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.
This is another guest post from Fathomless Regression. Acoustic treatment is SO important. In fact, stay tuned for an announcement for an upcoming acoustic treatment webinar.
I’m ashamed to say it but for almost three years I was mixing and recording in a space that had no acoustic treatment. I’m hanging my head in shame as I type this. A few years ago I moved several states away from my previous musical space which was properly treated, and isolated (I miss those days), and set up shop in a spare bedroom of a townhouse. Being a rental property I held off on doing any treatment and decided I would wait until I bought a house in my new home town. One year later I did buy a house but over the last 2 years have come up with several excuses for not buying treatment that I desperately needed. Second child, car repairs, house repairs, guitars, alcohol, shiny things to distract my wife from the aforementioned guitars and alcohol, etc. I was using some Mackie HR 624mk2 monitors in my studio and was getting pretty decent results so that fueled my procrastination. My mixes seemed to be translating well and the things I was recording in that space (mostly guitar and vocals) weren’t sounding too bad so I kept dumping money into other pieces of my studio.
In the recent shoot-out I did between the Shure SM7B and SM58, I discussed some of the reasons why you would use a dynamic microphone for lead vocals as opposed to a condenser.
One of the main reasons is that dynamics tend to pick up less of your room, so if you have a noisy room or just an acoustically bad-sounding room, a dynamic microphone might allow you to still record a decent vocal.
That said, sometimes a condenser microphone simply sounds better.
The next obvious step would be to do everything you can to minimize the amount of room the microphone picks up. The first thing people usually try is to throw the vocalist and microphone into a nearby closet. Problem solved, right? No more room!
Eh…this will usually introduce more problems than solutions. One of the main problems with most home studio rooms is that they are rectangular, chock full of right angles, corners, and parallel surfaces, which cause all sorts of room nodes, standing waves, bass build-up, etc.
I’m out of town this weekend playing a show, but I wanted to put up a quick post regarding acoustic treatment. As you may recall, I recently posted an article on acoustic treatment.
When I first heard about the Auralex MoPADs, I was skeptical. Once I got them in my studio, however, I changed my tune.
The MoPADs are monitor isolation pads. They’re designed to live between your studio monitors and the surface on which they are resting. Why is this important?
Good Vibrations
We all know that sound, by definition, is vibration. When a speaker vibrates, it not only vibrates the air around it, but it also vibrates whatever surfaces it comes in contact with.
You’ve probably seen pictures of a speaker suspended in an anechoic chamber by a couple wires. This is how they test the frequency response of speakers, they hang them in a super-quiet room. They are able to hear the speaker by itself, as it was intended to be heard.
I had a lot of visitors to the site last week, and several folks submitted a question using the “Ask Joe” form. Thanks! I decided to answer these questions via video.
The questions deal with the following: [UPDATE: I realized after the fact that a 10-minute video might be a bit long, especially if you're searching for the answer to your question. By all means listen to the whole thing, but if you want to know where to find specific topics, see below.]
Vocalign – 0:37
Good recorder for young band – 1:40
EMU 1616M PCI – 2:40
Getting good natural reverb out of drum room – 3:30
M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R, USB vs Firewire – 4:52
Good audio interface/microphone for video work – 6:20
Low latency monitoring in Pro Tools – 7:22
External hard drive for sample libraries – 8:31
If you have questions you’d like for me to address in a future video, head over to the Ask Joe page and fill out the form!
Acoustic treatment is arguably one of the most important components of your home studio. Sadly, it’s usually the most neglected area.
Most folks would much rather buy a new mic or new studio monitors than bother with acoustic treatment. Or they’ll buy plug-in bundle after plug-in bundle, praying that one of them would be able to “fix” their mixes.
Oftentimes the problem isn’t the gear, it’s the room.
Think about it. Everything you do in your studio revolves around sound waves. These sound waves are bouncing all around the room. Unless your room was built from the ground up to appropriately handle all these reflections, you’ll need acoustic treatment.
Time for another rousing edition of Ask Joe. Today I’ve got seven questions. They deal with:
Acoustic treatment is arguably one of the most important components of your home studio. Sadly, it’s usually the most neglected area.
