I’ve talked about acoustic treatment a lot here on Home Studio Corner. Why? Because it’s one of the most important components of your home studio (if not the most important).

Everything you do in a studio is centered around audio waves, right? We’re in the business of capturing, manipulating, and reproducing audio waves.

While we audio cowboys are in the process of wrangling in these unruly audio waves, they’re bouncing all around our room. The more reflective surfaces your studio has, the more unwieldy the audio becomes.

Acoustic treatment is like Ritalin™ for your studio. Audio waves have ADD. They bounce around the room like crazy until they finally run out of energy…then they do it again.

Okay. Enough analogies.

An Undercover EQ

Regardless of your involvement in audio, whether your a casual hobbyist or a full-time professional, your music has a slim chance of sounding decent if you don’t have acoustic treatment.

As these waves bounce around the room, certain frequencies are boosted. Others are cut. If your studio is untreated, the room itself acts like a graphic EQ gone crazy. 100 Hz might be cut by 19 dB while 250 Hz might be boosted by 6 dB.

Every room is different. No room is perfect. You can never have a perfectly flat frequency response, but you can “flatten” it out with acoustic treatment and tremendously improve the sound of your room.

Reflections Galore

Another big reason to treat your room is to improve the sound of your recordings.

Let’s say you’re recording lead vocals. You could have a $1,000 microphone running into a $1,500 preamp, but if the microphone is in a room with a bunch of bare walls, your recording is going to sound like it was made in a room with bare walls. (Shocking, right?)

The microphone will pick up the direct sound of the vocal, but it will also pick up all of the early reflections as the sound waves bounce off the walls and ceiling and race back to the microphone. By treating your room, you can cut down on these reflections and capture a nice, up-front vocal without building a vocal booth.

Auralex Roominators Project 2 Kit

I’ve been a big fan of Auralex for quite some time. I was planning to purchase a set of their LENRD bass traps and extra foam sometime this year, so when they approached me about reviewing some of their products on HSC, I jumped at the opportunity.

They sent me a few things to review, but today we’ll focus on the Roominators Project 2 Kit.

[Disclaimer: Yes, Auralex gave me the Roominators Kit in return for a review. However, I only review products I believe in. I've turned down similar offers from other manufacturers.]

What’s included?

The Roominators kit comes in two gigantic boxes. It includes the following:

• (8) LENRD Bass Traps
• (24) Studiofoam 2′x2′x2″ Wedge Panels
• (5) tubes of Tubetak Pro Liquid Adhesive

LENRD Bass Traps

I think I was most excited about these. I already owned some Auralex Studiofoam panels, so I had a fair amount of absorption in my room, but I didn’t really have adequate bass trapping. Bass frequencies are the hardest to tame in a studio, because they’re such large waves. Bass traps like the LENRDs go in the corners (where bass likes to build up) and helps absorb them.

Studiofoam Wedge Panels

Like I said above, I had some acoustic foam in my room, but not nearly enough. With these 2-foot by 2-foot panels (each 2 inches thick), I was able to liberally treat my entire studio, rather than cutting corners like I had done before.

I applied them in the following areas (in order of importance):

• Directly to the left and right of my monitors – This is probably one of the most important applications. Without treatment here, the sound from your monitors bounces off the side walls and reaches your ears at a slightly later time than the direct signal from the monitors. This slight delay causes the monitors to sound undefined. Placing studiofoam here immediately tightened up the sound of my monitors. They sound tighter, and the stereo image is much wider. (It sounded almost mono before.)
• Directly behind my monitors – To prevent sound from reflecting off of the rear wall and interfering with the direct sound of the monitors.
• Directly above my monitors – Sound waves bounce off ceilings, too!!
• Dispersed evenly throughout the room – After thoroughly treating all the areas above, I still had a bunch of panels left, so I applied them evenly throughout the room.

Tubetak Pro Liquid Adhesive

I didn’t use any of the Tubetak adhesive. I simply used a hammer and small nails to place all the pieces where I want them. Once I’m convinced that’s where I want them, I may glue them to the wall with the Tubetak. Until then, the nails are holding up okay…somewhat.

One thing to note about Tubetak. If you decide to glue your foam to your walls, you shouldn’t use standard adhesive, as these oftentimes eat through the foam. (That’s bad.)

See it in action. You can see exactly how I applied the treatment around my studio by checking out my latest Home Studio Tour video.

The Verdict?

