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Setting up my own studio advice needed


fiatcoupe432
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I would start by finding the place in the room where the drums sound best. Try walking around with a snare drum, hit it, and identify where the snare/room sounds the best. Set up the kit there.

If you are mixing/recording in the same space, I'm assuming you won't be using monitor speakers at the same time as drums are being recorded (so you'll monitor via headphones). You may consider setting up the control desk so that you have line of sight to the drummer.

Acoustic treatment for the control area will be somewhat tricky to get perfect. If money was no object, it would obviously be better to create two rooms, one for tracking and one for mixing....

Anyway I'd suggest focusing on getting drums sounding good acoustically within the room first, and get adequate monitoring on headphones. That will allow you to capture good sounding drum first, something you can't really 'fix in the mix' - unless you replace the kit with samples (yuck...)

You'd have to make more compromises with your mixing space, but you can probably adapt this more and 'learn' it. Worst comes to worst, you could mix somewhere else. I think few project studios have good sounding live rooms but many are well set up for mixing. You can't however do much with badly recorded drums.

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[quote name='roman_sub' timestamp='1502374673' post='3351053']
Studio gear GAS is even more dangerous than bass/guitar GAS, in my experience... you've been warned!
[/quote]

I suggest that anyone who is contemplating spending money on a serious home studio has a good read of [url=http://basschat.co.uk/topic/308700-advice-what-next/page__view__findpost__p__3338557]my cautionary tale[/url] before getting out their wallet and credit card.

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[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1502450575' post='3351524']
I suggest that anyone who is contemplating spending money on a serious home studio has a good read of [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/308700-advice-what-next/page__view__findpost__p__3338557"]my cautionary tale[/url] before getting out their wallet and credit card.
[/quote]

Would you have listened to that excellent advice, back in the day..? :rolleyes:

:D :P

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[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1502455087' post='3351583']
Would you have listened to that excellent advice, back in the day..? :rolleyes:

:D :P
[/quote]

Don't be silly...

BIgRedX is entirely correct, gear does not equate to quality, very much like the guy we all know with the £4000 bass at home and no clue where the downbeat is.

I have 30 years experience as a pro engineer and have been building studios for 20, I still go to "proper" recording studios to record drums and rhythm sections, as the combination of mics, room acoustics and convenience is hard to beat and almost impossible in a home studio unless you're planning on spending big bucks. The beauty of modern systems is that you can take a drive away from the studio and drop the tracks into whatever DAW you care to use to do all your overdubs. Any one of the decent pre-amp/soundcard combos will do, OP has got the Apogee, that's a god start, you can pretty much do anything in the box now with a little knowledge and application, but the talent to make the kit produce great quality is relatively rare.

Most of us can make a decent fist of it with a little practice and study however.

If I was going to choose kit for a home room now, I'd get a couple of decent mics, Sontronics or AKG or the like, a good interface, the fastest computer I could afford with a ton of RAM and some decent HD space and a decent pair of self-powered monitors, then do everything else in software. Hardware is brilliant, but it's expensive and requires a deal of knowledge.

Edited by WinterMute
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[quote name='WinterMute' timestamp='1502456058' post='3351598']
If I was going to choose kit for a home room now, I'd get a couple of decent mics, Sontronics or AKG or the like, a good interface, the fastest computer I could afford with a ton of RAM and some decent HD space and a decent pair of self-powered monitors, then do everything else in software. Hardware is brilliant, but it's expensive and requires a deal of knowledge.
[/quote]

+1

Although I must admit I do [i]love[/i] the few pieces of hardware that I own. Not just or the sake of them being 'real stuff' - and putting aside discussions of analog mojo - but because I find them so beautifully straightforward to use.

