I was listening to some music on my speakers the other day and I noticed a very nasty boost at some unknown fairly low frequency, making certain section of a bass line atrociously ring.
For some reason, I yanked my head back in surprise or disgust - and the ringing was gone.
Thing is, that head movement might have been a few inches back.
I then proceeded to play around with my listening position (sitting in the same spot, mind you, I am lazy after all) and it is amazing how the sound changes, even a few inches in or out.
Next step is to go to the first step: better place my speakers so that I can actually measure sound bouncing around with REW. But for that, I need to buy longer cables - and most likely find a better way to conneect my speakers with my interface.
But that's for another day.
Showing posts with label acoustics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acoustics. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Sunday, August 5, 2012
So proud
I am so damn proud of myself.
You see, and those who know me will confirm this, I am not much of a DIYer. At all. Blame it on not growing up in a house, not seeing my dad doing a lot of it, being lazy... You get the idea.
So here am I in my new house with a space dedicated to music. If I already had the basic equipment at the apartment (audio interface, a mic, a guitar, a MIDI keyboard), I didn't need to worry about acoustics because I was mixing on (bad) headphones. Yes, I know. It's like cooking pizza in a microwave: smells like pizza, looks like pizza, but it ain't pizza. So my music sounded boxy and pretty much sounded like *ss. So back to my music space in the new house: after having bought more equipment like we all do (electronic drums, new acoustic guitar, electric guitar, guitar amp simulator, new mic /stand / pop filter / shockmount), I decided to go for the real thing and mix on monitors. That was a very important decision, and I must confess I only really discovered how important it was until several hundred dollars and tens of hours later.
Mixing on speakers means that your untreated unbalanced weirdly shaped full of resonating material excuse of a room comes into play big time. It's actually even worse than that: it defines your sound. You can of course change the sound during tracking (somewhat) and during mixing, but it's tedious and unless you spend a lot of time on it, the sound will still be most likely crappy. After having done my research and bought monitors, I placed my listening position at the best possible spot in the room, and the monitors in a nice equilateral triangle with one of its corners where my head is.
Yikes.
The advantage with fairly decent monitors like mine is that you hear a lot of detail.The disadvantage is that you hear a lot of detail :-) The need for acoustic treatment became very apparent. Of course, the first order of things when you decide to mix on monitors is to treat your room, not to buy more equipment! This is obvious and is repeated on countless forums, but for some reason, I only "discovered" it too late. So off I went, reading about acoustics, treatment, and most of all, DIY treatment. There are very good commercial companies selling you everything you need from bass traps to reflections treatment to diffusors, but I didn't have the budget, most of these companies are in the US (I'm not), and a little voice in my head told me that I could really try to do something on my own, for once. After reading and waiting and reading some more and hesitating for a few months, I finally decided to try. I needed 3 bass traps and 1 reflection absorber, something to cover the bare walls, and curtains for the window and the shelf space in the back of the room.
I bought the following material: 2cm x 4cm wood for the aborber frames, rockwool for the absorption, glue / nails / clip, string, clip gun to hold everything together, fabric for cover; I also bought curtains in a fairly dense material, two carpets for the walls and a smaller desk to avoid early reflections. After a few errors and a lot of trial, my room is now finished except for the overhead absorption that I need to attach to the ceiling, the curtains that my wife needs to sew (thanks honey) and the one stand I still need to build for the bass trap that will sit in the corner where the door is. Fixing the carpets on the walls was a bit of a pain, and attaching one absorber on a corner was a bit of a challenge, but I somehow managed. It looks really cool. I also completely redid the cabling around the monitors and the computer and it is much cleaner.
All of this for a guy who had barely used a hammer more than twice in his life :-)
(if you want moe detail on how I built the absorbers, let me know)
You see, and those who know me will confirm this, I am not much of a DIYer. At all. Blame it on not growing up in a house, not seeing my dad doing a lot of it, being lazy... You get the idea.
So here am I in my new house with a space dedicated to music. If I already had the basic equipment at the apartment (audio interface, a mic, a guitar, a MIDI keyboard), I didn't need to worry about acoustics because I was mixing on (bad) headphones. Yes, I know. It's like cooking pizza in a microwave: smells like pizza, looks like pizza, but it ain't pizza. So my music sounded boxy and pretty much sounded like *ss. So back to my music space in the new house: after having bought more equipment like we all do (electronic drums, new acoustic guitar, electric guitar, guitar amp simulator, new mic /stand / pop filter / shockmount), I decided to go for the real thing and mix on monitors. That was a very important decision, and I must confess I only really discovered how important it was until several hundred dollars and tens of hours later.
Mixing on speakers means that your untreated unbalanced weirdly shaped full of resonating material excuse of a room comes into play big time. It's actually even worse than that: it defines your sound. You can of course change the sound during tracking (somewhat) and during mixing, but it's tedious and unless you spend a lot of time on it, the sound will still be most likely crappy. After having done my research and bought monitors, I placed my listening position at the best possible spot in the room, and the monitors in a nice equilateral triangle with one of its corners where my head is.
Yikes.