There is an IMMEDIATELY noticeable difference in the sound of the room. It feels much more…”tame.” When I talk or clap my hands, I don’t hear the sound bouncing all around the room anymore. It does a little bouncing, but it quickly dies out.

One thing to keep in mind when applying acoustic treatment – don’t try to cover every square inch of your room. If you do, the room will be TOO absorptive and it’ll feel dead. It’s okay to have some reflections, just not an overwhelming amount.

Mixing

From a mixing standpoint, my speakers sound much more clear. I can hear details in my studio monitors that I could only hear with headphones prior to the acoustic treatment. Also, thanks to the bass traps, my studio has a much better low end. It’s not perfect, there’s still some resonance around 200 Hz or so, but the bass is much more pronounced.

Check this out: adding bass traps to my room actually INCREASED the bass response of my room. (See Low End Woes for more on that.)

Recording

From a recording standpoint, I’ve noticed that my recordings sound much cleaner and “tighter.” I don’t hear quite as much room in my lead vocal tracks. The room just seems quieter, which is always nice.

Play some audio already!!

Want to know what a lead vocal sounds like recorded in a completely untreated room versus a treated room? Of course you do.

The bedroom right across the hall from my studio is almost the exact same size as my studio. There’s a bed in there, but nothing on the walls.

I set up a mic in the guest bedroom and recorded a vocal. Then I set up the same mic (with the exact same settings) in my studio and recorded the vocal again. The audio files are 320 kbps mp3′s, and there’s no EQ or compression on either file.

Each was recorded through a M-Audio Luna microphone into a Presonus Eureka preamp into Pro Tools. I was standing 12 inches from the microphone each time.

The Untreated Bedroom:

[See post to listen to audio]

The Treated Studio:

[See post to listen to audio]

What do you think? Pretty big difference, right? And it totally makes a difference in the mix as well. Once you add compression to that first vocal, the sound of the room gets even louder, and you’ll hear it in the mix. The second vocal? Sits in the mix just fine.

The Auralex Roominator Project 2 Kit currently sells for $599 over at Sweetwater. That’s how much you’d pay for a nice preamp or microphone, which are both great, but neither one will help you make better recordings and better mixes. A properly treated room will make your current gear sound much better.

So…what are your thoughts? Let me know by leaving a comment.

If you want to get rid of the frustration of constantly guessing as to how to acoustically treat your studio, join “Understanding Your Room.”
You’ll get the exact training you need to confidently tackle the acoustical issues in your room. Grab your copy here.

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As you’ve heard countless times, your room plays an important role in how good your recordings are going to sound.

Got a bad-sounding room? Your recordings will sound bad.

Got a bad-sounding room? Your mixes will sound bad.

You can certainly do lots of things to combat a bad-sounding room, and no room is perfect, but what if your room was destined to sound bad? What if the mere dimensions of the room were all it takes to make a room unfit for studio work?

The Problem With Rooms

In a perfect world, we would be able to record and mix in a completely open space, where no reflections could swoop in and mess up the sound. If sound travelled through outer space, that would be an IDEAL place to mix a record…but it doesn’t, so we’re stuck figuring this out on earth.

The second-best option would be to mix outside, in a nice open field perhaps. Between the mooing cows, the wind, and the potential rain, you won’t get much done.

So we’re stuck mixing in a room. Whether your room is a tiny little bedroom or a big finished basement (or even a really expensive professional control room), you will have issues. All rooms (just like people) have issues.

Why? Because the sound is bouncing around the room. It’s an enclosed space, and these sound waves need somewhere to go. Since they can’t escape, they bounce around the room in all sorts of weird ways. Side to side. Up and down. Some of them make a loop around the corners of the room. It would be awesome if we could SEE them.

As these sounds are bouncing around the room, they inevitable “run into” each other. Do you remember what happens when similar sound waves combine together? That’s right, bad things.

If your friend, Mr. 150 Hz is bouncing around the room, and he meets up with another 150 Hz wave, one of several things can happen. If they’re aligned with each other perfectly, you’ll get a big ol’ boost at 150 Hz. If they’re out of phase with each other, you’ll get a big ol’ cut at 150 Hz. And any other combination can cause boosts and cuts at all sorts of frequencies. The result? It’s like you slapped a graphic EQ across your speakers and asked a two-year-old to play with the EQ sliders for a while.