Switch on > turn a few dials > sounds great, job done, on with the mix! :)

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Guys bare in mind that I'm not trying to build a studio in a room .
Is a very large barn conversion which I. W rented a year upfront to do some recording .
I m trying to build something good enough so I can record some music and put it up on the market.
Money of course is an issue but I do have some to spend on it .
Probably try to spend them soundproofing etc
.
I'm gonna use lol fix just for now as I own the licence but thinking on upgrading to monthly plan of pro tools . Amazing deal eh?under £20 a month.
Also I'm looking to get a nice power synth like omnisphere .
Upgraded today to mac tower 5.1 12 core 64gb ram
Couple more mics I ve bought today
2 rode nt5 and a Shure beta 91 .
So now this is the equipment
Mac 5.1 12 core 64 ram
Apogee quartet
Audient id14(spare)
Se 5600ii
Shure sm58 sm57
Cad drum mics
Plus Shure beta 81
2 rode nt5
2 Berhinger c4
Yamaha rydeen drum kit
Yamaha clavinova piano
Hammond organ
Gk 212s bass cab plus gk head
Ashdown 2x10 cabs plus Hartke 250 head
Rat valve guitar amp(plus another 5 guitar amps like valve amp peavey line 6 Marshall etc
Epiphone 339 guitar
Fender strat Mexican
Peavey falcon made in USA
Martin acoustic
Yamaha and cort classic guitar
Eris monitor 8 x2
2x lg screen
Akg k702 headphones
Couple of sennheiser headphones and some studiospare one
Lots of basses ahahah
And GAS continues..........
looking to build a vocal booth next and space for drums
Let me know if I'm doing well ;-)



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[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1502455087' post='3351583']
Would you have listened to that excellent advice, back in the day..? :rolleyes:

:D :P
[/quote]

At the beginning in 1990 when I had a load of money to burn, lots of ambition and belief in my recording prowess, and was doing music that was mostly electronic based, I'd have told future me to take a hike. I'd had a couple of experiences with good local studios and hadn't been that impressed other than they had a lot more "toys" than I did

Also until I had upgraded to Logic Audio and was recording on the computer rather than on a tape-based system, there were still definite and obvious limits of what I could achieve which were being imposed by the equipment I had available to me. The EP that we released recorded in the first version of my home studio, didn't sound bad at all, but in retrospect the most impressive thing about it was what we had managed to do with relatively modest equipment and a lot of ingenuity.

By the time I had spent most of the money and was recording the album, and realising that the overall sound wasn't a massive improvement over the 8-track cassette, I might have been more ready to listen, but then of course it was too late.


These days setting up an excellent recording system at home is stupidly cheap, so you'd be stupid not at least give it a go. However I would suggest that you keep the spending in check. Once you've got a suitable computer, DAW, something to get your audio (and MIDI) into the computer and some decent speakers to listen to it all on. Stop there. Really get to know the tools that you have at your disposal. If you can't make an excellent sounding recording with this, then TBH it doesn't matter how much more money you throw at the studio, it is extremely unlikely that you will significantly improve what you can achieve.

Remember that even the most basic computer based recording system, in technical terms, far outstrips the equipment that some of the most iconic recordings of the last 70 years were made on. Realise that the things that made these recordings so great were the musicians, the recording space and the engineer(s) and producer(s) capturing the sound, not the equipment they were recorded on.

IME home studios are a great tool for organising your musical ideas and sorting out pre-production, but you can't beat a good studio with a great engineer when it comes to making a great recording.

Edited by BigRedX
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[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1502530085' post='3352011']
IME home studios are a great tool for organising your musical ideas and sorting out pre-production, but you can beat a good studio with a great engineer when it comes to making a great recording.
[/quote]

I agree with this wholeheartedly, I might be able to put up a shelf, but that doesn't make me a master carpenter...!

However, tech means that home studios can be fully capable of producing recordings and mixes of professional standards, if in the hands of someone with talent and experience, and whilst George Massenburg might be able to make a couple of cans and a bit of string sound great, you nearly always find him in his $1,000,000 plus studio..!

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[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1502530698' post='3352018']
Typo fixed. ;)
[/quote]

Thanks! I could really do with a proof reader before I post!

Just in case anyone is vaguely interested, the results of the decade I spend ploughing stupid amounts of money into my home studio can be heard on [url=https://open.spotify.com/user/bigredx/playlist/5lsuJH8hAQSy0arZQMZ3vA]Spotify[/url] or bought from [url=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Skin-Tight-SugarBox/dp/B005M067XW]Amazon[/url]. It's not a proper album because the band split before we had everything tracked, but I was able to cobble something together using the earlier EP (recorded with much more primitive equipment) and 3 remixes done by a couple of Japanese DJ/Producers (which shows what someone with some proper production skills, and probably a lot less gear, can achieve)!

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