I’ve done a lot of jobs in this studio of mine, but few make me beam like the CD project I did with Rick Andrews.  Rick’s really put his heart into his music, and keeps up the good fight trying to get exposure and have success.  His guitar speaks a different language that’s really unique to him.

It was a great project to work on, very unique with lots of energy in every song.  Rick was very exacting and opinionated about how everything should be in the mix.  He couldn’t always explain it, but rather he felt it.  He knew when it was just the way it was supposed to be, and I moved things around until they fit his vision.  By the way, that’s the way it’s supposed to work!

On one tune he had called “Waited So Long” he expressed some frustration with.  It wasn’t a “that guitar should be on the left” kind of thing, rather Rick thinks visually about the songs.  He explained the movie he had in his head to me in great detail, and said “the song needs to sound like that!”  I knew what he meant, it needed something extra to communicate that vision…so I pulled that one out of RiffWorks into a DAW and found him a bassline that did the talking (of course Rick did the rest of the talking!).  Thanks for the kudos on that one man!

Today, I logged into Facebook, and saw a couple things about him.  First, today is his birthday.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRO! The second was arguably at least as cool, a video of Melodic Revolution Records artists, including Rick!  You can view the video here, he’s shown about half the way through.  Rick also has a track up on their main page, scroll down to #22 and give a listen to “The Sea and the Lighthouse”.  Awesome stuff

Rick is a great example of keeping true to yourself, keeping your head down and pressing forward.  Some day I’m going to get a phone call asking me what it was like to work with him “way back when” and I’ll be happy to oblige.  You can be part of the story today…check him out and get a download of of his debut CD here.  Support Indie music, and keep it real!!!

I received an email earlier in the week from Garageband.com, saying they were shutting down after 10 years.  I haven’t been on there in at least 2 or 3 years, but it got me to thinking back about that time and what I got out of the experience.

Back 5 years ago or so, I got back into songwriting.  I didn’t intend to, but one thing led to another and I got excited about it again.  Songwriting is pretty much like anything else in life…if you want to get really good you need practice, good guidance and honest feedback to continually improve.  I could get feedback on the Riffcaster site, MySpace and others, but they usually consisted of “nice tune, man” which is good for the ego but not exactly critical feedback.  Given a lot of people don’t deal well with critical feedback, I understand why!

What if you could get real feedback though, from people you didn’t know?  Who had no worry of keeping you from showing up at their door with a shotgun after a bad review?  Who didn’t know your name or anything about you when they first heard your song?  That was Garageband.com, and it was cool.  The way it worked was you had to give 10 pairs of reviews to get a free review of your song.  As a reviewer you heard 2 songs, rated each, and picked the one you liked best.  You’d never heard these before, so it was a true first-impression.

If your song was good it moved up the charts.  If it wasn’t, it wasn’t.  It was a great feedback mechanism mostly, though always subject to the flakiness of musicians.  You know, the kind who believe they have the best stuff ever, and want to get to a review of their songs…so they quickly buzz through their reviews giving low marks to everybody in the guise that their songs are the best ever and will fly up the charts and they will be discovered because of that and get signed to a deal and fly around the country in private jets with hot tubs in them and…you know the type-they think that is called marketing lol

I don’t know how much of that nonsense went on overall, by my own experience I’d say about 20-30% of the time.  That’s too much for any serious use, but from a pure feedback perspective that other 70% was helpful in understanding how you were coming along.  At the end of the day, musicians have at least as high a percentage as any other group of folks at trying to climb over other people in their quest.  Some days I wonder if it’s worse in music, and I’m not talking about those “evil” record labels either…but let’s not go there

In 2008 I moved on to Taxi’s paid service which is a lot more helpful if you are seriously trying to get beyond good and into the professional level.  But Garageband.com was cool and a great experience for me in it’s own right, and it was free if you did your 10 reviews–or you could pay to get a song in the review cycle–but you know musicians–they don’t like to pay for anything .  Heck, maybe that’s why Garageband.com has come to an end?

With the recent group buy on SampleTank XT packs, I’m guessing by the questions I’ve seen some of you jumped on that deal (or are considering the new group buy they have going on) but have never really messed with virtual instruments or DAW programs.

