SLS Studios build

Cheers! :) Once the vocals are in the mix, you can't hear it at all (to stay faithful to the Queensryche song, we added chorus, slapback, reverb and delay to it, so if you're hearing anything in there, that's it rather than the room). If you mean the 3rd vocal sample, yeah, I can hear a tinnnnyyyyy bit of slapback in there too. I have heavily compressed those 3 vocal samples, though, to see what it would be like in a real-world mix, so that's bringing the room up a little. I might change the orientation of the booth to see how it goes - we have a big velvet curtain that cuts the room in half, so depending on where the reflections are coming from most, that should take care of a few. But if all else fails, then yeah - some packing blankets around the holes should do the trick. :) I'll be doing a lot more testing over the next week or so with much drier songs and using heaps too much compression to see if the room will actually be a problem with the booth as it is now. As I said before, I'm not really hearing it in the cover song, but hey, it could be massive problem in a stripped back acoustic song. Guess we'll find out soon! :)

Tim: I will echo Brad's comments on the nice job on the Queensryche song (I used to be a fan of theirs in the early 80's sometime if I remember correctly). I love the way you have improvised when needed, but I do have to say (as a brother-in-arms and as a colleague)... You spent all this money to design and build a first-class studio, and then went cheap on the vocal booth, which most folks say is the most important part of most songs. As long as it works, I guess you are fine, but it is certainly not up to the AMAZING standards of the rest of your studio appearance-wise! Maybe this is just a temporary stop-gap solution until you get some more funds and/or time, I am not sure, but man with that beautiful studio, I just hate to see you go "ghetto" with the vocal booth. Anyway, I hope you don't take any offense to my comments, it is just me thinking out loud. Best of luck to you, it sounds to me like you are well on your way to a successful career.

We'll be doing a little bit more work on the baffles to make them a little less crappy! HAHA! I've recorded in a few big studios where they used these kind of baffles (not as cheaply made, though) and it's worked well, so I don't mind so much using them. But yeah, I think a vocal booth will be on the agenda when we start making some damn money down the track. I passed the $50,000 mark a while back and I'm quite a few months past when I told the main lender I'd start paying him back, so the heat is on to start to pay him back or move to Mexico and start a new life as a Chili farmer to save my knees from being broken! :P

Lord Tim wrote:

so the heat is on to start to pay him back or move to Mexico and start a new life as a Chili farmer to save my knees from being broken! :P

OUCH! I understand!!! Like I said, the bottom line is the sound. Good luck man...

HAHA! Thanks! :) The more I think about it, the more I think I can do with a much smaller bathroom area and put a booth in half of that space without too much fuss. Time to earn some damn money! 8)

Hey, everyone! Well, I've been doing exactly as I said I would do - earning some damn money, which is why I haven't been around here for a while. It's amazing, the studio still isn't even officially open and I've done a a movie soundtrack that'll be internationally released here, and 3 albums which will be out worldwide by the end of the year, and bands coming from all over the country to record here! It's insane! I'd hate to think what's gonna happen when I actually start advertising! :shock: HAHA! Good to see everyone's builds are going well! Nothing really new to report here, and lots of little things that STILL haven't had a chance to be finished because I've been so busy using it rather than finishing it (sigh!), but plans are well underway for the new vocal booth, and I'll be putting in tie-lines from the control room to the live room for amp in / speaker out stuff in the next day or so. It's amazing the motivation you get to do those little jobs when the client is paying you good money to have it available, hey? HAHAHA! Anyway, nice to see you all! I'll try to pop back in more regularly if I can! :)

Hey Tim, I just came across this thread when I did a search for "Aeropac" and wow i'm glad I did. I think you're studio looks fantastic and was blown away with the quality of the drum recordings you have here: http://www.lord.net.au/slsstudios/test1.html Can I ask what sort of mics you are using for the overheads / close mics? Also how is the Aeropac working? I'm thinking of getting one of these for my project Cheers! Mark

Hey Mark, The Aeropac units are awesome! I have them on their lowest setting here and they're pretty much silent, and also are well isolated from noise entering or leaving the studio. I definitely recommend them! :) Believe it or not, I use Shure PG series mics here. It's not something I tend to tell people before they hear the results because of the stigma attached to such budget mics. And sure, they absolutely have their shortcomings and don't "just work" like a lot of their more expensive counterparts, but if you understand their limitations and know how to process them later, you can get some fantastic results! Those particular mics are PG-81 small diaphragm condensers for the overheads, and PG-56 for the tom and snare mics. Kick is all triggered, so that could be a $15 second hand Dick Smith karaoke mic for all I care! HAHA! If you're interested (and sound quality aside), there's more current recordings using the studio and those mics here: http://www.myspace.com/lordaus and and here: http://www.myspace.com/lordtimmusic You can actually see the studio in action here in our recording diaries: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... A9DF626BD8 Our new album will be out internationally later in the year (thus the lack of my presence here on the forum of late - been fairly busy working on it) which will really show off what the studio is capable of. :)

