studioporn

Posted by Len at 06:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ordered a couple more books today to try and absorb more information before i begin construction:

home recording studio: build it like the pros by rod gervais

building a recording studio by jeff cooper

rod is a regular on the forum and always has really good advice on stuff. i've heard many positive things about the cooper book as well.

Posted by Len at 06:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

started today on our first truly non-destructive mod to the house. we filled in the gap in the floor where the fireplace was.

this was the first time i worked with concrete, so it was a crash course in mixing and pouring, screeding, floating and all that fun stuff. probably wasn't the best area on which to learn this stuff, given that it's triangular, in a corner, and what with having to use the existing floor as the screed surface, there was no place for the excess to fall off. on top of that, in hindsight it appears that i bought the wrong float for the job (hand float instead of a bull float). end result: the finish is insanely lumpy. probably not too big a deal, since it appears to be mostly cosmetic and i'll be pouring leveler across the entire floor anway. i'll confirm with the mason tomorrow when he comes to get the rest of his stuff.

there's still one problem with the area around the fireplace that will need to be dealt with eventually. there's a fair amount of water buildup inside the base of the wall where the chimney is. when the area under the fireplace was fully excavated, there was a fair amount of water seeping in and pooling there. it doesn't seem to be as bad now that i've filled in this space, but i can still see a bunch of wetness in the first 2 rows of block. this has probably been like this for quite some time, but the thickness of all the fireplace layers helped mask the problem. i'm going to seal it as best i can once the concrete cures, but i think we might eventually have to put in a french drain. before we do that, though, i want to investigate the possibility of reworking the slope along the side of the house to try and divert water towards the back of the house. right now, there's a bit of a depression right around where the chimney is, plus the neighbors' yard is a higher elevation than ours, so everything heads in that direction when it rains.

Posted by Len at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i want to decorate the lounge area in an interesting way. this space is going to ultimately have a book/video library, a tv/dvd/tivo, and a fridge and microwave and all that fun stuff. oh, and seating, of course. i'm thinking of covering the walls with the cheesiest band posters i can find. you know, like those old maiden posters and shit. what do y'all think?

i've been having this idea for a while now, but it was further reinforced today when we were tearing down some old shelving in the garage and came across this:

Posted by Len at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

woohoo! the destruction phase is now complete. we ripped out the bathroom sink, the skanky-ass toilet, the 300-pound utility sink, the kitchen cooktop and oven, and a whole bunch of other odds and ends. al came over to fetch most of his masonry stuff and grab some of our unwanted copper and aluminum to take off and recycle. i am still amazed at how quickly one can fill up a dumpster.

i brought my dehumidifier over to the house last night. the basement is extremely damp, a combination of the humidity and the fact that water has been tossed everywhere during the tile removal and all that. wet footprints would stay wet for hours and hours and wet areas of the floor were staying like that for days. over the course of 12 hours, the dehumidifier sucked up about 2 gallons of water. it would've gotten even more had the tank not filled up. i emptied it again today and it's been running non-stop and the floors are finally drying up.

the bathroom is still smelling skanky. i found in the course of removing the toilet that it wasn't actually bolted to the floor. looked like the only thing holding it in place was residual glue from long-gone flooring. i have rags in all the exposed drains except for the shower drain--hopefully this will be sufficient until we install the new fixtures. once the floor finishes drying, i'm going to sweep up the rest of the debris and give this whole area a good cleaning to see if that helps with the odor. but i still need to see about sealing off the old shower drain, plus i need to have the drain pipe coming down from the kitchen above checked out--it's looking rather funky right around the floor area. part of me wonders whether we shouldn't have all the DWV assemblies checked out just to make sure there aren't any problems or vent clogging or anything like that.

Posted by Len at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

woohoo! after pulling up about 350 or so tiles today, all of the floor tile is outta there. of course, the subfloor underneath is mostly black, so i'm now dealing with a room where the floor and half the walls are all black. it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. none more black. fortunately, there's nothing more to remove from this room now other than the door frame and the drain pipe stub from where the bar was, so things can only get lighter from here on out.

i need to go back this weekend and rip out the bathroom fixtures and utility sink, after which point the destruction will be essentially done and i can switch to focusing on building things back up.