Your room is acting like an EQ. It’s changing the signal before it ever hits your ears. Poor signal…it never stood a chance.

While it’s much more complicated than the way my small brain can explain to you, that’s essential what happens. When sound waves are allowed to run rampant, they interact with each other and cause problems.

The Solution

The solution to this problem of sound waves run amuck is to absorb them. By absorbing the waves, they have less of a chance to bounce around the room, minimizing how much the room affects the sound.

Unfortunately, a little piece of foam doesn’t help that much when it comes to absorbing low frequencies, like our friend Mr. 150 Hz. That’s why you’ll hear people stress that you need bass traps. You need something bigger to absorb those bigger sound waves.

How low should your absorption go? It depends on the room. The dimensions of your room will tell you which frequencies will be the most troublesome, then focus on getting treatment that will absorb down to those frequencies.

Choosing the Right Room

If you have the luxury of choosing which room in your home will house your studio, you need to give it some serious thought. We bought our house a year and a half ago, and my studio is now in its THIRD location. Yep. We’ve moved it three times. As it turns out, I think this is the best-sounding room. Why? Because it has good dimensions.

I mentioned earlier that the dimensions of your room determine what frequencies will give you the most problems. For example, if one of the dimensions of my room is around 14′, then I will have issues at 80 Hz. (Just divide the speed of sound by the wavelength. 1130 / 14 = 80.)That’s because 14′ corresponds with the wavelength of an 80 Hz wave.

You can see how it can get really complicated.

Here’s where I’m going with this, and a really simple way to practically apply all this when you’re choosing your studio. You want to set yourself up to succeed. So before you start hanging acoustic treatment, you need to make sure your room isn’t fighting against you unnecessarily.

Here are two room dimension:

5′ x 7′ x 9′

6′ x 8′ x 8′

Which room do you think would be better for your studio? I’ll be honest, I used to think the bigger the better, so I’d go with the second one, but as it turns out, the 5′ x 7′ x 9′ room is MUCH better acoustically.

Here’s why. When choosing a room, you want to avoid dimensions that are divisible by the same number or each other.

In this example, the numbers 5,7, and 9 aren’t divisible by the same number OR each other. This is ideal. That means you’ll realistically only have three main trouble frequencies, rather than dozens.

The numbers, 6, 8, and 8 are ALL divisible by 2. And the numbers 8 and 8 are both divisible by 2, 4, AND 8. That’s not good. That means that whatever frequency has a wavelength of 8 feet (140 Hz) will be exponentially more problematic. Not only that, but multiples of that frequency will cause big problems. So 35 Hz, 70 Hz, 280 Hz, 560 Hz…all of these (and lots more) cause all sorts of problems.

The best solution? Simply use the other room. You will, of course, still need acoustic treatment, but the treatment will be much more effective, and the room will sound MUCH better than the other one, all because of the silly physics of the way sound travels and interacts with itself.

Your Next Step

I hope this article has helped you realize how important the room is to your recording success. If you want to learn more, and get really in-depth, practical advice for how to get the most out of your room, then go check out Understanding Your Room. I partnered up with Gavin Haverstick, who knows infinitely more about this stuff than I do, to bring you a phenomenal set of tutorial videos that will help your studio TREMENDOUSLY.

Go check it out now. The price is going up at the end of October. Here’s the link.

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A while back I had the pleasure of attending a seminar given by Gavin Haverstick
of Haverstick Designs. The topic of the seminar was how to measure the acoustic issues of your room. He talked about various measurement techniques and devices.

All of this was very interesting, but the most fascinating part for me was during the question-and-answer section at the end. Someone in the audience asked Gavin to give his opinion on digital room correction.

Let me take a step back and explain what I mean by “digital room correction.” There are several products on the market now that can tune studio monitors to the room they are in. For example, if the room is causing a boost at 200 Hz, these products will use a digital EQ to attenuate 200 Hz. The end result is (ideally) a flat frequency response.

The way these products go about measuring the room is by using an omnidirectional measurement microphone to “listen” to the room while the system generates white or pink noise through the studio monitors. Since the generated noise has the same amount of energy (or volume) across the frequency spectrum, the system can then intelligently “hear” when certain frequencies are being either boosted or cut by the acoustics of the room.