Awesome Tim! go for it! :thu:

Hey Tim, I wasn't expecting to hear back from you so quick considering this is an old thread. Many thanks for your reply. With the Aeropak, are you sucking in air from outside or from an adjacent room? Did you need to use any special piping for isolation or just the standard piping that comes with it? Do you find it does enough air changes per hour? My room is about 4m x 4m so not sure if it would suit my room..... I'm also considering something like this http://www.ultrafonic.com.au/Drawings/Ventilation.pdf which is a home made ventilation system with an exhaust fan outlet and a passive inlet. Thanks for the links to your vids and audio. Haven't had the chance to sit down and go through them slowly which I will in the next few days, but have enjoyed what i've seen. Cheers Mark

I'm just using all of the standard stuff that comes with the unit, and I'm drawing air in from the outside. Even on the lowest (near silent) setting, it's absolutely fine for having one or two people in the room. My control room is around the size of yours. Once you put a few more people in, I tend to also run the aircon as well, which evens out the difference quite nicely. I have the same aircon/Aeropak running in the live room too, and they work absolutely fine. For just vocals I tend to only have the Aeropak running but for drums, I have the aircon on also so the drummer doesn't spontaneously combust during a vigorous fill! HAHA! (I've recorded some extreme metal here besides the normal rock/metal/pop, and the drumming is pretty intense). Given my time again, as much as I definitely recommend the Aeropak, I'd do a ducted ventilation system. There wasn't really enough room to do all of that properly with what I had to work with here, unfortunately, but thankfully the backup plan worked great. :)

Lord Tim wrote:

I'm just using all of the standard stuff that comes with the unit, and I'm drawing air in from the outside.

So that doesn't compromise your isolation? I'm having visuals of people camping outside listen to you practice through a tiny vent :mrgreen:

Lord Tim wrote:

Given my time again, as much as I definitely recommend the Aeropak, I'd do a ducted ventilation system. There wasn't really enough room to do all of that properly with what I had to work with here, unfortunately, but thankfully the backup plan worked great. :)

I'm researching this but haven't had much luck looking on the net or talking to airconditioning companies. I'm getting lots of blank stares, rolled eyes and evasive answers when I mention the v (entilation) word (brick wall). The cassette ducted systems look ok since they bring in fresh air but I haven't found one that fits being my ceiling trusses. Please let me know if you can recommend someone / thing

No, in fact the isolation is fantastic with these things. I'm getting worse leakage through the ceiling here into the house upstairs than I am through the wall with the Aeropak in it, and when I say "worse", loud metal drumming sounds like a quiet radio playing somewhere else in the house. Immediately next to the intake vent on the outside of the drum room, you can obviously hear it's drums playing but it's VERY quiet, with all but the loudest of cymbal crashes really coming up close to even approaching regular conversation volumes. :) With aircon, I just got EconAir units - $1500 each and just a standard split system. Quiet compressor on the outside, really quiet when it's operating on the inside and very, very little leakage. When the pipes were put through the walls, we did add extra fill around the pipes to make sure they were totally sealed off, but other than that they were totally stock.