Posted by Len at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i'm just about to the point where i'm ready to order all the main building material for the studio.. here's how it's looking thusfar:

63 sheets of 5/8" drywall
70 2x4's
25 pieces of resilient channel
250 pounds of drywall compound
700 feet of joint tape
1200 drywall screws
??? insulation ???
6 door frames
6 solid core slabs

Posted by Len at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

here's the last picture i took of the remains of the fireplace before al started working on it:

here's how it looks now with the walls all sealed up and all:

all that's left for the fireplace is filling in the floor.

Posted by Len at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

al finished filling in the cavity between the removed fireplace and the chimney. woohoo! i think all that's left is sealing off the flues at the top of the chimney and removing the leftover bricks and block.

dumpster #3 is being delivered tomorrow. this will be a small dumpster which i'm going to use for disposing of the remaining floor tile, the disgusting sink and toilet in the bathroom, any remaining masonry stuff, a whole bunch of shit that's been piling up in the garage, and possibly the old stove and oven upstairs if no one bids on my ebay listing for them.

speaking of floor tile, i had one of those caveman-learns-to-use-tools moments today. i've bitched before about what a pain in the ass it is ripping out floor tile with a floor scraper, especially one that isn't designed to let you thrust it with your foot. well, i decided to try pounding the hell out of the tiles with my hand sledge, and then use the floor scraper on them. this worked beautifully. i was able to cut the time probably in half--i removed about 100 tiles in under an hour. only problem is, the tile fragments go flying everywhere when you whack them like this. if you're thinking about trying this technique, wearing full wraparound eye protection is an absolute must.

Posted by Len at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

made some minor tweaks to design #2. my main concern was that one of the vocal booth walls was angled straight towards the mix position and might provide some imaging problems. i decided to angle it a little further away and tentatively work in some non-private glass block in place of a window to give line-of-sight to the mix and nearby area if need be. glass block has a pretty high STC rating, plus it looks cool. i also removed the space allocation for the secondary HVAC stuff. this will give more space back to the lounge area.

Posted by Len at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i just got back from pianos n'at with a copy of synthogy's ivory acoustic piano library. it has samples for 3 of the most famous grand pianos out there: yamaha c7, steinway model d, and the bosendorfer 290 imperial grand (this is the 97-note model that tori amos is always humping).

this library is HUGE. it came on 10 dvds and is going to take me on the order of 2-3 hours to install at the current rate. it's about 30 gigs of samples in all.

i've heard some good things about this library, and if nothing else it'll give me a better arsenal of piano sounds than the 2 gigastudio pianos i currently have. one problem i have with both of those is that they don't have enough velocity layers and the transitions from one layer to another are really uneven. hopefully it won't be a problem with this set; it has 10 velocity layers

they also provide separate samples for soft-pedal playing. i don't think i've encountered any other sample libraries that have that. you can also adjust the level of mechanical noise coming from the pedals and hammers and all. not strictly necessary, but useful nonetheless when you need to inject a little bit of character in the sound.

now if only my piano-playing ability weren't frozen in 1988. whenever i sit down at the piano the only thing my fingers can do is play richard marx.

Posted by Len at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i picked up this table saw today:

this is really going to come in handy when i do the framing, as the non-parallel walls are going to require lots of miter and bevel cuts. i'm normally not a big fan of ryobi's products, but this is a pretty decent unit and the price was great, too.

i gave it a test drive by cutting a piece of MDF to fix a cabinet in our current house. don't worry, i didn't have any emo philips incidents. it really shined on the rip cut, but it had a little more trouble with cross cuts. i cut a total of 3 boards, and on all 3 it either kicked back about 1/4" before finishing the cut, or threw the short side of the cut back about 4-5 feet. this may have been because i wasn't using any sort of push stick to gide the short side of the cut along--i'll do that next time.