I threw together a short video to give an you an idea of how these things work together, and (in theory) how ReWire would let you use SampleTank through Reaper and into RiffWorks.  I say in theory because the RiffWorks and Reaper are not talking properly with ReWire.  It’s too bad and hopefully some day it will get sorted out!

This video is available in HD, so hit the full screen button!

If you’re like me, you have friends that are good at Rock band invite you over as a guitarist to kick your butt. Rock Band is really tough for me, the timing is never right and the colors never seem to line up where logically the notes should be.  It seems I only do well on really fast songs that I don’t already know how to play on guitar…but it looks like it’s time for revenge!

Check out more here at Engaget:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/11/rock-band-3-gets-pro-mode-real-guitar-hybrid-controller-and-k/

I’ve done lots and lots of writing in this series.  The reason I went through all that is I’ve never seen room acoustics explained from a practical point of view.  ”Use a blanket, that’s all you need” is understandable, but is it the best thing to do?  Why don’t the higher end studio discussions ever talk about these “other” solutions?  And why do those higher end discussions have to be so friggin’ impossible to understand?

If you’ve read through the series, it’s been a long and winding road.  Through all this, I haven’t found anything that changes fundamentals.  No shortcuts that you can do at home that’s just as effective (or even close to) as the “real” stuff.  Sorry.  I’ve tried it all, and didn’t even bore you with half of it!

That’s not to say you can’t build it yourself and save money.  But we need to make sure we’re doing the “right” things, instead of just doing “things”.  That’s where the commercial products and guidance can be helpful, as few of us are acoustical engineers.  If you’re willing to learn though, you can build some very effective treatments on your own.  Search the web, most of the good stuff is based on 703 fiberglass.  I’ll leave broadband absorption materials to others to describe!

“Gator, you took the wind out of me with this one, I don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands on acoustic treatment!  And I don’t have a bigger room!  But I still want my songs to sound great.” I’m with you here!  Let’s talk about how to maximize your recording and maximize your money.

When we started out recording (maybe for the first time, or maybe this time around!), most of us bought something very simple.  In my case, it was a Line6 PODxt and Rifftracker (now RiffWorks) software.  The premise was things had changed, and we could get all we wanted in recording in the corner of our bedrooms and be the next big thing on MySpace or YouTube.  We could record all right, and it was time to change the world with our music!  Except for most of us, our stuff didn’t sound that great.  We blamed the hardware, or the software…and bought more of it trying to get the sound to be more “commercial” sounding.  It turns out that hardware and software was just fine, but if you can’t hear what’s going on it’s really hard to mix…whether you know how to or not!

I talked about how to record without a treated room – get good headphones!  I mean ones that are flat, not hyped, and can at least help you get really good sounding tone for your guitars, bass, and vocals individually.  The actual recording is still the most important part of the process, and will go great lengths to a good end result.  If you’ve already bought monitors, good for you.  You will get better recordings here too for most anything not bass related, because at least you’ve taken the speaker response out of the equation…and some speakers can be quite hyped!

I talked about trying all sorts of things I found on the internet to get around buying or making real treatment.  In my experience trying to be cheap, any of these is better than nothing, but none work too well compared to real treatments.  If you want to mix your own stuff, keep it simple.  Lay off the “wall of guitars” or you’ll probably end up in trouble!

Let’s Talk Turkey

If you get some really good flat response headphones, and take great care in recording…that’s all you need to do.  How do you get a great mix then? You send it off to somebody who does mixing and mastering.  Surprise…that’s how you do it in the “real” world too!  Still want to do it yourself?  I saw a great quote on the GatorForum I’ll paraphrase…”for all the money I’d have to spend for treatment to make the room effective, I could send my music to you and still buy a Marshall stack with the difference.”  If that first CD you do goes gold, you’ll have plenty of money to build the right studio and do it right yourself.  Spend your time making your songs great instead of guessing at mixes and blowing up mastering.  You’ll be much happier for it!

Do you need new gear?

