Vertustudio

Entrance doors. The threshold on the bottom of the frame is standard issue; the other one had to be sliced so that they could be installed back-to-back. Debra installed three layers of weather stripping. Now the stripping is even with the thresholds. Debra used the exact same methods and materials to make the inlays between the studs as she used to make the window dressing. Page back to see how she did it. All three of the doors in the studio got the recommended three coats of Minwax high gloss polyurethane—this was a grueling round of work, but I had some time on my hands while waiting for some other stuff to get done so I did it. I guess I’m glad I did, but I feel like I lost a few brain cells in the process. The studs got two coats after which I rubbed them out with automobile rubbing compound. Great for the wood (makes it super-smooth), but I got some smeared on the door seals and this was a real problem, as the compound got stuck in the super-fine texture of the strips and believe me when I say it was hell to get off—a whole night wasted, repeatedly scrubbing the seals with various detergents on a toothbrush until we got it all off. Mo' Mo' MO! Later,

Wow, that looks great! Nice job!

Your finishing touches are a true inspiration.

What is the material you have to buffer the two door frames with? It's a beige material -

Thanks for the compliments, Cram! Debra and I really appreciate that... Fabrics / Color Palette. The fabric wrapped duct foam inserted between windows and door jambs is an upholstery fabric by Mill Creek Fashions. It was an expensive designer fabric but Debra found it as a large quantity remnant 50% off, so it may be a discontinued print. It's a heavy material similar to cotton duct. All the fabrics that Debra picked for the studio are upholstery fabrics that will hold up to stretching, with a nice subtle texture implied or actual. They’re acoustically transparent enough. Our color choices always refer back to the warm wood tones and off-white/green paint colors. I moved in all my gear over the weekend! :wink: Mo' Mo',

Thanks for the laugh on that last photo. :) Edit note: I just noticed that you're from Wisconsin. I was born and raised there...spent some 30 years on the South Side of Milwaukee. So, ya gotta know I'm super curious where "yousguys" are located...I stop by every 5 years or so and I'd love to tour the finished product.

Nice monitors! You should take a break after the move-in. Don't want to break a hip or anything before your 1st session. In fact Radio Shack is having a mic sale... :lol: Cant wait to see the place in person!!!

Drumdrumdrumdrum wrote:

Your finishing touches are a true inspiration.

Thanks a bunch! We love hearing these nice comments. We totally need inspiration right now...this morning the carpenter dropped off 20 frames that need stuffing and wrapping...yikes! I just wanna make some music! Thanks so much, Mike & Debra

wooaaaahhh that the new Circuit Bent John Hardy pre? looks to me like your monitors are sitting in a node...

DCinFrance wrote:

Thanks for the laugh on that last photo. :) Edit note: I just noticed that you're from Wisconsin. I was born and raised there...spent some 30 years on the South Side of Milwaukee. So, ya gotta know I'm super curious where "yousguys" are located...I stop by every 5 years or so and I'd love to tour the finished product.

SE side of Madison. Nice quiet place in the country - yet another reason why I shouldn't have bought that QuietRock. C'mon over and have a nice cold pop! :D

My panels arrived! I’m glad I won’t need to solder ‘em. This is the main reason why I didn’t do staggered panels. I know, I’m lazy. I’ll go to Radio Shack and pick up ¼”-to-RCA adaptors and plug the holes I’m not actually using, to help keep the sound in the hole. I’ll also insulate the hole with something and post pictures of what I do later. Page back to see a diagram showing what the jacks are for if you're interested. Remind me to have my head examined if I ever run out of lines in my little iso room! 15 balanced lines are probably twice as many as I’ll ever be able to use in there. Mostly, I’ll be using this to run speaker lines to amp cabinets while I fiddle around in the control room with amp heads and guitars and stomp boxes and stuff. Here’s one of the reasons why I wanted to bail out of the soldering. Anybody wanna come over and help me wrap some panels? Seriously! Dang, this is gonna be a long haul. When I saw all these frames lined up I just thought to myself, "Now you’re in too deep, Mr. Studiowannabe!" Mo’ Deeper,

Vert, Wow those are very nice!! You can never...I repeat never have to many AC plugs or balanced inputs. You might be surprised the day you fill them all up and say whow I just made it work. Congrats on the nice build Question....how did you fill the cavity behind the panels between rooms. Peace Tom And FYI I would rather wrap panels all day instead of solder for an hour :o

I've following this for a while and never felt the right time to say this: Great stuff! Andre

AVare wrote:

I've following this for a while and never felt the right time to say this: Great stuff! Andre