There are three main products that come to mind that incorporate digital room correction:

• JBL LSR 4300 and 6300 series of studio monitors – These are very nice studio monitors with room correction DSP built into the speakers themselves. They ship with a measurement microphone for tuning the room.
• IK Multimedia ARC (Advanced Room Correction) System – This is a plug-in designed to be inserted on the master fader of your DAW, just before the audio is sent to the studio monitors. It ships with a measurement microphone, and it stores the room correction settings inside the plug-in itself.
• KRK ERGO (Enhanced Room Geometry Optimization) – This is a hardware box designed to go between your audio interface and studio monitors. It employs the same basic principle as the other two options above, but it simply does so in a hardware box, rather than in the speakers themselves or as a plug-in.

The audience member who asked Gavin about room correction actually owns a pair of JBL LSRs, but he has no acoustic treatment in his home studio. He was basically wanting to know if he could “get away with” just using the room correction feature on the speakers without buying any acoustic treatment.

Two Parts of Acoustics

When talking about acoustically treating a room, we need to look at two different aspects of sound. You can’t focus on just one and negate the other. Likewise, correcting one won’t fix the other. Those two parts are the frequency domain and the time domain of sound.

Frequency Domain

This is the most obvious side of acoustics. We’re all searching for this fabled “flat frequency response.” We know that the size and shape of a room contributes significantly to the frequency response of the room. Ergo (forgive the pun), we must address those frequency issues by altering the frequency response at the source.

This is done with some sort of equalizer. In the past, engineers attempted to do this buy using some sort of graphic EQ. They would send the outputs of their mixing console through an EQ, which they tuned by ear, out to their studio monitors.

Today we have very accurate products, such as the once listed above. These digital products can EQ a signal with surgical accuracy, but is that enough?

Time Domain

Sound travels fairly slowly (as opposed to light). It only travels at around 1,130 feet per second. We’ve all experienced this. Two football players hit each other on the other side of the field, and you hear the sound of the collision slightly after you see it.

While it’s not as obvious, the same thing happens in a studio environment. The sound leaves the speakers and bounces around the room. The problem is this. To accurately hear studio monitors, you need to hear them by themselves, without any reflections from the room.

This is why manufacturers measure their speakers in an anechoic chamber, a room that allows for no reflections.

If we are in a large enough room, we can clearly hear the direct sound from the speakers and differentiate that from the delayed sound that is bouncing off of the back wall. However, in most home studios, the room is fairly small, and most reflections happen rather quickly.

Our brains aren’t capable of distinguishing between these early reflections and the direct sound from the monitors. In fact, according to Gavin, any sound that reaches our ears within 50-80 milliseconds of the original sound gets interpreted by our brain as the original sound.

For example, if you have your studio monitors in front of you, and you play a snare drum through them, you’ll first hear the direct sound of the snare. A few milliseconds later your ears will hear the sound after it bounces off the walls to your left and right and also the ceiling above you. Since the walls and ceiling are fairly close, your brain will combine these early reflections with the original sound.

The result? Well, let me ask you this. What if you took a snare track in Pro Tools, duplicated it, and delayed the second track by a few milliseconds. What would you hear? The two tracks would be out of phase with one another. Whenever signals are out of phase, all sorts of issues occur, such as comb filtering (where certain frequencies get cancelled out).

The difference in sound will be rather subtle, but imagine this difference across an entire mix! All those frequencies will be reaching your ear at slightly different times. The result? A very fuzzy mix with little detail.

Conclusion

The problem with digital room correction is that it only addresses the frequency domain. Depending on the room, they may do a rather good job. However, if your room is causing a 30 dB cut at 100 Hz, these digital systems won’t be able to fix this. Most of them can only boost the signal by something like 6 dB, which isn’t enough to cover the 30 dB lost by your room acoustics.

As far as the time domain goes, I think it’s obvious to note that no amount of EQ will fix this problem.

I’ve used both acoustic treatment and the IK Multimedia ARC system. My findings? I heard an immediate difference as soon as I put up some acoustic foam to the left and right of my speakers. The sound was instantly tighter and more defined. With ARC, there was a difference, but it wasn’t as dramatic.

The goal of this article is not to sway you from digital correction products. They can be a valuable tool in helping create an accurate mixing environment. I love the JBL LSR monitors. They sound amazing, even without any room correction. Digital room correction, when added to acoustic treatment, can be very effective. However, nothing…I repeat nothing…can replace the need for acoustic treatment.

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We’ve look at how important it is to record a quality instrument and to really know what that instrument sounds like. Next? Microphones, right?

