Layout, Treatment + Mixposition

Hello everyone. First of all: Great Place. Loads of information! :D After spending weeks reading in this Forum, I finally found the heart to Post my Quesitions to all you Studio-Building-Experts! My Location is Frankfurt/Germany. Room Dimensions: Ceiling: 2.5m Length: 8.6m Width: 4.96m Here is a Plan of the Room I have: The bottom side of the windows is street level. All walls are heavy build stonewalls, exceptions are indicated otherwise. The Ceiling is concrete supported by steel beams. I will post a schematic drawiing of the ceiling tomorrow. ... and some Pics to give you an idea of what we are talking about: I will post some Measurement charts in the next Post. Room Purpose The room is mainly used for tracking and mixing drums and small acoustic groups that i play with. So i am engineer and drummer at the same time for the recordings that are made in my room. As i have access to a professionally build soundproof recording booth next door in my neighbours studio, i will mainly record live instruments in my room. Mix Position Right now my first concern is to make the Mix position as good as possible, acousticaly speaking. I was thinking a lot about moving the Mixing Desk to another place inside my room but for me i don't see any other practical place to put my desk... Soundproofing The Room is located halfway underground with 0,5m heavy brickwalls. Sound proofing is not an issue at the moment. Treatment for Mix Position For Figures see Treatment Plan further down this Threat! 1.) Cloud (Fig.A) I want to build a really heavy cloud over the mix position for broadband absorption. 12cm of rockwool (40kg/m3 and 12 kPa*s/m2) with an air gap to concrete ceiling of about 10cm. All build into a wooden frame and hung to the ceiling on screw-hooks. 2.) Sidewall Absorbers (Fig.B) I want to cover the Sidewalls Right and Left of the Mixposition with 10cm of insulation (40kg/m3 and 12 kPa*s/m) in a wooden frame and fabric covering hung directly on the walls. Starting about 1m over ground and going up to the cloud. This should give sufficient control of early reflections from the sidewalls (i hope...). 3.) Front behind Speakers (Fig. C) I already have two huge broadbandabsorbers filled with insulation and going from floor to ceiling covering the whole frontside behind the speakers. At the moment they still have a wood cover at the back which will be removed and covered with fabric so the soundwaves that arent absorbed can go through it. 4.) Sidewall opening on Right Side (Fig. D) Option A: One Option would be to have a big absorber (or slat resonator or angled reflector) fit in that opening and the same unit on the opposite wall. I would prefer if the rack could stay where it is so i only close the opening obove 1m from floor. Option B: I could close the whole thing building a drywall-gypsum-wood-mineralwool-construction. I'd rather avoid that if not absolutely necessary... How does the room sound at present? In generall, the room is good sounding. It was perhaps a little bit on the dull side, but that has been (over) compensated by putting in the new wooden floor. Room modes are present but there are no spots where the buildups are ridiculous. I did several recordings / mixes in the past that are considered pretty good sounding. Especially the Low End has been a problem though: I never knew if the low end of the mixes was right or not. (I solved that by running around the city playing back my mixes everywhere and made notes so i could get a better idea how my mixes transformed to other playback systems) And now: The Question :D Can this work? What do you think about the whole project? Can I get my mixing spot decent enough to make good mixes? I know that the mixposition is to some extend unsymetrical, but i hope that i can still manage to get a decent place for mixing. If you want to say: "That is a waste of time and money, STOP now before it's too late!" - say it now please! :roll: What You get in return? I will do a photo documentary of every building / Treatment step i do and i will do a measurement at listening (mix) position (like the ones in the next post) after every step of treatment installation to track my progress. So you can follow the progress with pictures and charts... Waiting curious(ly?) for your answers Simon

Here are the measurement charts i promised. The signal chain for measurement was Behringer ECM8000 microphone -> Mackie Onyx -> iMac -> Fuzzmeasure The Loopback Function to correct any unlinearities produced by the signalchain was enabled. Here is a pic of how i measured: Measurement One: Broadband Absorbers at Front (see Treatment Plan Fig. D) installed. Red is Right Speaker, Green is Left Speaker.