If you’re like me, when things don’t come out the way you want you look for something to blame, and buy a better version of it.  I’ve spent all sorts of money on software and equipment looking for the missing link that turned out to be the room.  My advice would be…DON’T SPEND ANOTHER DIME ON RECORDING GEAR OR SOFTWARE!!! Okay, Instant Drummers excluded (props to my friends at Sonoma Wire Works), whatever software you are using is more than fine, and that interface, no matter how cheap is probably light years better than the digitally recorded stuff you were listening to in the 80′s.  If you want high end plugins or vintage equipment on your recordings, send it to somebody who has them, and more importantly knows how to use them…not that it will matter if your song is great in the first place!

The next time you think a new piece of gear or the “Ultimate Colossal Mastering Plug-In Suite” is the answer to your problems, take the money out of your wallet and put it in an envelope.  Spend some of it on a new guitar or better mic.  Keep the rest as a “recording fund” for when that magic song comes out of you and you really need it to shine.  Send your music off to somebody who knows what they are doing (I have some suggestions ), and spend that mixing time writing the next magic song instead of sweating over trying to get a mix that will highlight the awesomeness of what you wrote and played!

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So in conclusion…

There’s no doubt you are the best at writing the songs you want, and playing the way you want them played.  When it comes to the engineering piece, you need a) the experience, b) the equipment, and c) the ability to actually hear what you are really doing to your music.  Skip the “home remedies” version of acoustic treatment and if you’re really serious about doing it all yourself, go straight to the pro stuff.  If money is an issue, build up your room treatments over time.  You can’t ignore it, but you can get around it if you segment the recording process into it’s traditional areas – songwriting, tracking, mixing, mastering – and use the things and expertise that is most appropriate at each stage.  Think through carefully what are the best things you can do (and let others do) to maximize the value of both your time and money in home recording!

Actually a lot of things matter…but one thing we’re doing with treatment is trying to “fix” a room that is smaller than ideal.

There are several spots in the room we need to absorb mids and highs:

- behind each monitor

- on the wall to the left and right (between where you sit and the monitors sit)

- on the ceiling (between where you sit and the monitors sit)

- on the rear wall

These are the places sound bounces off of and back into your ears so quickly it messes with the sound of the monitors.  You can find lots of info on the ideal spots, but basically have somebody hold a mirror along the walls and ceiling (I guess that’s hard to do ) and anywhere you see the monitors from your mixing chair, you need something to absorb or diffuse it, to keep it from bouncing back at you and muddling up the monitor’s direct sound.

When you take out the sound reflections, you then can hear what’s really going in all it’s glory from your monitors!  So…why don’t we just pad the whole room then?  Simple…it would drive you nuts!  Seriously, that much absorption would sound very unnatural to work in, and not balance correctly with the bass, so you want a good balance in the room overall.  Keep the direct reflections down, but still have some level of things bouncing around the room (albiet greatly reduced) so you don’t go nuts in the vacuum and “over liven” things to compensate.

I mentioned that in a small room you can’t treat bass.  Sure you can treat it, but getting treated to a level that is useful is nearly impossible in my opinion.  While the mids and highs seem to improve and get easier to work with as you add treatment, the bass is so bad in a small room that the same level of improvement doesn’t help that much.  To get to a useful amount of treatment, you’d probably take half of the room up in bass traps, and it was small to begin with!  So from a very practical standpoint, I’d say skip the subwoofer, skip the bass traps and do the best you can with reference songs, headphones and other systems when trying to judge bass.  It’s just not something you’ll solve in a small room.

Which begs the question…what happens in a larger room?

I’ll start by saying the move to a bigger room had nothing to do with acoustic properties…I’m really not that smart! I was happily recording, mixing and mastering in that small room and had done lots of successful projects there.  Things were so much easier to do than when I started I thought that this was the holy grail, and aside from the bass tweaking challenges things translated pretty well.  I would have stayed in that room forever…had I not started to record other people and needed a bit more room.  I’ll talk about the unique (read cheap) “features” of this new room another time, but after deciding on this move it hit me that in theory, the sound should be better.  The reflection points are further away, and the bigger dimensions should probably break up the sound and give me a better shot at a useable bass.  That’s when I decided to figure out how to measure the room I was leaving, and the one I was going into.

