studioporn

after getting the whole-house dehumidifier installed last year, i've been kind of dragging my ass on buying/installing a whole-house humidifier. i finally bought one about a month ago but didn't get around to installing it until this past week when temperatures dropped and the humidity in the studio got as low as 26% (ack!).

the humidifier i got isn't anything terribly special...just one of those whole-house drum humidifiers you can pick up at home depot. the unit itself is pretty decent, but it was a pain in the ass to install and the whole process was kind of kludgy. it took a little while for it to start working its magic, but after about 3 days the humidity levels are pretty stably about 10% higher throughout the house. i still need to tweak things to get the studio a few % points higher, but overall things are looking good.

my goal is to have the humidity in the house be between 40-50% year round. for the studio this is mainly to help wood instruments behave well, but i also want the humidity controlled in the rest of the house for comfort/health reasons. nothing i hate more than waking up in the middle of the night in the winter feeling like every drop of moisture has been sucked out of me.

when springtime rolls around i'm going to confront the dehumidifier situation again. i'm still really pissed at the way they installed this thing and i believe it's running very inefficiently as a result. in places with both heating and air conditioning, you're always supposed to do any dehumidification before the evaporator coil and any humidification after the furnace. the reason for doing humidification after the furnace is that the increased temperature enables the air to hold more moisture, and the very process of passing air through the furnace drops the relative humidity significantly.

as for dehumidifying before the evaporator coil, i've learned the hard way why this is important. dehumidifiers are self-contained refrigeration cycles--air passes over an evaporator coil where it is cooled significantly, which causes excess moisture to condense and get drained out. then it passes through a condensor coil, which causes it to heat back up. i discovered this summer that the air coming out of our dehumidifier is actually several degrees warmer than the air going in, and since the output of the dehumidifier was tapped into the supply line, that warmer air was just circulating through the house and making the a/c work harder. when spring comes around i'm going to switch it over to the return so that all of the output from the dehumidifier passes through the a/c evaporator coil before going anywhere else. that should also provide better dispersion of the dehumidified air throughout the house--in the current set up, because of where the dehumidifier is tapped into the supply trunk, one end of the house and part of the studio barely get any direct delivery of dehumidified air.

Posted by Len at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

finally installed the laminate flooring this weekend. it looks awesome--really adds a lot of warmth to the room:

overall it was pretty easy to install. the only tricky part was the dealing with all the weird wall angles. it was sometimes difficult to accurately measure the angle and transfer it to the piece i was cutting--a couple of pieces i had to do sort of by trial and error and mess up a few cuts until i got it right.

it's amazing how much of a difference the flooring made. it completely changes the vibe of the room and brightens it up a lot since i no longer have that dismal, gray, concrete slab thing going on.

Posted by Len at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i finished building the helmholtz resonator tonight. here are some photos of the process. first i built the frame out of 2x4s, then i put up some 1x2's on either side of the middle stud and secured straps at 2" deep to hold the insulation in place. then i cut the rigid insulation and put it in place. next came the fabric, which is there for no other purpose than to make the gaps between the slats look nice, and that's partly why the installation is so sloppy (the other reason is i was lacking a decent means of cutting this fabric, which is a pain to cut insofar as fabrics go). finally, i put the slats up after staining them...

the left-hand side of the resonator was an absolute bitch to do, owing to the really tight angle (24 degress on the inside, which meant having to cut everything at its complement of 66 degrees). since things that are capable of cutting/ripping at that angle are few and far between, i had to get creative. mostly it involved rotating the wood 90 degrees before putting it in the pathway of the saw. this sounds easy enough on paper, until you find yourself having to do things like stand a 3-foot piece of wood vertical and pass it along a table saw, or cut pretty much diagonally through a 2x4, which a standard 10" saw can't do. for the frame i had to do the rip cut using the band saw instead. which, as usual, came out very sloppy and i had to go back and plane the hell out of it. i finally got tired of planing and said, "fuck it, it's good enough."

this is what the angle cuts look like on the slats:

i had to pick up a tenoning jig so that i could secure the pieces vertically to run over the table saw. yet another semi-expensive tool that i wsh i didn't have to buy, but it did do an awesome job and if i ever do use it for making tenon joints in woodworking, it has all sorts of knobs and stuff to tweak it out the wazoo.

haven't done another round of room analysis yet, but i do know already that it is not helping with the ringing at 320Hz, or at least not significantly. after walking all around the room and singing that pitch, it sounds like there's only one particular area in the room where the sound energy at that frequency is disproportionately high, so i'm going to tackle the problem by building a smaller, wall-mount helmoltz to go on the wall in the middle of that area.

