GuitarMasterClass Blog

Building has finished, Ant has gone back to the UK and its time for an update!

When we last spoke, we were varnishing the desk -and when finally complete it looked like this:

Ant spent the rest of the day building the rack. He had put a lot of thought into it and it had quite a few useful features:

• Fully covered on the visible side, but including a hole for wires
• Cut away at the top for very easy access to wiring form the other side
• Space for airflow at the bottom
• Wheels and handles to enable easy movement for rewiring
• A useful shelf at the back for coiling wires.

All in all, an excellent job, and it looked like this during manufacture:

And the finished article:

After we had the rack complete, I rewired the studio - it made a mess of wires under the new desk, but I have plans to address that later. The next task was to figure out what audio treatment we needed, so once again, I tested the room. It was pretty much the same story, so I wasted no time getting the bass traps up - first one either side of the desk, then I remeasured. And then we put one in the middle of the wall between the wall and ceiling, and again re-measured.

Here are the results:

This is where you can really see the bass treatment in action!

The blue trace is the untreated room - quite a few dips there as you can see. Adding the first 2 bass traps (pink trace) smoothed out the dips at around 110hz and 230hz. In the final trace you can see our problem frequency at 144hz has really been smoothed out! So, whilst the final trace isn’t a straight line (it never would be in the real world), some of the most severe dips have been ironed out by an impressive amount. And of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or indeed the listening, and a spin of a few favourite tracks showed a great improvement in the sound of the room.

Next we placed Auralex 2″ tiles in the mirror points of the room, and then moved on to the recording treatment. In fact, this turned out to be a non-event. A few test recordings showed that the room now sounded impressively neutral, and neither too live, nor too dead. Vocals weren’t coloured by the room, but they did have a sense of space around them that wasn’t present when using the Reflexion filter. Although the reflexion filter is impressive in taking the badness out of a bad room, it still isn’t as good as using a good room, and for my purposes I now have a good room

A few final touches were put in place next - we put up a couple of shelves and some new hooks for wires and generally tidied up, and now the studio looks like this:

I hope you’ll agree it turned out pretty well!

There are still a few minor jobs to take care of :

• Shelving under the desk to hide the wiring
• I will need to add some power conditioning as my speakers hum slightly even when disconnected and turned down
• Although the noise floor is now very low, I might tinker and see if I can improve things further

We spent the last couple of days of Ant’s visit doing some vocal recordings and the results were great - I now have a fully functioning, high quality studio and the results are all I could have hoped for!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 9:29 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.