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Recording set up advice
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
If you have a good room then room treatment is less necessary.
All IMO, of course.
Eqd Speaker Cranker clone
Monte Allums TR-2 Plus mod kit
Trading feedback: http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/60602/
Depends what kind of music/tones you're doing, they're good for cranked amps close up, but I usually use something a bit more sensitive a bit further away at home. Sometimes both.
Depends on the room too, might need to experiment with positioning.
They have a sound nothing else has.
Try one on an acoustic guitar with a decent preamp- they are actually pretty good.
https://www.theoddfoxes.com/
But, yes, IMO, room treatment IS a waste of time, unless you have a suitable space to start with, ie, correct proportions, and measured to correct for frequency buildups, appropriate monitors etc, etc,etc.
Have a search for Eric Valentine, room treatment for an interesting video of a real world problem.
Or get a good set of open back headphones, and spend a lot of time learning how they sound with reference mixes.
Closed back for recording, to avoid spill.
A mixing space, is not the same as a recording space, and if they are the same space, there will be compromises.
Bass, and low end are the hardest thing to get right, and really you don't have much chance in an untreated room, with bad monitors- easier to get close with a set of known, reliable headphones as a start, at least you will immediately hear how much low you don't need.
I honestly think the Fabfilter suite is the best money I ever spent on studio stuff, the EQ especially.
My set of Sennheiser HD650 comes a close second maybe.
All IMO etc etc.
I watched the specific videos you are referencing last month.
I've also built numerous studios over the years.
Where I disagree with you is you are being definitive about a nuanced subject.
Yes it is better to have idea dimensions but very few of us do.
I also agree that you absolutely have to measure.
I've made suggestions in threads here and on GS to this effect, which mostly gets ignored.
Oh well.
If you don't know what you have in your room it is significantly harder to fix it.
But that doesn't equate to treating an imperfect room being a waste of time.
You can do quite a bit with a measurement mic and ROOM EQ WIZARD.
You educate yourself a bit about how acoustics works. Always a good thing.
You become aware of the issues. Always a good thing.
You may be able to mitigate some of the issues relatively inexpensively.
You can send your room measurements to GIK and they will advise you on how to treat it and then it is up to you how much you want to do that.
Do whatever you can do then there are things like Trinnov, Sonarworks, Avid SPQ, Genelec GLM, Neumann MA1 and so on.
Sonarworks is probably where I'd suggest people start, which is also imperfect but there are people releasing music commercially who are using it.
Eric's current room was treated with DIY tube traps.
One of the things he says is that in this instance he didn't follow the pre-prescribed path of getting a studio designed by an acoustician and putting in that expensive solution, which inevitably ends up imperfect anyway.
In my current room we had some dimensional issues- I consulted an acoustician friend who did a room design.
We lowered the mix position ceiling by 20cm (so that the midrange driver of the monitors wasn't the midpoint of the room height).
I did so because we were gutting the room, so I could afford to do it properly.
A cheaper, but imperfect solution here would be to use a standing desk, raise it up 10cm or so and raise the monitors by that height too.
There are always workarounds, if you can't do a full build out.
Tell that to Sylvia Massey, or any of the other countless studios that use a single room as a recording/mixing room.
I do loads of tracking in the control room.
Mine is relatively dead sounding but not entirely dead.
The studio is semi-detached to my residence by way of a 40ft corridor that was the old exterior wall of a stone cottage. The other side is glass.
I get some great guitar tones in that space.
I get some great guitar tones in the control room.
Recording audio is nothing but compromises.
You never get an ideal situation.
A lot of Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic was recorded in a converted barn.
On Sweet 'Emotion' Steve Tyler didn't have a shaker to hand so he used a packet of sugar.
In the 30+ years I've been doing this I've never relied on headphones to mix.
I use them to place microphones in front of guitar amps, for checking phase in a drum kit and sparingly when mixing.
Sometimes not at all.