Hold on there, cowboy. There’s another HUGE variable that comes into play. Before you ever set up the microphone, you need to have a good understanding of what’s happening to the sound BEFORE it hits the mic.

The first step is the instrument itself. The second step is the room.

As Gavin and I talk about in Understanding Your Room, your room is lying to you. That’s right. The way the guitar sounds in your room isn’t exactly what the guitar sounds like. Unfortunately, we can’t take the room out of the equation. But fortunately, we can use the room to our advantage.

Move Around the Room.

When sound waves bounce around a room, a lot of crazy stuff happens. Flutter echo can causes the strumming sounds of the guitar to become wobbly and indistinct. Room modes can causes certain frequencies to be exaggerated, while other frequencies seemingly disappear.

To make it even more confusing, these acoustical anomalies are different from spot to spot within the room. The guitar will have a different sound in the corner of the room than in the middle of the room. Spend time listening to the guitar in different locations, and pick the one that sounds best to you.

Put Up Barriers As Needed

If your room doesn’t have a lot of acoustic treatment, and there’s a lot of natural reverb to it (and you don’t want that in the recording), try putting up barriers. Something as simple as a bookshelf or a mattress can work wonders. They’ll help absorb or disperse the sound, cutting down on the “room sound” in the recording.

Barriers can also help block out unwanted noise from the computer, hard drives, or outside noise coming through the windows.

Also, don’t sweat the noise too much. You’ll spend all your time fretting over a little noise in your recordings, when you won’t actually be able to hear it in the mix. Even if you can hear it, it’s generally not as big of a deal as you think it is.

What do you think? Do you experiment with room placement? Or do you just stick the guitar in the corner and play around with mic placement?

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Here’s a quick video for you. (I haven’t posted a video since before 31 Days to Better Recordings!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUlTe3tfZEI

If you’re reading this before November 14th, 2010, be sure to sign up for the Understanding Your Room live classes. This is a one-time live webinar series that will knock your socks off. Join today at the special discounted rate. Click here to check it out.

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Acoustic treatment can be a ridiculously confusing topic.

If you’re just starting out with recording, acoustic treatment might be the last thing on your mind. After all, you’re trying to figure out microphones, interfaces, EQ, compression, etc.

Speaking from personal experience, I wish I had gotten acoustic treatment for my studio much sooner than I did. Recording and mixing without acoustic treatment is similar to playing golf with really cheap clubs. You might be able to put together a decent round, but you’re constantly limited by the capabilities of your equipment.

Without acoustic treatment, you’re constantly limited by the capabilities of your room. (More on this below.)

I talked about the need for acoustic treatment on Day 4 of 31 Days to Better Recordings. If you haven’t read that article, do so. It’s important that you know why you need acoustic treatment.

2 Acoustic Treatment Myths

Yesterday I emailed my newsletter subscribers about acoustic treatment. I simply asked them if they had any treatment. I got a TON of replies, and among the responses I noticed a few things that bothered me.

It reminded me of all the myths out there that surround acoustic treatment. Here are a few of the responses I got.

Being new to the whole recording stuff, I’ve not attempted mic recording yet. I have seen alot of topics on this subject, so must be a key element of good recordings.

And this one:

Since all my stuff is written via sample and soft synth the only accommodations I need to make is for vocals and for that I throw the kid in the closet and do the best with what comes out…:)

These two responses represent one of the misconceptions I see in a lot of new home studio owners. They are under the impression that acoustic treatment only helps the recording process.

While acoustic treatment DOES make the actual recordings sound better, it is just as important (if not MORE important) to the mixing process.

The sound is coming out of your speakers, then bouncing around your room. Your room is then altering the sound, oftentimes dramatically.

Takeaway point: Acoustic treatment helps you get better mixes.

Here’s another response I got:

The only acoustic treatment, i will ever need, as long as I’m a home-recordler, and dont have somebody to build a studio professionally from scratch… is the IK MULTIMEDIA ARC…Believe me, when i compare my monitors with the ARC on, to my Audio-Technica ATH-M50, I hear pretty much exactly the same sound.

I am a musician, not a robo-engineer, so if the ARC gets me 95% (or more) there, i prefer to not spend thousands of euro, and huge stress to get on the technical-scientific side of things, and do room treatments.

I wrote an article on this a few months back. (See Acoustic Treatment vs Digital Room Correction.)

