GuitarMasterClass Blog

Now its time to think a little bit about the vocal area. A small but important piece of the overall picture.

Lets remind ourselves of what we have to work with:

As you can see, we are backed into a corner and have the workstation out on the other side. The plan is that the computer noise will be removed entirely by the addition of the soundproof box we will build - that is really the biggest concern here. At the moment it is impossible to record anything in the position you see the microphone, owing to the noise of the computer.

Once the computer noise is accounted for, the next consideration is acoustic treatment of course. This are will be used for recording guitar as well as vocals so there are a couple of extra considerations.

Firstly, the room itself will have benefited from the acoustic treatment I am doing for the control area. There will already be bass traps on that back wall and corners. For good measure, I will add a bass trap in the corner by the microphone and probably in the wall/ceiling angle of the side wall. With that amount of bass trapping I am hoping that boxiness and resonances will be a thing of the past, and it is my aim to be able to record without the Reflexion filter you see in the picture.

With bass trapping taken care of, reflections are the next order of business. I have mentioned before that a vocal area needs some treatment but does not want to be completely dead, so this will be a certain amount of trial and error. I am initially planning on treating the 2 closest walls from ceiling down to shoulder level, and probably the ceiling as well, but I will add tiles, test the sound, add more tiles and retest until I get a sound that I like.

When recording guitar, I will be sitting down, so the treatment will also need to go lower for this. For guitar, a certain amount of reflection can be desirable so I may well need less, or alternatively plan on putting a hard surface on the floor that can be removed for vocals, such as a piece of plywood or something.

The basic rule here is to try it and see, we will spend some time tuning this area to get the sort of sound that we want and then call it done!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under A Studio is Born. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.