I personally don't like them but also if you learn your monitors and how they work in the room, listen to loads of reference tracks, use them in the mix process, you can mitigate a lot of the issues.
It is down to learning the craft.
https://www.theoddfoxes.com/
as I said, IMO, etc etc etc.
Everything is compromise, cost benefit.
My headphones were the most cost effective addition to my studio set up, simple as that.
A lot of early comments re build quality.
The point of them is to recreate the acoustics of established studios, so kind of like applying an EQ / IR to a mix.
IMO, they would introduce further confusion and inconsistency, unless you always used the same 'profile'.
So, might as well just get used to the set of headphones you are using, and check mixes in the car, hi fi etc.
I use all the other stuff from Slate though, and am a happy customer.
I don’t know if I’m doing it “correctly” but I’m really happy with the sounds I’m getting and I feel more inspired to record using a mic than I have when using the Captor X.
I have some Slate plugins. Trigger is great. VBC is great.
I have a Trinnov, which is a great tool but even still it doesn't mitigate all room issues, it just improves things.
Slate promising 'perfect mixes' etc etc... give me a break.
Colour me very, very skeptical.
Hard pass.
https://www.theoddfoxes.com/
For context, I have just spent the last couple of days compiling 9 of my old projects into a single mastering project, using Reaper, and only monitoring through the built in speakers on my Asus Zenbook.
I took each of the old projects, and did a v1 mix, ( some of these things were nearly 100 tracks of various midi and audio tracks- and were too much to view on a single screen ), then I used DEMUCS GUI to spit out a 6 track stem mix.
Then I 'arranged' each of the 6 track stem projects into a single 9 track album session.
I then proceeded to use various Slate / SSL / Fabfilter plugins on the individual stems and the mixbus.
These 'stems' were laid out in a horizontal form, so a single instance of a plugin would be working on 9 different tracks, so it was a fair bit of work to match levels across the project, and the results are a bit unexpected in places, but it is sounding pretty good.
I use Voxengo SPAN on my main output, to monitor the spectrum, and have it set up according to a Dan Worrell video where he explains some settings, helps to see the low end and stereo field, very useful.
I also use the JS Loudness meter to keep an eye on the general LUFS levels, but I'm just aiming for consistency across tracks at this point, eventually it would be used to master to a level, probably something like -12 Lufs.
In total, I have probably spent around 12 hours on this project, and at some point I will be reviewing it on both my headphones and monitors, where I will probably find I have far too much low end information,so I will be adjusting things, but it isn't anything for any other purpose than tying up some loose ends on unfinished projects, and it is all good practice.
The point is, I also listen to a lot of music on my laptop, so I have a fairly good idea of how 'proper' stuff sounds through these speakers, so it is possible to do a lot of mixing without critical listening.
File management is a big part of it, and I also bounce out a lot of audio from midi instruments, trying to leave a project as a completely audio based thing, rather than relying on a VST, or plugin for the final tracks, is something to maybe be aware of - if you are using something like Torpedo Wall of sound for your guitar tones.
Imagine coming back to a project after a long break, as I have just done, to find that you were relying on something like NAM for your amp sound- which I did, actually it was Overloud, or Ugritone for your drum sounds, which I also did, and finding that the plugins don't work or are unsupported when you open up the project, which happened quite a lot.
Some of these projects were left in a state where I had 'stemmed' out the final mix tracks, so no real issue adding pro q 3 to the tracks, but some of them now need completely new drum sounds, and the guitars are now handled by Tonex.
It's all good getting a finished result, lessons learned, experience gained.
What I sometimes do is put a condenser mic in front of the cab as well as a dynamic. The dynamic and the crunch mids but the condenser adds some top end sizzle if you need it. You can introduce phasing issues but if they are both similarily close mic'd it's usually fine. Angus young used U47 Fet for albums like Powerage. Not suggesting you get something like that but goes to show some classic rock sounds are not mainly 57's.