Posted by Len at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i set up a bare-bones recording setup so we can get moving on recording the rest of christa's songs while i continue building the studio. setup consists of a mic, pre, compressor, small mixer, computer audio interface, and monitors. here's a pic i snapped of the setup:

christa came over this afternoon and we laid down vox for a tune whose guitar part we recorded about a year ago. this was my first chance to do a serious recording in the room as well as being able to give my new great river preamp and RME audio interface a whirl.

the good:
i love the hardware and software interfaces for the RME stuff. they're much easier to work with than my delta 1010's. all the important stuff on the box (word clock, sync source, -10dBV/+4dBu switching, etc.) is accessible on the front panel. the software seems very well suited to handling multiple interfaces, and it's much nicer being able to return to hardware that'll let me have up to 3 interfaces per card rather than having to deal with the one-card-per-interface crap. the clip lights on the box are dope, especially since they kick in a few dB below 0 dBFS, allowing me time to quickly adjust levels before ruining an otherwise good take with digital clipping. other converters i've used either don't have any level lights on the box or the clip lights are of the "if you're seeing this, you're hosed" variety. oh, and of course the converters sound quite nice and are a welcome change from the slightly-harsher-sounding deltas.

the great river pre is...well...great. lots of headroom. christa's a very dynamic singer, and it was able to handle her full dynamic range without me having to be constantly riding the gain or really holding it back. the 6-segment level indicators are a great feature. the sound is great and very easy to work with, at least for vocals--haven't tried anything else yet.

while i was setting things up i was listening to a bunch of mixes, both my own and those on commercial cd's. i'm amazed at the bass response in the room. the bass traps have given an extremely tight and clear low end. i heard some things in my own mixes that i had never heard before and, remembering some of the challenges i had when mixing the low end on those songs in my old place, i had a few "ahhhh! so that's what i wasn't able to hear accurately" moments.

working on actual music in that room after spending a year doing almost nothing but construction work in that space was a very surreal experience. this is going to sound kinda hokey, but instead of having a sort of "i'm sitting here and here's a desk and there's a person over there singing" sense of distinction, i felt myself and everything around me to be more...idunno...liquid, i guess? the room, the equipment, the singing, me...it all just kind of fused together. it's weird having a space of my own where i don't feel like the room is the enemy of the sound. here the room really embraces the sound.

the bad:
those frequency response spikes in the room around 200-350Hz are quite noticeable--they show up when recording and are exacerbated on playback. i started building a helmholtz resonator yesterday but haven't finished it yet. i really hope that will help tame those frequencies, as that will be critical to getting good recordings and good monitoring.

the console desk sits about 6" too high for my liking. taking the casters off will help at least somewhat, but it still won't leave me at an optimal vantage point once i install the console. and i'm definitely going to have to remove those rack shelves along the very top and knock the overall height down to provide a single surface on which to place both of my computer monitors and aux monitor speakers.

i'm not overly thrilled with the speaker stands i got last week. the main reason i got them was so that i could set them slightly higher than 48" and then angle them down towards me with MoPADs. however, they get really wobbly under the weight of my mackies. the connection between the stand and the bass isn't quite what i would call strong. i need to play around with them for a bit in the coming days and see if i can make them more sturdier. once i get the desk height down i'll also be able to drop the monitor height several inches, which should help at least somewhat.

so overall i'm quite pleased so far, although there is still much much work left to be done.

Posted by Len at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after a bunch of searching, i've settled upon the following lights for the ceiling:

i think they look really dope, plus they're really slim--only 3.5" deep.

i'm also going to install 4 wall uplights throughout the room to help illuminate the ceiling and provide more general illuminance. choosing these is a bit trickier, seeing as how most wall lights are designed to be hard-wired, but i never had the walls wired for lighting, only the ceiling. i've read that at least some types of lighting can be converted from hard-wired to plug with the use of these kits you can buy at home depot and lowes. i'm gonna go check those out tomorrow and see if they'll work.

related to this, over the weekend i found a cool lighting estimator page from GE. actually, i found that page several months ago, but at the time wasn't sure how to use it since i wasn't versed in things like footcandles. but thanks to an email message from tommy last week with a bunch of useful lighting info, i got on the right track and rediscovered that page. the original, less-technical web page i found on this topic suggested an amount of lighting that was about half what GE's estimator says. which very conveniently matches up with my subjective observation that the room is only about half as bright as it should be.

i should clarify in all this talk about lighting that the amount of lighting for any given session will be completely flexible; the ceiling lights will be on a dimmer, and the wall lights will be individually switchable. i also have a floor torchiere i'll be putting over by the console.