Well hell, it’s about time, Andre! It must be the wall panels that tripped yr trigger, eh? There’s something special about the magical studio wall panels in every studio…kinda substitutes for that space capsule dash board we dreamed of commanding as little kids. Man, I love this stuff. I must say, screwing that panel in there kind of switched on the light at the end of the tunnel for me on this project. Does that mean you’re gonna come over and help me wrap those frames? :wink: Nice Weekends,

TomVan wrote:

Vert, Question....how did you fill the cavity behind the panels between rooms. Peace Tom And FYI I would rather wrap panels all day instead of solder for an hour :o

Hey Tom, I'll post pictures of the cavity later. Last night I glued some duct liner in there - leftovers of the same stuff that we used in the window and door frames. Really fine stuff, I don't even know what it's called, my contractor brought it over and left it here and he doesn't know what it's called either - somebody just dropped it on him at a store. I need to find out what that material is called, it has a totally groovy, spongy texture. I came just a few square inches shy of being able to line the walls of the whole cavity. I also laid a bead of acoustical sealant around the inside edge where the panel meets the wall. Debra and I are figuring out what to stuff the cavity with (foam pellets? cotton balls?). We're snowed in again today so no shopping expedition, rats. Happy Happy,

Out of curiosity, in regards to your custom window...did you get the blue prints for it from the SAE site, or was it a custom design you came up with? Also, did you save money going this route, or was it about the same price of having one factory built? Thanks! And the whole thing looks truly impressive.

EC_Beast29 wrote:

Out of curiosity, in regards to your custom window...did you get the blue prints for it from the SAE site, or was it a custom design you came up with? Also, did you save money going this route, or was it about the same price of having one factory built? Thanks! And the whole thing looks truly impressive.

Hi, wow thanks so much. My contractor built that window. I bought him a copy of Rod’s book, opened it to the window page and said, “Here, build me one of these bad boys.” What he built is very close to the drawing in Rod’s book. Saving money? Hell, I’m bleeding money and it won't stop. That said, these factory-built solutions are no doubt excellent but would probably cost more than having a local guy come in and build you something – especially in George W. Bush's disaster economy; depending on where you are, you can get labor dirt cheap I would imagine. Here in Madison it’s not as slumpy as elsewhere because Madison is a decadent liberal oasis and a bastion of the Great Satan :twisted: (LOVE that devil emoticon!), so of course lot of people are always moving in and building little dens of iniquity. I’m not exactly sure what the window cost was because it’s rolled into my contract which is not like a line item thing, more like just a list of what I’m getting and a single bottom line cost which is probably too much. :wink: When I bought Rod’s book for my contractor, he was in the middle of building a house for somebody, so he had a few months to read it. He always had it with him when he came over for tea, and he had it marked up and stuff, so I figure he was paying attention. This whole project is coming off good, but of course there will be a list of ‘coulda/shoulda’ items that I’ll write down after everything is set up. Thanks again!

Finishing off the wall panel. Debra plugged in the USB, FireWire, and network cables and tied them in with the rest of the wiring. I ran a bead of acoustical sealant around the inside of the frame. Then we glued in some duct liner and other bits of foam that were lying around – all leftovers. Debra cut a piece of foam to lay over the jacks on the control room side. We stuffed the hole with cotton batting. We put another piece of foam over the batting. We applied sealant between the plate and the wall. All done! Hope it works! We'll find out soon enough... Have a good one,

NICE 8)

This 02R desk is not really my cuppa tea. Anybody want it?