Measuring all done, everything was torn down and brought to the new room.  I was excited to get a first impression of the room before mucking around with any treatment.  I was amazed!  It was really clear like I’d never heard before (again lol).  Again, nothing changed here equipment-wise, just the room.  I went ahead and put the auralex foam up, but only in the left and right reflection spots.  The bass traps are around here somewhere, but probably not doing anything to trap.  And yet, the bass is nice and smooth, the balance of the sound is awesome…and for the first time I’m hearing things in commercial recordings that I simply cannot hear anywhere else even when I know they are there.  Sure, you hear things on a good system that you go back in the car or on the iPod and it just wasn’t that obvious before.  But I’m now hearing what the engineers have actually done, instead of what the earbuds or car or boombox did to them…ponder that for a minute!

If we go back to the original plan we all had getting into recording with some software and a hardware interface, what was our goal?  Just about all of us had visions of recording our best songs, making them shine and getting that “studio” quality without the studio price.  And things quickly went awry…and we struggled to figure out the “tricks” and “secrets” those professionals were keeping from us.  The more we asked, the less they told us – what is the magic preset?  ”There is no magic preset” they replied.  So we listen to their work and try to copy what we hear…what we hear…which turns out not to be what they did.  Sure, some of us do better than others at this, through some combination of experience, knowledge, detective work or plain luck – but it always seems to be missing something, especially when it gets compressed down to an mp3.  What are these things they do?  The same things we try to do, set levels & panning properly, reverbs and delays so they gel nicely in the mix, eq so things are balanced.  But they can hear what’s going on so much better and be so much more precise, because you can hear the minute impacts to the mix at this level.

“Hey Gator, you’re rambling.  What about the big room?”  The big room is a big enabler to bringing it all together.  The black line is the small room with no treatment…the purple line is the big room with treatment just at the left and right.  So what do we see?  Fundamentally we see balance, caused in large part simply by the size of the room.  The bass is a lot smoother, as those long waves have room to breath and not build up so much in their resonant frequencies.  In the mids (where our vocals, guitars, keyboards all live – you know, the important stuff!), my untreated small room had a lot of combing (sharp but very narrow spikes and dips).  In the larger room those waves bounce around a lot more and end up a lot lower in level by the time they get back to the mixing spot.  Sure, there’s some improvements we can work on to make it even tighter, (particularly a couple spots in the low mids) – but the graph shows why I can hear this big semi-circle of a sound stage – and when you can hear it, you can use it!

Getting to that commercial quality is certainly possible, but not without having that level of quality at every step in the process.  If we cheat on any part, it adds up in the final result.  And who among us doesn’t really want the absolute best end product we can get?  In summary…if you have a big room you can use, use it!  It will make a big difference.  Treatment then makes the sound that much better, instead of being used to fix it.

Hmmm…it seems I’ve said that about almost everything in the recording process.  Do great tracking (recording), then you spend time in the mix just making it that much better instead of fixing it.  Do great mixing, then the mastering can really make it shine.  Write a great song, then the producer can…well maybe not…but you get the idea.  And ironically, being able to hear is absolutely fundamental to all of it.  Ironic because we don’t understand it, don’t deal with it, and then wonder why we can’t get those results.

I hope this series has helped at least give you some idea why the room is so critical, particularly for mixing and mastering.  Even if you don’t understand the theory, understanding what is good and bad and where your particular limits kick in can make a big difference in getting the best final product you can.

I’ve gone into a lot of stories and detail, because I want you to understand this isn’t some theoretical discussion…it’s a reality show.  Not the one liners you find on a forum from people you have no idea whether they are messing with you or not.  In the final blog on this series, I’ll pull it all together.  Results and facts instead theory and long-winded stories.  And how, believe it or not…you can really maximize your recordings and your money by working with Gator-Studios.com!

Click here for the next section

Still with me?  Great!

Let’s review a couple points from the last blog, shall we?

If you’re room is untreated, you’ll want to:

- Have some good, flat, honest headphones to record with

- Keep your mixes simple, so you have a decent chance of getting a decent mix

- Mix via the “hokey pokey” method (you put your CD in, you take your notebook out, you write down where it’s off and you shake it all about…in the car, in the boombox, on the iPOD etc. until you fix everything you find everywhere).