The problem here is that IK’s Arc software creates an EQ curve to compensate for the room. Unfortunately, most acoustical issues can’t be completely fixed with EQ. (Your room could be causing a 45 dB dip at certain frequencies. An EQ can’t fix that.)

While this technology is FANTASTIC, and it can be found in studio monitors as well, there’s really no replacement for acoustic treatment. I recommend digital room correction as an add-on to your acoustically-treated room…not a replacement.

Acoustic treatment can address issues in both the frequency domain AND the time domain.

Still a bit confused?

That’s understandable. That’s why I’m launching a brand new training course this week. It’ll be something I’ve never done before, and it will give you all the ammo you need to tackle your room’s acoustical issues.

I’ll be telling my newsletter subscribers about it first. (One of the perks of being a subscriber.) If you want to be the first to know about it, sign up here.

[Photo by SAN_DRINO]

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Welcome to Day 4 of 31 Days to Better Recordings.

It would be a grave injustice for me to talk about getting better recordings and not dedicate a day to acoustic treatment.

Acoustic treatment is probably one of the least “fun” items you’ll add to your studio, but the benefits FAR outweigh any potential inconveniences. Whether you decide to buy or build your acoustic treatment, this is absolutely one of those must-have items.

I’ve talked about acoustic treatment a lot on HSC. (Click here to see all the acoustic treatment articles.)

What IS acoustic treatment?

I’d guess that 98% of you have home studios in some sort of spare room in your house. In other words, the room wasn’t built specifically to be a studio.

Chances are there are a lot of bare walls and parallel surfaces and right angles. While very common in houses, these things can wreak havoc on the sound of the room.

This isn’t some evil myth created by acoustic treatment companies to get you to buy acoustic treatment. The problems are real. It’s physics.

Ever wonder why your recordings sound nothing like the professional recordings you listen to? Ever wonder why your mixes sound great in your studio, then sound horribly bass-heavy in the car? Ever wonder why your vocals don’t cut through the mix?

Acoustic treatment can address all of these issues.

Hear it for Yourself

I explained this in more detail in my review of the Auralex Roominators Project Kit. I highly recommend reading that and listening to the before and after sound samples. It paints a pretty convincing picture of what you could be missing if you ignore acoustic treatment.

Acoustic treatment doesn’t have to be expensive. Even if you just hang up some packing blankets and sleeping bags, you could still reap some big benefits. Experiment. Take a chance. I’ve found it’s extremely difficult to get excited about acoustic treatment, but once you hear the difference, you’ll be glad you took the plunge.

Day 4 Challenge

Leave a comment below and tell us what you plan to do (or are already doing) to acoustically treat your studio. Does it make a huge difference?

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last several days, you’ve probably heard about the massive amounts of rain and flooding going on in Middle Tennessee. There has been so much flooding here in Nashville. They’re calling it a “500-year flood,” whatever that means.

It will be a long time before this area fully recovers. Many have lost their homes and businesses. Thankfully, my wife and I are safe and dry. (If you’d like to donate to the flood relief, you can do so at the Nashville Red Cross website.)

Before I go any further, I want you to know that I don’t mean to make light of the devastation that’s going on in this area. However, I did actually have a recording session on Saturday, during the torrential downpour, and I thought I’d share some of the experience with you.

Rain, rain, go away…

If you follow me on Twitter, then you may have seen me post this last Saturday:

The forecast called for rain. Little did I know it would rain something like 20 inches over the next 48 hours.

The goal for the day was to record acoustic guitar and vocals for a 4-song EP. We figured we could knock it out in a couple of hours. We made it through the first song just fine, then the rain started up again. We waited a few minutes for it to subside. It didn’t, so we looked at the weather forecast. It was clear the rain wasn’t going to stop any time soon.

Since I’m in a typical home studio, I don’t have a sound-proof vocal booth to record in. If it’s raining outside, you can probably hear it inside.

We realized very quickly that there was no way we could record lead vocals without picking up a LOT of rain noise. But we noticed that, with some careful mic placement and a generous amount of acoustic treatment in the nearest window, we were able to record acoustic guitar just fine.

We quickly decided to focus on getting all the acoustic guitar parts recorded really well, then we would re-schedule the vocal tracking session for another, quieter day. The important thing to note here is that we didn’t cancel the entire session and go eat pizza. We figured out what could and couldn’t be accomplished given the circumstances, and we changed our focus accordingly. (Don’t worry, we did eat pizza a few hours later.)

