoying" the benefits of me getting warm tones out of my system. It's got a fairly aggressive build up of the warm low-mids going on just because I could not get and hear them for years. I mixed this sans reference tracks just because I had a sound I had to get out of my system. Now I need to dial it back a little. This one's for me. 🙂  I will see it through ti a Mastered state, so to speak, and try some post-mixing totnal corrections to make it fit the more bright radio sound. It will be educational for me in the very least.

Yes, the song is "Hurricane Blues", previously "Rain Blues". I think I recorded that using a Lap Steel directly plugged into an amp sim. I think I want to do it on a Dobro with a Mic. The vocals is the biggest thing I want to re-do, though. I think next, though, might be the song, "Good Morning". I think I remember us talking about that one last year. 

I've got 60 originals done, all with the old studio acoustics sound going. Of the 60, I've got maybe 25-30 that I want to redo. I've got at least that many songs in a mostly written state, waiting for me to on. One of them in particular has been nagging at me for 5-6 years, called the "The Battle of Bellows Falls". At any rate, I've got two 12-song albums in mind. That'll keep me busy. LOL

[BoSoxBiker]

Another update as I learn and re-learn this room and what I hear. I did to that Mastering effort on the previous one, but had a quasi-senior moment toasted it.

This mix was nearly a re-mix. This is all still a new experience for me. This one was an effort to open it up and have it sound like something one might hear should they want to listen to an Urban Cowboy Soundtrack CD. The Johnny Lee, "Looking For Love..." song, to be specific. I used it as a reference song as well as a few Garth Brooks numbers from No Fences album.

I'm going to work on a mastering version today and maybe tomorrow. I'll post that for comparison in case anyone is interested, along with some notes on the results. The volumes are going to be close as part of much broader gain staging and volume management efforts I began with this version.

 

[BoSoxBiker]

OK, the final posting of this for this thread. This is the "Mastered" version of the song I posted last week. It was all new to me just like the mix-down phase was. I added some more reflective material to the panels/gobos in order to hear more of what was going on. The room itself has got some more life to it than it did back in January.

Going through this whole process taught me a great deal. Some of it even goes back to tracking my acoustics on day-1. I don't think there is anything that I would not change if I were going to start this song today. To that end, it served it's purpose. I do think this song deserves the less is more treatment, so when I do get around to doing it again, it will be largely an acoustic offering instead of the bigger mix I had in place.

The mastering process is basically a series of gentle moves, with needles barely moving on compressor gauges and EQ changes small and subtle. I added a small bit of harmonic enhancement directly and indirectly. All of the modifications I did were things I could hear in real time with my monitors - even the dithering. While that may seem like a small thing, it was big progress for me.

So, to mercifully end this drawn out production, Pawn Shop Guitars 3, all Mastered up.

 

 

[thegreatgumbino]

Kudos on an awesome job.  Thinking about adding all the overdubs makes my head spin.  I look forward to hearing more of your originals as you get your albums put together.

[BoSoxBiker]

5 hours ago, thegreatgumbino said:

Kudos on an awesome job.  Thinking about adding all the overdubs makes my head spin.  I look forward to hearing more of your originals as you get your albums put together.

Thanks! It is fun, but the added factor of learning a bunch of this stuff all over again all, and at once, was head spinning. Just putting some thoughts together as a little test for my next song earlier this week was much smoother, though, now that this one was under my belt.

[Lars68]

Sounds spectacular!

Lars