Yes, mixing in an untreated room is possible!  But…your mix will never be anywhere as good as it can, and it will take you forever.  You could probably make enough cutting grass in the same time you take to mix this way…to send it off to the guys at Abbey Road!  We’ll keep opportunity cost and other financial muck out of this, in the promise of keeping things understandable

If you buy what I’m saying so far, you probably want to know what will make things better.  In this case we call that “acoustic treatment” and this treatment can be a lot of things.  In my quest to be cheap I’ve tried a lot of things a long the way to varying degrees of success.  Here’s a few:

Housewares (Blankets, Quilts, and closets)

If you have any spare thick quilts that you can hang on the wall, those will help some.  They’ll tame higher frequency reflections somewhat, and if you bundle them up in a corner they might help a little with bass.  You’ll need more quilts to do both, and in a small room you’ll run out of room to sit before you get things well tamed.  Have a closet in the room, with clothes in it?  Open the doors and let your clothes absorb your sound…hopefully your sound smells fresh like a summer breeze!

These are kind of brute force methods, you won’t get the right amount or type of treatment, but they’ll tame things down a bit.

WWO (Windows Wide Open)

When I finally got the whole “reflection” thing about sound, and understood where the hottest points were, I set about to see what I could do.  One of the big spots is right behind the speakers on the wall.  Right behind my speakers were 2 windows, so I would open them up while mixing!  It actually did help, unless somebody was cutting the grass, or cars went by, or kids were playing in the street.  But sound that bounced that way went right out of the room.

The Cone of Silence (SE Reflexion Filter)

It didn’t help a lot, but with the addition of an SE Reflexion filter behind my head I was able to make due.  The Reflexion is meant to have a mic in the middle of it, to keep reflections of your room out of your mic (the same problems the room causes to a mix, actually get recorded so this is twice as bad an effect of an untreated room!

Like I said, I’ve tried a lot of things…lol…so I figured if it would block sound I could stick my head in it and bloc the reflections off the side and rear walls.  Not ideal, but it did help.

Po’ Man’s treatment (acoustical ceiling tiles)

As I mentioned I added something extra with the 2nd Auralex kit…MoPads.  These are little acoustic thingy’s you put under your monitors and subwoofer to decouple them from the desk and floor.  I was not really believing these would help much, but for the price I couldn’t resist.  Sound-wise, it was an effect you could either convince yourself was there, or convince yourself it was not.  Out of curiosity, as I was tearing down the old room, I decided to do one extra measurement…that was with the MoPads but no other treatments in the room.  And…I was a bit shocked at what I saw!

- Point 3…As you put more things up to deal with your room sound, you will start noticing more things…and more things wrong that you didn’t notice before.  This may put you on a never-ending quest for better room sound!  There, I warned you

Okay class, open your books to page 3 rip it out, then throw it all out the window.  We’re not here to talk technical junk, we want to know what works and maybe just enough of why to convince ourselves that it’s real.  Where shall we begin?

Let’s begin with the untreated small room.  Most cats I’ve met recording at home have this as their studio.  I did.  It’s the typical bedroom studio, mine was 11 x 12 or so but with a vaulted ceiling.  Yeah, that makes a little difference.  Sound bounces off stuff that is hard, and gets absorbed by softer things.  It’s why your empty room is echoey and when you get the bed and bookshelves in it, not so echoey.  Ceilings are hard, just like walls.  So are wood or tile floors.

Throw a ball against a wall 20 feet away.  Then walk up 4 feet from it and throw the ball just as hard.  What happens?  The second throw, before you finish your follow through it smacks you in the face.  Not good.  Just like an 8 foot ceiling or 11 x 12 room.  The reflected sound hits you too soon and too hard after it comes out of the speaker and messes up your face, er I mean the sound, and in unpredictable and odd ways.  The further away the wall, the less impact to the sound you hear…since it has further to go and further to come back and loses steam along the way.

Part of the sound is messed up volume/eq-wise, i.e. the room reflections actually make some frequencies sound louder and others quieter than what’s really coming out of the speakers. See this graph?  This is from monitors that are flat enough that the difference between all the frequencies should be basically unnoticeable.  But that graph ain’t flat!  If you like numbers, the difference is 33db in the bass area.  If you don’t like numbers…then take RiffWorks, put something on play (InstantDrummer is fine), turn the master volume down to where it says “GAIN” and then up to +18.  That should give you an idea what this graph is saying to your volume, again on different frequencies.