Cool. Thanks for the info! I'm sure i'll sleep better tonight :D

So here we are almost 4 years on from when this thread was started. It's been funny reading back the process of building the studio and remembering the stress of getting it all done. There's a lot of stuff that I've learned about this space, both good and bad, and I've managed to do some pretty amazing work in here! I'll put some links to some of my work at the end if you're interested (woo, blatant plug time! HAHA!) So the good first: The drum room sounds amazing! It's bigger than it needs to be but it's worked out well because it can accommodate all of the drum cases, and give me options to distance mic the drums if I want to (which came in handy when I was doing some brush kit recording - it really needed a very roomy sound which I got easily). Even though it's been a screw around, it's worked out well for vocals despite not having a dedicated vocal room (yet) and me using my removable screens and overhead absorbers as I talked about earlier in the thread. I'm constantly amazed at what I'm able to pull off in that room, too! The other day, I was recording upright double bass, trumpet, congas, djembe, acoustic guitar and acoustic violin, flutes, opera singers... pretty wild project, and every time I thought to myself "ah, time to take this up the road to my friend's commercial studio to take advantage of their room, mic selection and preamps", the room has turned around and utterly surprised me with how good it's sounded! Control room wise, it just works for the sound. I've mixed and mastered a lot of material in here - and yes, I'm aware that mastering in the same place you mix isn't usually a good idea - and it's all came up sounding great. All world-class. I'm getting great flexibility with the computer set up I have here: 1 laptop for web/mail/general use, 1 computer for audio recording with two screens, and one computer for video/graphics work with one of the two screens being the main TV monitor that is great for previewing video or acting as a video link between the control room and live room. Soundproofing-wise, it's fantastic. I can record well into the night and no one complains. You can barely hear anything outside at all, and even doing drums at 3am sounds like someone tapping in another room when you're directly above the studio upstairs. Very, very cool! And the bad? Well, the control room is simply too small. The ceilings are too low for my liking too, but the room is the big thing. If I'm working by myself or one, maybe two people, it's fine, but the moment you add more than that, or they bring in their own keyboards on stands, or a few people want to play at once, it just gets VERY cramped. The aircon works, but sometimes it's a juggling act to get fresh air in here without it directing onto any particular person and they're freezing their ass off while the other people are generally OK. There wasn't a lot I could do about that with the budget we had, and the space restrictions though, and by and large, it works great when you have a couple of people in here anyway. Most of the time I don't have a problem. I do miss windows. It was gonna cost me a fortune, but as good as the video link has been, nothing can beat a nice big bit of glass between you and the talent for communication. Surprisingly, I also miss having a view outside! Our yard is nothing special and there's really no view to speak of, but there's something odd about wandering out of a studio at 4pm and finding yourself in a beautiful sunny day when you've been in an artificially lit, filtered air room all day. You really expect it to be 3am or something when you wander out, and it disconnects you entirely from the rest of the world. That can sometimes be good, but other times you really miss it! My console/interface here is doing the job too but the money I tried to save on it in the first place ended up biting me in the ass with a bit of a routing flexibility loss and ironically cost me the same as a the bigger console with better routing I was looking at, after I bought some extra gear to expand the number of inputs! D'OH! Oh well! The bottom line: Well, $50,000 later, what did we end up with? Pretty much a studio that is pumping out world class product that's released internationally! I think we're up to the 10th internationally released album now that's come out of here, a movie soundtrack (music album and actual movie mix itself), some stuff has ended up in the National Archives in Canberra and there's even talk of the UN wanting some stuff I've had a hand in producing! Clips played nationally, mainstream radio play... it goes on, and this year is looking like it's gonna eclipse even all of that if all goes to plan! The moral of the story here (aside from some blatant self-promotion! HAHA) is that what everyone is doing here with the help of some talented people on this forum, it's entirely possible to make your "little project studio" something very, very successful and release product that can compete with the best in the world if you know what you're doing. My studio here is nowhere near as ambitious as some (and I'm in awe of what you guys have created, seriously!) but it's done the job, and it's done it well, and I have no doubt each of you who are doing this crazy thing that I started years ago will get something amazing out of your project too! Right then, so here's some stuff that was done here: My band's latest album, Set In Stone is the obvious starting spot. It's been smashed across both Australia and Japan and features tracks that have been released world wide. Some songs have been played on mainstream radio too: http://www.lord.net.au/sis You can check out the making of Set In Stone here in our recording diaries where you can see the studio actually being used: http://www.youtube.com/user/LORDofficia ... A9DF626BD8 We also have the first of several clips that are about to be released by us that were entirely cut together here in the studio too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZY45hIrPM And for a laugh while we're on our YouTube channel, here's a link to a version of the Doctor Who theme I did one day when I was bored, which shows off exactly how much I deserve a wedgie! HAHA! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvL9Qkgub9E Another interesting project has been a thing called The Oz Dream that was nearly Australian Song Of The Year in 1987 but I was commissioned to redo it. It's since been released and as I mentioned earlier, it's now in the National Archives. Pretty cool - orchestrations, opera singers, you name it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlGmULH5e8 Predominately, we do metal here, and mostly extreme metal. I've done tracking for well known Australian metal bands Nazxul, Lycanthia, Austere, Fury (who have all had great success internationally with the material we did here) and a killer punk band that I was a part of for a while called Platinum Brunette: http://www.platinumbrunette.com.au/ The latest stuff has been a Croatian band called Angels that do melodic rock: http://www.myspace.com/angelsrocktheworld A dark, moody rock/alternative project called Grey Waters: http://www.myspace.com/greywatersband And a depressive black metal band called Woods Of Desolation: http://www.myspace.com/woodsofdesolation Lots more in the works too, so if you guys don't mind, I'll check back every now and then and add some to the list here so you can see how I'm all traveling. Thanks for reading this, everyone, and all the very best with your own projects! Now go be amazing! :D