More Pictures to get an even better impression on what i have... View of ceiling right above mix position Ceiling and Pole Joint on the right side behind mix position Front Side of Mixing Desk and Door to other Studio Window and Electric on Rooms Right Side (Bottom Side on the Plans) Storage Area. Behind the Monster Speakers (that are going to be dumped next week) is the elevator (covered with mattress) Studio Desk without Front Absorbers (see Fig. D in Treatment Plan)

I don't like where you have the mix position at all. and those freq graphs just back up my concerns. Having your monitors that close to a wall cause thoses kinds of dips and peaks.

hello lilith_envy. thanks a lot for your reply :D i'm sorry but i am not sure what the drawings you did are suggesting? you think that i should move the desk to another place but to where? there is only one other place i could think of putting it, i attached a drawing... thanks a lot

In the top left hand of the sketch Lil did, that is where she placed your control room. It requires walls to be framed, but it's a very good idea based on your floor plan.

How are you gonna record live instruments in your room without building a new room inside for it? How are you gonna monitor that? I promess you a cranked guitar amp wont let you hear crap even if using headphones. Dont even mention if you wanna judge mic position. In other words, you NEED to build a separate room for that, and thats what Lil proposed. A room for tracking, and a room for mixing

thank you all again for your ideas and explanations! right now, building walls (and rooms) inside the existing room is not an option...sorry :-(

jbassino wrote:

How are you gonna record live instruments in your room without building a new room inside for it?

when i am recording acoustic instruments, most of the time i myself am playing them. so i couldnt be in the control room and in the recording room at the same time. what i do is: record it, listen to it, adjust what needs to be adjusted and do it again. having separate rooms would, in this case, make my work harder, not easier... sometimes i record live with one of my bands in my room. we set up equipment, check the sound, make test recordings as long as it takes. when we are sattisfied with the sound we go and have lunch (or dinner mostly), come back, press record and there we go. mostly 1-3 takes is sufficient.

jbassino wrote:

I promess you a cranked guitar amp wont let you hear crap even if using headphones

you are right. for this aplication, as mentioned above in my post, i do have access to a soundproof, pro-build recording booth. the booth is not mine, it's my neighbours in the studio next door, but he would let me use it when i need it. i have cable-access through a hole in the wall(s) to connect me to the booth. that is where i put noisy instruments such as guitar amps and singers. so i can track them and listen over my speakers, no need for headphones here. but you are right, without this option i would have a serious problem... 8)

jbassino wrote:

A room for tracking, and a room for mixing

this is the classic "engineer-walls-musician" setup. as i am both at the same time, i would run back and forth between the two rooms all the time, or needed an expensive remote system to have control over my recording system from the tracking room...

xSpace wrote:

In the top left hand of the sketch Lil did, that is where she placed your control room.

ah, that was my first thought too. but i am pretty sure that this would be too small. what she suggests as a place to build my control room would be extremely small. about 10m2 groundfloor. anyway, i'm pretty sorry myself but at the moment, building an expensive and time consuming room construction into the existing dimensions is not an option...:-( by the way: this is not my first "studio" (at least, thats what i call it) and i have not started to do recordings just yesterday. as an engineer in fact, i do have some experience. it's not that i don't understand that non-parallel walls, room-in-room, angled ceilings, superquiet hvac, and optimised room dimensions aren't important. it's just that i do not have the possibilities to do it at the moment. whereas: as a musician i have seen some things and i think some would be surprised how much music you hear every day is produced in much worse enviroments than mine :D - that gives me hope! right now i have to do with what i have and see if i can do it better next time (meaning: next studio). i am learning more every day, specially in this forum and from all of your experience, so thank you again and again :D i started having "homerecording-studios-not-at-home" kind of places for the last ten years and this is the fourth and so far best sounding (not: good though) studio i had. what i wanna do right now is make it better! and with you're help i think it can be done! thank you all for the support you give by helping me with my little project!!! music is life simon

If you could sum up your question in one paragraph, what would it be?

hello

xSpace wrote:

If you could sum up your question in one paragraph, what would it be?

in fact the answers that have been given helped me already in the way that if i thought there might be an easy way to a good listening position i was wrong. as i don't have neither the time nor the money to make it really pro, i now decided to work with what i have and simply try to make it better than it is at present. as long as there is improvement - how can i be totally wrong? :wink: question: do you think tracking my progress in improving my mixing spot by adding non-permanent acoustic treatment to ceiling, sidewalls and so on is interesting to this forum? i would upload pics and measurements of every step i do but as that is a lot of additional work i would only do it if it is interesting to this forum. what do you think? thanks a lot simon