Posted by Len at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i did a bunch more measurements today after installing the bass traps. below are the waterfall plots from 7 different mic locations in the room. here are the results from the original analaysis for comparison. frequency and dB ranges are the same, but be aware that the time scale is different. the traps have significantly decreased the reverb time of the room and brought it more in line with what would be appropriate for that size room. so the previous time scale went from 0-1000ms while the new one goes from 0-500ms.

the area around 60-70hz (particularly right around 60hz) has been MASSIVELY improved by the traps. the region just above 300Hz no longer rings out like it used to, but it could still stand to be tamed a bit with a helmholtz on the wall. there are still dips leading up to 100Hz, but they're not as bad as before. don't know what's up with the spikes @50hz. i need to look into both of those some more.

overall i'm extremely happy with what i'm seeing.

Posted by Len at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so the electricians have done nearly all of the work in the studio. the outlets are all wired and the lights are all in. all that remains to be done is to install the dimmers. i had to order some special dimmers that won't generate any interference when used. i ended up going with the lutron nova line of dimmers, which is what other studio peeps have been using when they don't want to go all hard core with a variac transformer. unfortunately, the dimmers are on backorder and i don't know yet when they're expected in. and i've learned this week that for some reason electricians have a real aversion to the color black for plugs and switches. jerry and dave tried repeatedly to talk me out of using black plugs and to use dark brown instead, but i stood my ground. and i'm glad i did, because black plugs in metal boxes with metal face plates is HAWT.

the booth sconces look fucking awesome:

the lights in the main room are a different story. the lighting is too directional, leading to problems with shadows and being blinded from intense brightness if you happen to be standing in the wrong place. the fixtures are also too domineering. when you walk into the room, your attention is pulled right towards them, and not in a good way. and overall, even though it's 800W of lighting total, it's still very dark in the room. michelle and i are going to spend some time this weekend exploring other lighting options. bah. i thought i was *finally* done with this crap. oh well, these things happen, no biggie.

in other electricity-gone-bad news, i received the RME PCI card today. it's actually a main card and a daughtercard, and the person i bought it from decided to put both cards in the same static bag when packing the box. this is generally a bad idea, and the damage the main card received as a result speaks to that. check out the damage it sustained.

Posted by Len at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

no, not the indie rock band, but the bass trap of the same name where you pile a corner from floor to ceiling with wedges of rigid insulation in order to smooth out a room's bass response. while disco was over this week cutting the insulation, i was building the frames for the two traps. here's how one of them looks (sorry for the shitty quality):

notice the access panel. in retrospect, i really should have put that panel somewhere else, but at the time it didn't seem like it would be a big issue to put it there. no biggie, i just had to make sure the trap dimensions were such that it completely covers the panel.

next came stacking all the wedges inside the frame:

note that the bottom 10 or so wedges are in two pieces. this is so if i ever have to get into that panel i can just pull out the small pieces in front of the panel and pop a short 2x4 or something in the corner to keep the pieces above propped up while i go into the wall.

here's how the wall looks with both traps installed. the pieces that disco cut are on the left. the pieces that i cut are on the right. you can kind of tell that my frame of mind was, "i don't care how these look, i just want to cut them as quickly as i possibly can").

eventually these bad boys will be covered in black fabric so they look all sleek and stuff. but the next step is to do another round of room analysis to see how much these have helped the low-frequency response problems.