Posted by Len at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

pretty early on in the planning phase, i made the decision to put the studio on a separate HVAC system from the rest of the house. this would keep studio noise from travelling to the rest of the house and would also allow me better control over temperature conditions in the studio.

this is turning out to be a huge pain in the ass.

since a soundproofed room when closed is essentially airproofed as well, it's imperative to bring fresh air into the room to prevent musicians from passing out. but since the room is so sealed, you need to exhaust some of the return in order to maintain proper air pressure within the space. this is doable with some larger systems, but it's really hard to find conventional split systems for spaces as small as this, and probably even harder to work fresh air and balancing into the equation with them. lots of people have been talking about the mitsubishi mini-split, which requires no ductwork and is supposed to be sufficiently quiet that one can have it running while recording. however, the major drawback of these units is that no one has been able to find one that has a fresh air intake.

most of the other options i've seen people pursuing for spaces this size involve portable and/or window units. one common guerilla tactic is to put a window a/c in a really tiny room, chill the hell out of it, and run ductwork from there to the studio space. this isn't really feasible in my situation for a number of reasons, plus it's basically just a hack job.

then there's the whole issue of needing to maintain humidity in the 45-50% range year-round.

so all in all, it's sounding like it's going to cost an insane amount of money to do perfect climate control in the space, and i'm not entirely convinced yet that the benefits would be enough to justify the cost. i've decided to take a gamble with using the existing system in the house, with appropriate treatments to make it more studio-friendly.

for starters, all ductwork coming into the space is going to have to be insulated to reduce vibration. i might have them do flex duct as this helps even more with that. the ductwork will need to be oversized in order to help slow down the velocity, and will have to have more than 180 degrees' worth of turns. i'll also need to get a humidifier into the air handler, but that'll help the house as a whole--i hate waking up in the middle of the night during the winter feeling like i've been sleeping in a dehydrator.

Posted by Len at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

here's some info about self-leveling concrete: http://www.quikrete.com/diy/PreparingSurfacesforCarpetResilientFlooringandTile.html.

it's basically a very watery concrete mixture designed to be poured onto the floor and flow freely until it finds its level and bond to the concrete underneath. i'm going to use this to level out all the unevenness of the concrete slab before doing any flooring.

Posted by Len at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

al the mason is working on finishing up the fireplace/flue removal and sealing up the giant cavity between the exterior wall and the chimney that had been created when they built the fireplace and was then packed with filler. since i have very minimal experience with masonry in general and chimneys in particular, i wanted to get someone with more clue than me to deal with this part of it.

al's also going to take all the remaining bricks off our hands (yay!).

once the fireplace stuff is done, i'm going to turn my attention back to the floor. anyone wanna come over this weekend and help with floor tile removal?

Posted by Len at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

some things have been bugging me about the first studio design for a few weeks now--all the HVAC stuff is in the furthest corner of the house, there's a lot of dead space and awkward space, there'd be inadequate space for moving in and out of the vocal booth once the console and monitors are in place, and the main room seems a bit small.

i've been struggling with this for about a week now and i've made some changes and compromises to arrive at this design:

pros:

• more cubic footage in the main room


• easier access to vocal booth


• HVAC stuff now over by existing furnace and more detached from studio space


• 2 fewer doors


• less strict adherence to room-within-a-room design gives more simplicity and flexibility to the vocal booth and storage room


• better use of space


• not having to worry about the sliding glass door in front of the console means i can soffit-mount the main monitor speakers, as shown in the plan. (oh, in case you're wondering about the dotted lines going from the speakers to the chair, those are guide lines for speaker and listener placement. basically, these 3 need to form an equilateral triangle for optimum listening.)

cons:

• room dimensions are not ideal in terms of minimizing room mode problems (L > 3*H). i've heard mixed opinions on how problematic this might be. some people say that for small (for a studio) rooms like this, it's more important to increase room volume than to get the perfect ratios. other people would say split it off into 2 separate rooms, which will allow getting more ideal ratios for each room. my take on this is that the laid-back-ness and big-ness of the 1-room design are what are most important to me and i'll deal with any room mode problems as best i can once the space is built and start doing room analysis and tuning.