Bass is a particular problem from the room.  Imagine your gain knob pointing at “GAIN” when you play an open ‘E’ on the bass, and then at +18 when you play F#.  Youch!  That’s not going to work.  The good news is if you recorded direct, like through a TonePort, it’s all even inside the computer and speakers, but you can’t hear it that way on your speakers or monitors.

When you’re listening now, you will probably notice this on some bass notes.  Some boom, some get weak.  You may think you’re good though, because the difference is not as dramatic as I’m making it out to be.  But what you are hearing are some of the frequencies and not others.  You may hear the boom of the low note on one fret (the main frequency resonating), and a weaker sound on another (the combination of the reduced main sound and the harmonics) – but what you are hearing is not real!  So how do you dial in bass tone when each note sounds like it’s eq’d completely differently?  Uh…it’s not easy for sure!  This is where good headphones are required…for dialing in the tone.

I mentioned part of the problem is the vastly different volume of different notes on the same instrument.  This up/down tends to get narrower the higher in frequency you go (that’s that jumbled up mess on the right of the graph).  Another part of the problem in the higher frequencies…they bounce better.  Think of bass as a semi flat kickball, mids as a tennis ball and highs as a golf ball.  Golf balls bounce a lot better than a semi-flat kickball!  The bad news is you have all 3 hitting the walls/ceiling and bouncing in their own different ways and causing all sorts of different changes to the sound.  Those mids and highs now have a reverb to them in addition to different volumes for different frequencies.  Sheesh!  That’s why when you crank a mix up in a room like this, it gets muddy and hard to hear details.  And detail is exactly what you need to be hearing!

Let’s review the key problems:

- Your computer speakers or monitors are nowhere near the problem that your room is

- The bass in the room sounds like you’ve cranked the volume and eq up on some notes and cranked it down on others – you can’t eq it one way or the other to fix it, and there’s no way to tell what your tone really sounds like through the speakers

- High frequencies bounce better than low frequencies, and keep bouncing around – this is like adding bad eq and a varying reverb to the sound you hear

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So…if you can’t hear your bass tone and your guitar tone is masked by a bad eq and reverb that’s not really there, odds are the results are not going to be that good without the effort of listening on different systems in different rooms or cars to find those things that are way out of whack.  Each place on it’s own is compromised, but you can usually tell if something is way off and go back and tweak it into a reasonable shape.  Are you going to get the best tone you want?  Or the best mix you want?  Nope.  Sometimes you’ll get lucky, sometimes you won’t.  But you can help yourself along greatly with good (and I mean good!) flat headphones when you are recording.

An awful lot of what goes into a good sounding track is how each track sounds when it’s recorded.  The playing and the tone are so critical to the end result you absolutely need to do your best here.  Good headphones will take the room out of the equation, and provide a much better reference to what you are really recording.  And guess what?  If the tracking (recording each track) is superb, you’d be amazed at how little needs to be done to get a great mix.  Even if you can’t hear what you’re doing because of the room, keeping it simple will usually get you a good result.

So why not mix in the headphones too?  Depending on how bad your room is, it might be your best option…but it’s a sucky option for setting levels and panning.  In addition to taking out the room, you’ve now put the soundfield inside your head instead of spread out in front of you both left to right and front to back like a semi-circle (and yes…this is what it really sounds like if you can hear it!)  You’re just not going to get the right perspective on panning, reverb, or levels if that’s all you use.  You’ll need a second opinion for sure!

-And of course if it’s something really special (like for a CD, website, film/TV/radio)…send it to Gator! If you recorded it well we will be able to take it to the next level for you.  If not…let’s just say we have some really good tools to fix things

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Next time, I’ll talk about some treatment options, and the real impacts they have or don’t have.  Stay Tuned!

Click here for the next section

Welcome to the Acoustics “school of hard knocks”!  I’m your teacher, you can call me Mr. Gator.  Let’s begin.

In this blog series, I’m going to try and translate some science and reality into musician’s English.  How tough is that?  Tough enough I’m not sure it’s been done before, or at least I’ve never found it.

