Hi all.
First off - thanks for this forum - hours of great reading already.
Here's an odd one.
First off - about my recording habits. I occasionally do voice-over work, and backing industrial music, but most of my recording is single person, songwriter at the board stuff. Most of it is MIDI-based, with electric guitars / bass going straight into the console, and vocal / acoustic guitar recording in the control room.
I'm not looking to (nor can I afford) spend any real money on this space. I AM fortunate to have 6 pieces of Auralex Maxwall panels, one of which is a window panel, and some sheets of plywood if necessary.
What I AM looking to do is get the recording area of this loft in sonically-stable shape.
OK - the main room is 40' x 24', with a ceiling of 24'. Floors are linoneum. The vast majority of this room has tin walls (First 4 feet is wooden wainscoting - tin from 4' straight up to, and including, the ceiling. WITHIN this room is a sleeping loft, the underside of which is 12' wide, 9' deep and 7' high. This is where the studio is located.
The sleeping loft itself is essentially on stilts, with X-cross-members on the back and sides. The front has a single leg coming straight down the center. The back is up against one of the tin walls. The "ceiling", which is actually the floor of the "bedroom" above, is 1/2" ply, with 1/8" ply on top of that, with a sisal carpet lining the top of the whole thing, and a full-time futon mattress on top of that. (There ARE multiple 2 x 4 cross beams underneath, with a center 4x4 beam.)
The sides of the sleeping loft are essentially open. I've got a couple of keyboards hung on one side, and a pic or two on the other.
I'm using an analog console (an old, warm Yamaha 2404 - certainly not the quietest, but easily as good if not better than your average Behringer / Mackie, if only for the warmth itself - no flames please) - with a newly acquired trio of MOTU 1224's into a G3 450. Monitoring is done through a VERY old and treasured Kenwood amp, hooked to 3 sets of speakers - more about them later. (Not that it matters, but for the record, I've got a Blue Ball and a Sennheiser MD 421 II mic.)
My recording spaces have always developed organically - I've got a good sense of placement for equipment / speakers, etc., and the spaces have always served me. However, this one's got me a bit stumped.
For starters, I hung a shelf at about 4 feet at the back of the sleeping loft, and placed the monitors on it. Put the console between them at an appropriate distance. Sat down in front of it, fired it all up, and BANG - no lows. Regardless of which speakers. If I stood UP, BANG - bass is back.
Now I have to confess that I don't know jack about standing waves or the like, but my assumption is that there was some kind of cancellation going on in the engineer's spot. So after about a month of playing with various placements, I tried hanging one of the speaker pairs up by the ceiling and BANG AGAIN - bass is back.
I've only had it like this for a couple of days, so I'm still living with it (hence the temporary placement of everything in the pics, but especially the speakers). But in the meantime - I'd be interested in any comments, along the lines of:
Should I plywood in the side walls or leave them open? What about the back wall - any issue there?
Insulate the ceiling at all?
Carpet?
The opposing wall, behind me when I'm at the board, is 20' away, so having stuff bounce back at me hasn't been an issue. But if you have any comments about that, fire away as well.
Here are just a few pics of the space, for your perusal. ANY comments are more than welcome.
Empty, before I moved anything in - for reference:
External image, not preserved — original: http://www.markmarshall.com/studio/s4.jpg
External image, not preserved — original: http://www.markmarshall.com/studio/s1.jpg
External image, not preserved — original: http://www.markmarshall.com/studio/s2.jpg
External image, not preserved — original: http://www.markmarshall.com/studio/s3.jpg