I have a rehersal/recording space away from my house, so tend to use my little Spark Mini for putting the ideas down and building the track up, then usually go to the rehearsal room to mic up and replace the guitar parts, but tbh, sometimes the originals sound better because I have more time to relax and just play. To that end I'll probably change to a high quality direct solution like the Tone King Imperial pre (was previously looking at the UA audio dream). Will keep me not not worrying about volume at home and also not thinking I have to pack everything up and use half a day hufting gear around and setting up somewhere else just to get a valve and real speaker in the signal chain.
Monitors - I have a small untreated room and have just go Kali LP UNF which are excellent. They sound good at very low volumes and close up which means you can take some of the room effects out of the equation. Ultimately I need to get a few panels but they are perfect speakers for untreated spaces IMO. The tendency is to push the size up but big speakers in a small room are a recepie for poor monitoring.
My room is very cluttered, mostly full of amps, pedals, guitars, and it is by no means a great listening environment, which is why I decided to limit my monitors to something only a small step up from good headphones.
I'm sitting centrally opposite, on a sofa against the other wall, about 10 ft away, and the wall behind me is not a solid wall-basically the flat is all plasterboard studs.
I have my session running on Reaper, and am using blutooth as the connection to the ILouds, and as I suspected, I have mixed the project with a lot of boomy bottom end, it took the first 2 tracks to tell me this, so I added an instance of ProQ3 to the mix bus, and did a fairly brutal Hi pass to filter anything below 30hz, and I also adjusted the instance of ProMB to dynamically compress below something like 50hz, this seemed to take out a lot of the boom so I continued.
I try to mix to a constant static level, so I usually have my laptop speakers at 50%, and I find this is a good level to work at when I have my faders at 0, and I do all my reference listening at this level, the ILouds are set to unity and never change - which equates to something like 65-70 db, measured across the room in my listening position-this is slightly too loud for comfortable listening, so I drop my master fader down by 6db.
After I listened a couple of times through my session- about a 45 min project, I am quite pleased with my settings across the 10 tracks, they are fairly balanced and I don't have to do any further EQ to balance the mixes-they are quite a wide selection of tracks, all done over a long period where I experimented with a lot of differing drum software, strings and midi keyboard stuff as remixes, or covers of various 'pop' tracks, featuring female singers mostly.
Some of these tracks have my guitars included, and over time I have wrestled with various methods of getting a good sound in there - not always with great success, but it has all been a learning experience.
The main point of this exercise, for me, was to try to compile a selection of tracks into a single mastering project, to see how cohesive I could get things, considering the material varies quite a lot, and to be able to do this some things have to be consistent , to allow decisions to be made, ie listening levels and reference materials.
After I had reviewed my mixes, I closed the session, and played back something through Foobar as a reference, which is my music player of choice, and I chose an album that I discovered fairly recently, by Tobias Forge ( Ghost ), which he recorded around 2007, and never officially released.
This album was 'mysteriously' leaked online on valentines day, and is interesting because apparently, at the time it was his last attempt at trying to release popular music, his last go as a solo act, and he was on the verge of giving up.
The 'CD' was sent out to various record companies, but he never got a deal, because the music didn't really fit into the then current genres, maybe?
Then he put out a couple of anonymous tracks on Myspace, as 'Ghost', and the rest, you could say is history.
Whether you like this style of music or not, you cannot deny that the production is cutting edge, really, and the songwriting and stylistic choices have turned out very successfully for him, and the same production values are evident on this 2007 record.
Straight away, I could hear how well the bass and drums were recorded on his album, with all the punch and low end it needs, without being boomy, and despite the ILouds being small speakers, they do get down to something like 50hz fairly well.
The album is very guitar and keyboard oriented, and does sound a lot like Ghost, because it is, but stylistically it is quite different, with a lot of surfy, spaghetti western sounding guitars-well worth a listen, search for 'Passiflora' on YT, 'The Breeze' is a high point.
Sorry for rambling, just a follow up to my post earlier.