After we installed the pass-through panels, I began slowly and deliberately polishing stuff up and moving it into the space. A lot of old gear never made it back in—liberating myself from that junk was sublime. Here’s what the control room looks like at the moment. This is basically an 80+ channel lightpipe/analog setup that’s perfect for music composition and tracking pristine hi-fi mono or stereo passes (through one high quality stereo recording channel). To the left of the 02R console is another digital mixer (01V, covered at the moment), and to the right, an additional DAW system (MOTU 828 / laptop in for repairs) that functions as a virtual instrument farm that I address via MIDI. An assortment of guitar gear can be seen on the far left; I’ll be running speaker cabs in the iso room and playing LOTS of guitar at the board (down with amp simulators!). The new rug is a cosmic beauty that Debra picked up at a T.J. Maxx for $300, proving that it pays to shop around. The only new gear in this picture: the KRK VXT8 monitors. I’ve always liked KRK speakers. They’re especially nice for people like me who spend lots of time composing and tweaking, because they have a pleasantly elastic sound that I find to be ‘motivating’ or ‘stimulating’. I can stay interested pretty much endlessly working through these. The VXT8s LOVE being cranked! Before I got ‘em, I thought I was going to need to get a pair of Primacoustic Recoil Stabilizers to put them on, and I still might do that (Anybody have any comments on these?). However, the VXTs, with their dual-wall cabinets and the thick pads on their bottoms, actually vibrate my console LESS than my little Finnish Pro-X monitors (very nice) sitting there next to the KRKs. That was surprising. I like how the KRKs interact with my 32 sq. ft. ceiling cloud (made of 703)—while the KRKs have that characteristic pleasant, kind of ‘rubbery’ zing to ‘em, the cloud just DRINKS UP an enormous amount of their sound, which helps to stiffen it up and dry it out. So the KRKs and the cloud work well together to provide a vibrant and exciting sound that’s still clinical enough to engineer with. Other things I like about the KRKs are the muting system (shuts down the power stage when you walk away); being able to power up and down w/o popping, and oh yea, those little logo lights on the front. :D Really cool. I can’t think of a better value in the price range ($1,200/pair). I couldn’t imagine using a larger monitor in this space. An engineer buddy of mine stopped by for an extended music listening session. He owns a pair of the elite KRK Exposé E8Bs. He said that the VXT8s sound similar, except that the Exposé E8B’s soundstage is ‘about five times as deep’, which makes sense considering that the Exposé E8Bs are about five times the price of the VXT8s! As for the VXT8’s imaging, the jury is still out because I don’t have my sidewall treatments in, and I only have a few panels of raw 703 propped up behind me right now. Even in spite of that, I like what I hear, even at low levels. Old jazz recordings are especially interesting to listen to at low levels in the mix position—I’m hearing new things in the soundstage all the time on classic Miles and Coltrane stuff. After the room treatments are up I’m sure it’ll sound even better. So I’m 90% set up in the space and getting busy already. I’ve been jamming out on some heavy dub music (reggae sounds INCREDIBLE on the KRKs—I’ve never heard Family Man sound punchier) and kicking those KRKs deep into the night while Debra sleeps peacefully—sometimes she can hear muffled thuds, like a very distant tribal thunder, heh. Joy! There are a few room-related (not speaker-related) problems: there’s at least one frequency at which the bass pretty much disappears. Backing away from the mix position takes you under the ductwork soffit, where the bass blooms – not good, especially with the big KRKs in play. I’ll get the whole story after I put all my wall panels up. I *knew* that soffit was going to be a sonic drag. The KRK’s big sound really highlights the issues. There’s probably no correcting the soffit issue, which would actually be a client’s listening position if there were a sofa there (there’s not). I’ll be tweaking on that though and we’ll see what happens. Any advice is appreciated. These are great. If you have heavy stuff on casters, try these! I can easily slide my console furniture around on these and not chew up the new floor. The weight of that console would dig huge pits in my new Bruce floor if I just let it sit on the casters… I’ll be putting up more pictures of the treatments as we install ‘em. Right now, I’m busy makin’ noise down there… Mo’ Later,

Hey Mike, that window behind the monitors...what did you build it for, really? ;)

That’s funny, I recently asked Debra why I did that. That furniture console is a bane. Just give me a door on a pair of saw horses. I almost got a hernia pluggin' stuff in back there. The place where the computer is is fan-cooled, but the fan makes more noise than the computer. It’s nice to have some natural light come in down there during the day though, even if I’m never down there during the day. What was the question? Oh yea. Well, I might like to run the computer from the iso room. I can swing the monitor around on its arm (I have it mounted on one of those fancy mounts 'n' more mounts) and have a keyboard and mouse in the other room. I already have the jack panel sockets for that. It’ll be nice when I feel like having the electric guitar close to the speaker to get feedback.

It looks like 50% of your window is gone with all the stuff in the way :shock:

Alright, let's settle this controversial window issue. :wink: I needed a bit more slack on my VGA connection, so I purchased this rotatable thingie. Not that this was really necessary, but what the heck. Here's the monitor position that I typically use for editing. In this mode, I'm not too concerned about seeing into the iso room. This position allows me to see better into iso. If I just get up offa my chair a little, I can see everything in the room. Here's the (hopefully) fun part - being able to run the DAW from inside the iso room, so I can be closer to the speaker cabs, if that's where I want to be while I'm recording guitar parts. I haven't tried this yet, but I will soon. I already have the USB connection on my pass-through panel. I still need to get the extra keyboard and mouse, and a (standing position) table to put it on, maybe I'll need to get a USB amplifier - whatever it takes... Mo' Later,