Skol303

Don't mean to sound like a jerk, but there might be good economic reason why there are no music shops in your area (i.e. insufficient demand for one). I say this as someone who's run a small business for 15+ years; though admittedly nothing to do with musical instruments... I wish! But anyway. In response: 1. I buy nearly everything online because it's generally cheaper and certainly more convenient. 2. I rarely need to try before I buy; most online retailers I use have a 14-day no quibble returns policy should I not like my purchase. 3. My most stores I visit these days (which is a rarity) feel like a) jumble sales or b) fly-traps for people who don't realise they're being fleeced. I don't tend to come away thinking that anything is missing from the stores themselves. 4. I generally only browse shops close to me at work (e.g. occasional trips to shops in the city centre if my lunch break brings me close by) or when visiting new places with work, mostly out of curiosity. So that'd be a radius of less than a mile from where I happen to be. 5. Possibly a special event at which I had opportunity to see a famous player perform... or a closing down sale

I'm slowly learning to read... very slowly... but I'm getting there. As mentioned above, I have no interest in sight reading at gigs because I don't gig and mostly produce electronic music. I'm interested because it helps me to access and better understanding the wealth of theory that's available once you're able to 'join the dots', so to speak. And I'm interested in that for the purpose of improving my composition chops. It's also something to do whilst killing time on the long journeys that my job involves

You beat me to it - twice! - but I was going to use the term 'nonsense' instead of horsepoop. Much of Bowie’s own music contains samples - i.e. pretty much all of his output from the 1980s onwards (electronic drums, synths, etc). The problem with this discussion is that to some folks, using samples equates to Puff Diffy lifting wholesale from ‘Every Breath You Take’. Whereas it's much more subtle and prolific than that. And Bowie, perhaps more than most, would have embraced sampling much earlier in his career had the technology been available, for sure. As would Beethoven

Some great advice here from Ethan Winer, an American chap who runs the company RealTraps - generally regarded as among the best in the business. http://ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html http://audioundone.com/do-it-yourself-bass-traps

It has a nice noise reduction filter. Super quick and easy to use.

Sounds like DIY is definitely going to be your best option. Timber frames, loads of mineral wool and elbow grease

I do indeed! The guys I used are called Blue Frog Audio, run by a chap called Joe. Very friendly, expert advice and good prices for good products (slightly cheaper than the bigger companies for equivalent products). There's also GIK Acoustics who are arguably the market leaders in acoustic treatment. Also great products from what I've read (I haven't used them myself) and very helpful in providing advice.

Install a vinyl floor and add a nice shaggy rug. Best of both worlds and much easier to maintain in a cellar (which is ultimately going to be prone to damp). But really that's the least of your concerns in a room like this. Your biggest issue is going to trying to control the different frequencies that will be ping-ponging off those hard brick and concrete surfaces and causing bedlam with the acoustics. I've been in this situation myself - and am still trying to make improvements to my own humble music room at home - so here are a few insights that I've learnt along the way: 1) Firstly, forget covering the walls with carpet/ egg boxes/ acoustic foam. All of these suggestions are proven to be duds - they’ll just dampen some of the high frequencies at best (if they do anything at all) and you’ll end up with a room that sounds lifeless and ‘boxy’ (and smells like a wet dog if you start nailing carpets to the walls). So just ignore any of those ideas right from the start, no matter what people tell you. Trust me. 2) What you need are bass traps made out of rigid mineral fibre, like Knauf/ECOSE mineral wool. And lots of them! These will help to dampen the low frequency problems that are going to plague your room, known as ‘room modes’ or standing waves. Bass frequencies (esp. below 100Hz) contain lots of energy and are able to penetrate through walls (as your neighbours will soon testify!), but some of that sound energy gets reflected back into the room. Where these reflected sound waves meet they either reinforce each other - making the bass louder - or they cancel each other out - causing the bass to suddenly drop in volume. These peaks and dips in volume will occur at different places in the room and are very difficult to fix (this is a problem that plagues professional mix rooms as much as it does home studios, so you’re in good company). This might be fine if you’re using the room to practice live music in - but it’s going to cause problems if you want to record/ produce /mix in the room, because what you’ll be hearing/recording will be a very inaccurate, especially in the low end where it counts. Dips of up to 30db or more are not uncommon and in my own room that one particular spot where 60Hz just drops out completely. So what can you do about it?… Quite simply you need to build/buy and install some mineral wool bass traps. These are basically wooden frames, packed with mineral wool and covered with a breathable fabric, fitted to the walls and ceiling. If you want to make a good job of it, you’ll need lots of these bass traps. IN a room of your size I’d recommend building a wooden frame 60cm deep, floor to ceiling, at one end of your room and packing it with mineral wool then covering with fabric. Add some additional bass trap panels (approx 3’ x 5’ x 6-7” thick) to the remaining walls - say, two on each wall - and the same on the ceiling. Yes, it will feel like a padded cell but it it will sound much, much better. You could probably do all this DIY for around £500. If you let me know the exact dimensions of your room (length, width, height) and can post a rough floorplan, I'll happily work out which frequencies you'll need to tame and how best to do so