• main room is no longer symmetric. this is a bonus for tracking, but for control room purposes it's imperative to have left-right symmetry in the mixing position so that you get proper stereo imaging. i've maintained the symmetry as far back as i could given the other constraints. not ideal, but given the constraints of the space i think this is a reasonable compromise.


• no more line-of-site from the desk to the vocal booth. i've been toying with the idea of installing a window on the booth wall that faces the desk. it's kind of suboptimal having all musicians behind me when recording, but on the other hand i really don't like staring at people when they're recording and under the microscope enough as it is.


• storage room is now a double-captive room. i'm in the process of trying to determine whether this violates any building code. probably not, since it's essentially a closet. worst case, i can move the door to go into the main room, but this will violate L-R symmetry in the mix area.


• less adherence to room-within-a-room wall framing means the soundproofing won't be quite as effective. but as with many other things in this space, i've decided to stop pursuing "perfect" and be content with "good enough".
  

Posted by Len at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

in preparation for the eventual move, i've decided to part with some music gear i don't use anymore. i figured i'd give you all first dibs...

rapco 100' 16-channel snake with 4 returns: $50

mackie 1604 vlz pro 16-channel mixer: $250 (note: last time i used this, i noticed one of the channels on the main mix buss was on the fritz. i suspect it's the standard mackie ribbon cable problem, but since i never use this anymore i never got around to getting it fixed)

oud #1: $75

oud #2: $200. this one's a real beauty with some incredible inlay work. one of the strings buzzes a bit (bridge problem, if memory serves correct) but other than that it plays well.

if your'e thinking about buying either of the ouds, be forewarned that these are very primitive instruments and are very picky about things like humidity. the drier you can keep them, the better. they are notoriously bad about staying in tune, although you can stiffen up the tuning pegs with bow rosin to reduce slippage. but if you're able and willing to be patient with them, you'll be rewarded with a really nice tone.

Posted by Len at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

things are in a bit of a lull with studio construction right now while i deal with other things in life. but in other studio news i picked up a copy of native instruments electric piano to get some rhodes and wurly sounds for one of the projects i'm working on right now. haven't tried it out yet, but if it's anything like all the other native instruments stuff i've purchased, it won't disappoint.

Posted by Len at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i pulled into the home depot parking lot this evening and my car started shaking like crazy. initially i was like, wtf? and then i realized that it was a person who was rocking my back bumper. i first i thought it was one of the hizzy depot parking lot panhandlers being a little more crazy than usual, but it turned out to be mo.

he informed me that the woman working the cash register in the tool department was named "ninja." i figured this was just another case of mo confusing surrealist poetry with reality. but i ended up buying a heat gun in the tool department and sure enough, the woman working the cash register was wearing a home depot apron which said "ninja."

right around the time i was thinking "wow, that's kinda random," this older guy walked by and asked her, "how are your exams going?" to which she replied, "great! i got an A in funeral." that statement seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense to him than it did to me. i'm not making this up, and i was fully awake and (mostly) sober when this all occured.

so anyway, i got some more destruction work done tonight. still convinced i could remove the rest of the fireplace bricks without having to resort to pneumatic tools and/or explosives, i grabbed the hand sledge, cold chisel, pry bar, and circular saw. i very carefully chose the sequence of which bricks to remove when and used either the chisel or the circular saw to make enough of an opening between bricks to wedge the pry bar in. with the chisel, i really had to pound the hell out of it to get through that fireclay mortar. there were a few cases where i wasn't getting anywhere at all after pounding like crazy; i resorted to the circular saw in those cases. as long as i made the right decision of which brick to remove next, things went pretty smoothly. i got essentially all of the upper layer of brick out. since the top of the lower layer of brick is only a fraction of an inch above the basement subfloor, i'm somewhat inclined to just let that be, especially since i'm going to have to level out the whole floor anyway (more on that in a sec).