The advantage with fairly decent monitors like mine is that you hear a lot of detail.The disadvantage is that you hear a lot of detail :-) The need for acoustic treatment became very apparent. Of course, the first order of things when you decide to mix on monitors is to treat your room, not to buy more equipment! This is obvious and is repeated on countless forums, but for some reason, I only "discovered" it too late. So off I went, reading about acoustics, treatment, and most of all, DIY treatment. There are very good commercial companies selling you everything you need from bass traps to reflections treatment to diffusors, but I didn't have the budget, most of these companies are in the US (I'm not), and a little voice in my head told me that I could really try to do something on my own, for once. After reading and waiting and reading some more and hesitating for a few months, I finally decided to try. I needed 3 bass traps and 1 reflection absorber, something to cover the bare walls, and curtains for the window and the shelf space in the back of the room.
I bought the following material: 2cm x 4cm wood for the aborber frames, rockwool for the absorption, glue / nails / clip, string, clip gun to hold everything together, fabric for cover; I also bought curtains in a fairly dense material, two carpets for the walls and a smaller desk to avoid early reflections. After a few errors and a lot of trial, my room is now finished except for the overhead absorption that I need to attach to the ceiling, the curtains that my wife needs to sew (thanks honey) and the one stand I still need to build for the bass trap that will sit in the corner where the door is. Fixing the carpets on the walls was a bit of a pain, and attaching one absorber on a corner was a bit of a challenge, but I somehow managed. It looks really cool. I also completely redid the cabling around the monitors and the computer and it is much cleaner.
All of this for a guy who had barely used a hammer more than twice in his life :-)
(if you want moe detail on how I built the absorbers, let me know)
Monday, July 9, 2012
Why bother?
So you might ask yourself, dear reader, why bother? Why bother tracking (recording) drums from an electronic set to then trigger sample in my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)?
Well, there's multiple reasons.
Number one, when you are tracking and mixing in the same small (3x4m, or about 10x13 feet for you imperials) room, you can't have a live drum set. Obvious, right?
Number two, if I had a live drum set, I would need s lot more space because percussion with a lot of low end (low frequencies) will resonate about a shitton (metric) in such a small space.
Number three, if I had a live drum set, I would need at least 2 or 3 mics (microphones) to start recording drums: one "room" mic (whose captured sound would most likely suck because of reflections and low end travelling all over the place), one kick mic and one overhead mic for the toms, or 2 for the toms, depending on how the room would sound. The reason why I would need all these mics is because drum sounds coming from cymbals, a snare drum or a kick drum are very different and are treated very differently down the mixing road. To record all these mics, I would need to change my interface to accommodate for more inputs. And more cables. Because drum mics tend to be dynamic mics because they can absorb very high air compression from banging on these two like there's no tomorrow, I would need to buy 1 or 2 of those. Because these, in turn, require a pre-amplifier (preamp) to take the incoming mic signal and turn it into a usable signal (line-level), I would need to buy a preamp as well, which I don't have since the mics I have are condenser microphones which do not need special preamps since the ones in my audio interface are good enough.
Number four, I like to play drums; if I want to keep my marriage and paternity as enjoyable as they are now, electronic drums are a good compromise. Yes, the sound sucks, yes the pads are plastic. But if you saw my wife you'd understand :-)
So then the issue goes from acoustics and buying more gear to teaching my DAW how to receive MIDI input from my drum set, and then how to teach my DAW to trigger sampled drum sounds (samples) when instructed to. The other great thing about this method is that I can send each drum sound (kick, high hat, crash cymbal, etc.) through a different channel to my DAW, which means that I can route each incoming channel to a different track, which in turn means that I can treat each drum sound differently depending on what I have in mind. Not to mention the fact that some decent sample libraries are available for free.
So there. That's why I bother.
I'll talk about why I bother with all the rest too :-)
Well, there's multiple reasons.
Number one, when you are tracking and mixing in the same small (3x4m, or about 10x13 feet for you imperials) room, you can't have a live drum set. Obvious, right?
Number two, if I had a live drum set, I would need s lot more space because percussion with a lot of low end (low frequencies) will resonate about a shitton (metric) in such a small space.
Number three, if I had a live drum set, I would need at least 2 or 3 mics (microphones) to start recording drums: one "room" mic (whose captured sound would most likely suck because of reflections and low end travelling all over the place), one kick mic and one overhead mic for the toms, or 2 for the toms, depending on how the room would sound. The reason why I would need all these mics is because drum sounds coming from cymbals, a snare drum or a kick drum are very different and are treated very differently down the mixing road. To record all these mics, I would need to change my interface to accommodate for more inputs. And more cables. Because drum mics tend to be dynamic mics because they can absorb very high air compression from banging on these two like there's no tomorrow, I would need to buy 1 or 2 of those. Because these, in turn, require a pre-amplifier (preamp) to take the incoming mic signal and turn it into a usable signal (line-level), I would need to buy a preamp as well, which I don't have since the mics I have are condenser microphones which do not need special preamps since the ones in my audio interface are good enough.
Number four, I like to play drums; if I want to keep my marriage and paternity as enjoyable as they are now, electronic drums are a good compromise. Yes, the sound sucks, yes the pads are plastic. But if you saw my wife you'd understand :-)
So then the issue goes from acoustics and buying more gear to teaching my DAW how to receive MIDI input from my drum set, and then how to teach my DAW to trigger sampled drum sounds (samples) when instructed to. The other great thing about this method is that I can send each drum sound (kick, high hat, crash cymbal, etc.) through a different channel to my DAW, which means that I can route each incoming channel to a different track, which in turn means that I can treat each drum sound differently depending on what I have in mind. Not to mention the fact that some decent sample libraries are available for free.
So there. That's why I bother.
I'll talk about why I bother with all the rest too :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)