Do you have access to a computer? If so it's very easy to create an account - the link is in the top right-hand corner of the SoundCloud homepage. If you're using phone only, then let us know and I'll try ti find a workaround. Me too! I've always just uploaded the highest resolution WAV file that I'm able to muster (usually 24/48 or sometime 24/96) on the blind assumption that the better quality I put in, the better quality that SoundCloud's ham-fisted compression algorithm is likely to put out. But that is literally just guesswork.

^ Yeah Audacity is a great for processing and recording audio (so I'd strongly recommend keeping hold of it); but it's not much use for writing/arranging music. You definitely need a DAW software like Reaper* for that. *Other brands are also available

I was joking Point being (although badly made) that artistry in music can take lots of different forms; and I'd argue that creating something like the above video entirely from clips of other people's performances is no less valid than playing live in a pub.

So you think something like the video below involves no artistic talent to create? Really?
 You should maybe invite this guy along to some of your pub gigs, let him see what true artistic creativity looks like... PS: all made with sampled YouTube clips.

A quick follow-up to this... I've recently bought Fuzzmeasure (love it, very easy to use and much more intuitive than REW) and have taken some initial measurements of my room. Not too shabby... not especially great... which is pretty much as I'd expect from a small DIY home studio I'm quite happy with the flat response apart from the chasm of a dip between 60-100Hz, which is almost certainly caused by SBIR cancellation (nulls caused by speaker-boundary interference; a problem that all rooms suffer from and especially between these frequencies). I don't think any amount of additional bass trapping is going to fix that; so I'm now considering getting a subwoofer to help even out the low end and fill some of the 60-100Hz null. I'll report back here with the results when the time comes. In the meantime, I highly recommend acoustic measurement to anyone using studio monitors at home. Without it you have no real idea of what you're hearing and will always be mixing 'in the dark', especially when it comes to bass frequencies. I picked up a cheap omnidirectional mic for £50 and initially used the free REW software to take measurements. Even if your room has significant peaks and nulls - and it almost certainly will! - it's always best to know about them, so you can take them into account during your mix decisions. Anyway, here's what my room 'sounds like' at the moment: 1) Frequency response showing the big dip around 60-100Hz, caused by sound bouncing off walls/surfaces and cancelling out. The rest of the room is thankfully fairly flat and even. 2) Low frequency waterfall graph showing the time sound takes to diminsh at different frequencies (a much better picture of how the room 'sounds' than a frequency response graph alone). 3) Envelope time curve shows the energy of the test signal plotted over time. Very useful for checking the early reflection points (surfaces that the sound is bouncing off), seen as the spikes in the graph.

"Sampling.. but is it proper music making etc?" Yes. Next!

+1 and again this is exactly the key point of this discussion. Don’t just think about sustain in terms of “how long a note plays for”. More sustain means more harmonics, and that means better tone (or at least a ‘richer’ starting tone for you to sculpt however you wish). This is just as relevant to the bassist playing funky 1/16ths as it is to the bassist playing long notes on a fretless. This isn’t subjective opinion, it’s acoustic physics

Spot on! Great insight.

Again, I could be wrong but I'm fairly sure that sustain is related to harmonics, which are definitely related to tone. More sustain = more harmonics = 'better' tone (with tone being hugely subjective of course!). Sustain is all about energy. I don't know whether a higher mass bridge adds more energy to the notes being played; perhaps it does but to what degree I dunno. PS: to clarify I'm not talking about letting the note ring out here... I'm saying that if an instrument's materials/construction imbues it with greater sustain, then that instrument is likely to have a 'fuller' tone whether the notes are played long or staccato.