i turned my attention to the floor tiles. i have to be a little bit careful with these since the mastic used to bond them to the floor is about 12% asbestos. that actually sounds worse than it really is--since the material containing the asbestos is non-friable, it's really quite safe to deal with and it can even be disposed of normally rather than having to go through all the special asbestos disposal procedures.

taking the advice of the asbestos contractor i had out there a while back as well as general hazmat removal common sense, i'm wetting the tiles to be removed in order to keep any dust-kicking to a minimum, and then attacking them like crazy with a floor scraper. just to be extra safe, i'm wearing my heavy-duty respirator as well.

pulling up tiles with a scraper takes *forever*. one website i was reading recommended removing vinyl tiles by heating them with a heat gun and then prying them up with a putty knife. i got me a heat gun and tried this technique on a tile, but it took several orders of magnitude more forever to get up, so i just stuck with the scraper technique even though it's a pain in the ass and creates blisters in really weird locations on my hands. i managed to remove about 200 tiles before calling it a night, which means i have somewhere around 500 tiles left to remove.

one nice side effect of getting the floor all wet is it allowed me to get a feel for how level the floor is. which is to say not very. it's amazing how much things can settle over time. once i get all the tile up and fill in the excavated fireplace area with concrete, my plan is to hit the entire basement floor with self-leveling concrete to level the subfloor out so i can put down laminate flooring or something along those lines.

Posted by Len at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

since i had a break from the house tonight and since i'm tired of babbling on about house destruction, i figured i'd take a break tonight and talk about gear instead.

i slapped down close to $2k last year on an avalon 737 preamp. like so many others, i eventually came to the conclusion that these things are just overhyped and overpriced pieces of shit and i don't even bother turning mine on anymore. so i've been in the market for some better (and, ideally, less expensive) preamps.

last month i got a summit audio 2BA-221 preamp:

i've been using this on a couple of projects and have been digging it thusfar. it tends to pick up much more ambiance than my other pres. it sounds really nice with female vox on both my AT 4060 and Rode K2. i ran a snare mic through it on one session and was caught a little off-guard by how smooth the transients sounded and how much ambiance it picked up. i need to do a few more sessions with this on snare before forming an opinion on that particular snare sound.

my only real gripes are that the headroom is kinda limited, and there's no meter, just signal/nominal/clip LEDs. i find i need to ride the level pretty often, especially for vocals.

i'll probably get a second one of these eventually, but i think my next preamp purchase will be a great river mp-2nv, once i can convince myself to pony up the $2k for it:

Posted by Len at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i never thought i'd define the bane of my existence as 2 layers of brick, but goddamn, the bane of my existence right now is the 2 layers of brick that were underneath the fireplace. some combination of fireplace heat, really thin mortar layers, mud, and god only knows what else, has caused all the bricks to essentially fuse together to the point where it's actually easier to chip away at the brick than the mortar. it's insane--i get one brick out and i'm so exhausted from the ordeal i have to take a break. it can take a ridiculous amount of pounding just to get the chisel halfway through the joint.

i picked up a mason blade for my circular saw today. it cuts through the mortar, but it kicks up a hell of a lot of dust in the process and in the end it doesn't really buy much because it barely cuts to the bottom of the top brick layer, and wedging a pry bar in there doesn't do much good at all as the bricks are still fused to the layer underneath and will not budge. i've had only limited luck thusfar being able to get in underneath the bottom layer and pry up from there. i was able to do that for a couple of bricks on the far left, but the general structure of things precluded me from continuing this technique as i moved to towards the right.

i'm busy recording tomorrow, but i'm going to attack things again on wednesday. i may round up a few people to come brainstorm on ways to attack this problem. i almost bought an air hammer and compressor today, but talked myself out of it. after tonight's utter lack of progress, i may revisit that idea. especially if i could manage to position the hammer such that i could hit things from the side break up the joints between the 2 layers.

Posted by Len at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)