My Home Project Studio Project

[BoSoxBiker]

Well, it took far too long, but I finally got a handle on the needed adjustments needed to further treat my studio space.

It took several weeks to mix a 5-track song. The root cause ended up being gaps in my front wall treatment causing echo-chambers that reverberated and reflected back into my audio. In the pictures earlier in the thread, these were the space between my two front gobos, and the spaces between the corner bass traps and the top center wall bass trap. As a quick proof of concept, I taped together a bunch of my old studio foam, cut to size, and made 8-inch thick panels wrapped in plastic and filled the spaces.

As part of my ongoing pegboard and plastic experiments.

• Added plastic to 6 of the ceiling to wall triangle traps.
• Fastened the three 2' x 4' pegboard pieces to partially cover the foamed areas previously mentioned, as well as equalize the placement to be more uniformed.
• Moved pegboard from the 1st reflection gobos to the middle gobos. *
• Added full length plastic to the first reflection gobos and the one rear gobo. *
• Added one 12" x 12" square piece of foam to the top center of my front wall pegboard to control a specific reflection.

* = Technically speaking, having reflective material is in the first reflection zones is voodoo, and by helping, would indicate that it is making up for additional defects.

This helped me with three big, remaining fundamental defects that I had as a result of the new acoustic build last Winter.

1. A more balanced room in a tonal sense. It was tilted towards the low frequencies far too much. It is more even now.
2. As it turned out, I was still getting lots of mid-range phase cancellation. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this.
3. Most surprisingly, the major canyon between 60Hz and 110Hz filled up some more. No measurement numbers yet.

Now to how it helped me. The biggest thing was depth. As I said in another thread about my recent song, I have been able to hear the defects all along during the whole mix process. I just could not fix them. I wrote it all off to poor tracking, which is still at least partially true. After I did these changes, I was able to hunt down and identify the defects as if they were giant zits on the end of my nose. I re-mixed that song in about 4-5 hours and had the best mix of my life despite not doing any volume automation or anything. And that is all on what was still a poorly tracked performance.

Speaking of poorly tracked, I did some test tracking with my SJ-200 before and after. What I can hear now from the "before" is a separation of about 25-50ms between the original sound coming from my guitar to the ugly reflections being picked up by the microphone. I think this is more comb filtering? Regardless, the newer test recordings did not have this. There was a distortion happening right around the 1kHz area, too, that has been greatly reduced. This combination definitely led to a much more pleasing sound.

I did do the gap filling in one afternoon and then the pegboard and plastic positioning the next afternoon. I did not do any test recordings in between. I did do, however, a shorter rough mix in between. The bulk of the improvements of the sound I got from my monitors as evident after filling the gaps with foam. The positioning of plastic and pegboard helped, though, and it too was obvious right away. I would say the low mids benefited from this more than anything.  

In closing, finally, this link is the forum post to my most recent song and has the 3-week mixing effort and the subsequent remix for comparison. This is the same source material. It is all a result of being able to hear the detail much better due to room improvements. I think you'll find the differences to be substantial.

The Song Thread with samples

[claytongsimpson]

Nice interior, I like this wooden-style design with an old-school vibe. I saw a similar design in some of these Spanish apartments (without a studio, of course). I want to renovate my house in this style.

Edited December 15, 2020 by claytongsimpson