^ This!

Longer sustain is generated by the note having more energy; and generally speaking that means it also has more harmonic content. I could be wrong here… but by my reckoning more sustain therefore means more harmonics, which to some ears means better tone. That would be my guess as to why good sustain is a desirable quality in guitars (and nothing to do with how long the note plays for). Physics is fun, innit

I've heard very good things about them from various keys players. Let us know if you end up getting one; I'd be keen to hear your thoughts on it. In the meantime, all the best for the house move! Try to bagsie/barter permission for a music room with your better half...

Oh yeah definitely. It's not maths class and should always be about what you hear But it's useful to have some numbers as starting points. Well actually it is sort of maths class... or specifically physics class... but I try not to think about it too much!

^ Those Equator D5s seem nice based on the reviews. I was faffing around with my own monitors over the weekend and it reminded me of three tips I think I've posted here before, but will reiterate for convenience: Be sure to isolate your monitors somehow; don't just leave them resting directly on a hard surface like a desk - because the desk will reverberate and mess up the sound (sometimes significantly). At the very least put them on acoustic foam pads or better still on isolated speaker stands. I did the latter with my own monitors and the difference in sound clarity was HUGE, like having a new set of monitors. Money very well spent. Don't be tempted to buy monitors that are too big! I did this - I'm currently using 8" woofers in my room at home - and it's causing havoc with the low end frequencies. Too much bass is the #1 problem for home studios (in fact any mixing room). Whilst it might be tempting to have a nice big pair of bass bins, they're pretty much the worst thing for detailed mix work and tend to have frequency responses that look like the Himalayas. I'm currently using room correction software (Sonarworks) to compensate for mine but will be replacing them will smaller, flatter and more accurate monitors at my next opportunity. Be prepared to deal with the 100-150Hz dip which is explained very well in this article on SoundOnSound. Basically, every nearfield monitor results in a frequency dip around 100-150Hz (caused by reactions with the room) that no amount of acoustic treatment can fix. The dip can be considerable; up to -15db and can span from as low as 60Hz (I've measured the frequency response of my own room and it shows a dip of up to -10db around 100Hz). This is partly the reason why fixing the low end is such a notorious problem for mix engineers. The solution is to use a subwoofer to 'fill in' the low end (something I'm considering) and/or use room correction software, which is set to boost the frequencies that are lacking (not ideal, but better than nothing). Doing this can take a lot of the guesswork out of mixing and avoid the constant need to reference mixes on multiple systems - something I myself have to do. Checking your mixes with headphones is also a good option. Hope that helps.

^ Good advice. High pass the low end anywhere from 20-40Hz and scoop out some of the 'muddiness' from the low-mids between 250-500Hz is always a good starting point for cleaning up a mix. Be cautious of boosting the highs from 3kHz though... lots of nasty frequencies between there and 5kHz (and vocal sibilance around 7-8kHz), which you might not want to boost on your master track but instead fix individually in the mix itself. I tend to prefer boosting a little from 10kHz and up. And when I get the chance to use outboard gear belonging to friends, even boost upwards of 20kHz in what's called the 'air' band. You won't hear anything beyond 20kHz of course - hell, I'm lucky if I can hear with any real clarity beyond 15kHz! - but the tail of air band boosts tends to roll more gently back into the audible range than steeper boosts at lower frequencies, resulting in a really nice shine without any of the harshness/brittleness. You can also do this with some digital EQs and get a similar result. PS: these EQ tweaks can be done with any DAW software, no special plug-ins needed.

If you have an audio interface, then you should be able to write a simple beat - or set up a loop - and record some bass to it within your first hour with any DAW (certainly using YouTube tutorials). If not, then you’re probably not using the right DAW for you. And you won’t discover that unless you demo a few and try. But yeah, it’s a cyclical discussion that comes back to Reaper because it’s the cheapest DAW for people to ‘dip their toes with’. I suppose I’m just more of a tart ‘cos I enjoyed playing the field before finding my sweetheart

...a dark place laced with manure?