First…a history lesson.  I’m a guy who understands audio and waves pretty well, but was so confused by what’s out there on the web that once upon a time I declared room acoustics to be irrelevant.  I found lots of supposedly “smart” guys on forums who backed me up too.  ”Mix on your stereo” they said, “you know what already sounds good” and everything from egg crates and mattresses to ear buds in terms of advice.  The problem was none of it seemed to corroborate, and we all know by now real studios don’t use egg crates or home stereos

But alas, me and my stereo (bought off EBay) went to work mixing up my first recording.  It didn’t sound too bad! It (and everything else) seemed to get muddy if I cranked it up, but at lower volumes it was okay.  I proudly burned a CD and asked my wife to listen with me in the car.  There was no bass.  It was shrilly.  Hmmmmm….so I went back up to the room, turned up the bass, eased off the top end, and proudly burned another CD.  I took this one to the room with the home theater stereo, to proudly show my daughter.  The bass about blew us out of the room and it was muddy.  So I went….back and forth, back and forth, CD after CD, added a boombox and another car to the test environment and a big notebook and after about a month had something that sounded reasonable on nearly everything I played it on.  It was cool!  Does this sound like you?

And then Gator-Studios.com was born.  I had a friend ask me to master his CD and was eager to help!  I figured I shouldn’t master on a cheap stereo…so I looked around the web and discovered monitors must be the ticket.  Monitors should be pretty flat, and flat seemed to be what was needed for mastering.  So I bought some monitors. I was really excited when I got them home, but a bit disappointed when I heard them.  The things I had recorded sounded worse, and even CD’s didn’t have that “wow” factor.  They sounded worse than my stereo in the corner!  But…I figured this must be what “flat” sounds like.

And sure enough, I mixed the next song I had recorded, and while not great, the problems weren’t as severe.  Maybe it only took me 2 weeks of the CD burning and the note taking in the car…hey, monitors cut my mix time in half!  I started to think back to the old days…I didn’t remember anybody in a big studio doing anything more than a sanity check outside the mixing room.  So I started looking again and re-reading some of the technical jargon.  This time I got a little more out of it, at least I got the point that something needs to be done to reduce reflections-that’s why things got muddy when I cranked the volume up.  So I opened up the windows behind the monitors…and let that reflection right out the window!  Seriously…it did help.  I also bought a pack of acoustic ceiling tiles and slapped them up around the room where these “reflection” points were.  It seemed to help too.  And off to master I went, still having to do the car thing and the boombox thing, but again it better.  I had this deal down pat and got good exercise to boot!

This is getting long and I’ve probably said all this in other rambling blogs, so let’s hit fast forward.  I liked the improvements and yearned for more, so I bought a good quality (but minimal) acoustic tile pack.  Another noticeable improvement!  I added another one and got more improvement.  It was now really a useable studio!  I still had some troubles with bass levels and bass tone, but the mixes and masters were a lot better the first time and much quicker to tweak.

In early 2010 I moved the studio to the 3rd floor, where I have a large room (around 30 x 18).  One of the theory things I finally let stick in my head was that small rooms can be treated to a point, but are not optimal especially for bass.  Before I tore down the old room, I decided to get some facts though.  I downloaded some room measurement software, ran some sweeps both treated and untreated.  Oh…and when I got things hooked up in the big room, well let’s just say the sound went from great to amazing at Gator-Studios.com!  I ran some sweeps up here – and now can see why.

I will break it down in simple terms as the blog progresses, and try to explain what I’ve tried along the way, how well and why it worked (or didn’t).  And finally why Gator-Studios.com is the place you need to come when you have a serious Riffworks or DAW project like a CD or film/TV gig…or at least don’t wish to be embarassed by that thin and shrill CD you proudly show your wife in the car!

Here’s a sneak peak though below…as you can probably guess, the blue line is our new room here.  The green one?  That’s more what your room probably looks like.  Don’t worry, it will all make sense!

Click here for the next section

Ah the best laid plans…I was all excited to write this long blog on acoustics, and got tied up on some other projects and travel. A couple more weeks and I hope to be in the country and back at it for a while, so stay tuned!

Gator