All Change!
June 7th, 2008 by Andrew CockburnPosted in A Studio is Born
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In this update we have a last minute and fairly substantial change to the layout - the reasons are good and I think this will make things a lot easier!
Building this studio is a little like building a house of cards … if you change the foundation, everything has to shift to suit or come crashing down. A few thoughts around the PC have caused a similar cascade effect in my thinking!
Removing the noise of the PC from the equation is a key part of this whole exercise - as things stand, the PC noise is obtrusive and prevents really good recordings, especially for demanding applications such as Voiceovers where there is no chance to bury any background noise in the mix. You can get away with this surprisingly well in other applications, such as rock or pop songs where the accompaniment will mask any background noise, but it does affect the overall result and should be avoided wherever possible.
So far, the working assumption has been that we will put the PC in a soundproofed box. On looking into this a little more deeply I was a little worried about the amount of effort that would be required to build this successfully. The design would need to be a box in a box, surrounded by some kind of acoustic absorber. In addition, we would need to vent it and extract the warm air somewhere out of the room - necessitating a long run of tubing with a noisy fan on the end, probably in the Garage. This probably would have worked but would have been a lot of effort to get right, and remember we only have a week for this, and that week has to include songwriting and playing - we really don’t want to spend more than 2 - 3 days getting the studio right.
With this in mind, I revisited the idea of putting the PC in the boiler room. I had though of this briefly initially, and was reminded of the idea by Bali in a comment to my “Punctured Vanity” entry. A very quick test in which I put the PC in the boiler room and booted it up proved the point - the studio was now blissfully quiet, so the sound insulating properties of the boiler room were ample, and on further reflection I believed that the Boiler Room would probably be ok heat wise for the PC. If not I could revisit this perhaps with a water cooling setup.
The next problem was that of extending leads. I would need around 25ft on all of my cables:
- Four balanced cables for audio in and out
- Two TosLink fibre cables to connect my UAD8000
- USB cables
- Firewire cable (for my video camera)
- Monitor cable
Balanced cables can run hundreds of feet with little problem but the rest might cause issues. The TosLink cables should be good for 25ft, but the maximum USB cable length is 15ft and Firewire is even less. Monitor cables didn’t seem to be happy running that far either. I checked into some higher priced alternatives for extending these various cables, but the price was escallating significantly and I was on the verge of giving up on it … if only I could put the PC on the other side of a wall but keep it in the sample place in relation to all the other gear …
That was the moment of revalation - It turns out that I can. All I have to do is redesign the space a little (this is where the house of cards analogy comes in - a small change in the PC strategy ends up with a redesign of the whole space!). So, I flip the whole desk counter-clockwise 90 degrees, and put it against the side wall, and put the PC just inside the boiler room. I run the cables through a hole in the wall and bingo, I have the solution I was looking for! To do this properly I will need about 10ft of cables for all the things mentioned above, but that is now no big deal, I’ll put the order in on Monday and hopefully most of it should be here before Ant arrives. The space will now look like this:
All else remains the same in work area terms, although I think the right hand side will have to go back fairly deep to keep the keyboard within easy reach - this could make a great work area for guitar restringing and such just by pushing the keyboard back and out of the way.
This does a couple of other things as well that I like - it opens up more space for the all important guitar library, and similarly there is more space for vocals. It will be a less enclosed space which should reduce any boxiness and help with the overall vocal sound.
In treatment terms this also means all change. Before I decide how to go about this, I will re-measure the room, as I now have a new position for the speakers, and new speakers as well. I could have a different set of problems, but we’ll see. Over-treating with bass traps would not be a problem, but as I only have 6 of these, it would be nice to put some treatment in the rest of the room to improve the overall sound for vocals and other types of tracking. As you can see, I have penciled in a drum area - I dearly want this studio to be fully functional and capable of tracking a live band if necessary, and part of that will be drums. For this to work I will need bleed control (you can get screens or even half booths to help with this) and of course now the whole room needs treatment for good acoustics. So now, the plan is to build the desk and retest the acoustics, adding the minimum number of bass traps necessary to get a great sound for mixing, then distribute the rest around the studio as necessary.
I am getting a little ahead of myself here though, as the main aim for the coming weeks activities with Ant is to get a good mixing environment, and a great vocal and acoustic guitar recording environment. Drums will come later and will require a lot more investment in equipment:
- Drum kit!
- Drum Mics
- More room treatment
- Partitions
Ant’s take on this is that we will aim for that next year when he comes over again, and maybe at that time we’ll gather some session musicians, either friends or hired to help us track a couple of live songs if we can get the studio up to scratch!
So there you have it - a 90 degree flip in thinking and in the desk as well, opens up the studio for bigger and better things !