I think the main reason we were able to record the acoustic without picking up much rain is due to the fact that the guitar and the microphones were at least a foot below the nearest window. In addition, I was able to put some of my acoustic panels in the window as well as utilize my newly acquired Auralex Aural Xpanders (more on them in the future).

I’m really happy with the acoustic tone we were able to get, and you have to listen pretty hard to hear the rain. In fact, the recordings don’t sound any noisier than they typically do with hard drive noise, etc.

Moral of the story: Know your limitations and make the best of what you have in front of you. Be flexible. We were able to knock out acoustic guitars, and the session was quite a success.

Do you have a story of a session that didn’t go according to plan? Leave a comment. C’mon…you know you want to.

[Photo by iamthepinkcupcake]

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3. Backing Up Isn’t Dorky

Right now I’m sitting in my studio. Later this afternoon I need to do a final mix-down on a song. Everything is pretty close to where it needs to be. Now it just comes down to the final tweaks, automation moves, etc.

However, before I can smile and say, “Done!” I need to check my mix on as many systems as I can. You can never check your mixes enough.

Before I go any further, check out this picture. I’ve got a few different monitoring options. How many do you see? We’ll see if you’re right at the end of this article.

Why You Need to Check Your Mixes

Who cares what the mix sounds like through the boombox or in the car? As long as it sounds good in the studio we’re done, right? Wrong.

Your studio is unique. It’s like a snowflake, or a fingerprint. You’ve got a specific, one-of-a-kind combination of studio monitors, room dimensions, and acoustic treatment (or lack thereof). If you play the exact same mix in 100 different home studios, it will sound different in each one. Your job as a mix engineer is to predict these differences and accommodate for them as best you can.

The problem is that your room could be lying to you. Let’s say your mix has a HUGE, annoying build-up at 100 Hz. However, let’s also say the dimensions and acoustics of your room are causing a huge dip at 100 Hz in your room’s frequency response.

(Ideally your room’s frequency response would be perfectly flat. Sadly, that’s really never the case. Even high-end facilities have certain problem frequencies.)

So, you’ve got a mix coming out of Pro Tools with a huge boost at 100 Hz. When this mix is played in your room with a huge dip at 100 Hz, everything sounds fine. Your room is behaving like an EQ. Sound great, right? It’s not. Like I mentioned before, your room is lying to you.

You’ll bounce this mix, take it out to your car, and BOOM!…all you hear is 100 Hz. The acoustics of car are different than your studio, and you can hear that 100 Hz loud and clear…and the headache ensues.

Do you get what happened? The 100 Hz was ALWAYS there, you just couldn’t hear it because your room was getting rid of it.

This same scenario can happen ALL across the frequency spectrum. What sounds smooth in your studio sounds harsh in your living room but boomy in your car, etc. etc.

There are more than acoustics at play here. Keep in mind that every speaker/headphone system reproduces sound differently. If your speakers don’t reach down to 40 Hz, you need to listen to your mixes on something that does, just to make sure that there’s not a lot of craziness going on down there.

Needless to say, to do all of your mixing without ever listening on another system is simply unwise.

How to Check Your Mixes

This really isn’t a secret or anything profound.

First of all, in the studio, try to use as many different speakers and headphones as you can. How many do I use? Four. Here are the answers from the picture at the top of this post:

1. M-Audio EX66 – my main studio monitors
2. Roland speakers – I don’t even remember the model number, but these are cheap secondary speakers. They give me an idea of what my mix will sound like on bookshelf speakers.
3. HD280 Pro - My headphones of choice.
4. Apple earbuds – Obviously we want to know what our mix will sound like through these.

With my 003, I’m able to monitor all of these independently, without needing to plug/unplug anything. It’s pretty nice.

As far as checking your mix outside the studio, you simply burn it to a CD or upload it to your iPod and hit the town. Take note of the differences you hear and try to come back to your mix and adjust accordingly.

Got any tips of your own? Leave a comment!

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3. You’d Be Stupid Not to Check This Out

Time for another rousing edition of Ask Joe. Today I’ve got seven questions. They deal with:

• comparing home recording to professional recordings
• using hardware processing with your DAW
• tube mic care
• using Pro Tools on two computers
• acoustic treatment
• time compression & expansion
• mixing, mastering, etc.

Listen here:

Or you can download the mp3 here. [11 minutes, 7.5 MB]

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