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

lately i've been staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on the studio. but since the electricians are coming a little after 8, i figured i may as well just stay up all night and plow through a bunch of stuff.

disco came over tonight to help building the bass traps. he spent most of the evening cutting out wedge-shaped pieces of rigid insulation while i started building the frames. i'll try to have pix up tomorrow so everyone can see how i'm building them.

i built a new access panel to replace the one i messed up over the weekend. overall it turned out ok, but i'm still not thrilled with the way it's engaging the seal when closed. i made it 2" thick this time around instead of 2 1/4", which helped a bit, but i still can't get the panel to go flush with the jamb. i suspect i'll have to go back to my original plan of angling in the door edges so it tucks into the seal better. i had disco crawl into the access panel and then i closed it behind him and had him check for any light seepage. everything checked out there, but i'm still hearing a little more sound transmission through the panel than i'd like. i need to experiment with a few things to see if i can improve it. it's not like horrible or anything right now, i just think i could do better.

i'm almost done building the wooden boxes to encapsulate the lighting junction boxes and make the lighting assemblies look all nice. i just need to cut out the holes for the junction boxes and do a little more gluing and sanding and stuff and then they'll be ready to be painted.

on the mudding/taping front, everything is taped now. well, save for the outside corner on the iso booth bulkhead, but we won't talk about that. i'm typing this up while i wait for the most recent mud coat in the vox booth to dry so i can slap on another coat.

on the gear front, i purchased the PCI card for the RME audio interface a few mins ago. i'd been looking on ebay for the past week but wasn't turning up much, so i decided to just give up and buy a new one from somewhere. i found a place that was selling them for $570, which is about $30 below the average. just as i was getting ready to place the order, i decided to check ebay one last time just for the hell of it. i'm glad i did--i found someone had put one up with a buy-it-now of $340 just a few hours ago. needless to say, i snatched that little bugger right up.

i talked with dave at work today about how one might go about building the metal frame to hold the absorption cloud above the mix area. he suggested i get a machine shop to fabricate the frame for me out of welded aluminum. i'm now completely convinced that this is the right way to do it and will have the most professional-looking finish. only downside is i'm probably looking at around $100-150 for materials and then anywhere from $100-200 for the labor, depending on some of the joint particulars. i'm gonna try and get an estimate this week or next.

man, even after 3 energy drinks i still feel like crashing. i'm gettin old. can't handle these all-nighters like i used to.

Posted by Len at 04:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding and taping in the booths is very far along. but i've been doing it in between other tasks, so it'll probably be another couple of days before it's completed.

electricians come on tuesday to do the first round of wiring stuff up. all lighting has been purchased, although they won't be hooked up in the first round. more on that later.

met with michelle today to finalize remaining color choice stuff and discuss other design things. all fabric colors for the acoustic treatments have been finalized. capeting will be picked out tuesday night. i've narrowed the door jamb stain down to 2 choices.

framing for the bass traps has started. disco's coming over tomorrow night to help cut all the insulation for the traps while i finish the construction/installation of the frames. i'll also be making a new access panel in the main room due to the aforementioned goofup when cutting it.

as soon as we finalize a stain color for the door jambs, i'm going to start staining them and move on to installing the stops and seals and all that fun business.

sometime next week i will put in a *very* minimal recording setup down in the studio to begin finishing up recording for christa's cd. this will be an exciting opportunity to get a feel for how the room sounds for a real session.

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

the corner bass traps in the mix area are such that one of them is going to completely cover the access panel in the wall. this means that before i can get moving with those i first need to complete the panel assembly. this is basically a small door but without hinges and made out of plywood, so it was a good thing for me to practice on in preparation for doing the real doors.

first i had to create the jamb in the opening and seal it with acoustic caulk:

next came the panel. i took 3 pieces of 3/4" plywood and glued them together. i had to make it this thick since plywood isn't as dense as drywall and i wanted to make sure i have a mass in that space comparable to 2 layers of 5/8" drywall.

the rubber seal that goes around the doorway is kind of a weird shape. the longer side of the "V" shape gets recessed in the door stop...

here's the door stop ripped to create a cavity for the seal. note to self: rip fence at 3/8", blade at 22.5 deg.

next i cut the stops for each side and mounted on the jamb:

and finally i glued the seal in. they come all coiled up, so it was a real bitch getting the pieces to stay in place until the glue started to set--they kept curling and popping back out of the stop. i eventually managed to get them to stay put just long enough for me to shove the panel in the opening, prop a concrete block up against it, and call it a night.

overall things came out ok. in the future, i need to do a better job on the carpentry of the stops--one corner came up a hair too shy. i also need to find a better way to get the gaskets to stay in place, as well as doing a better job with the corners--i kind of cut them haphazardly and sort of eyeballed the angle. dumb idea.

my initial tests indicated that the seal could be compressed up to about 3/8" thick, so i set the stop back a distance of the panel thickness + 3/8. after everything was in place, i found that under normal circumstances the seal won't actually compress that much and i should have recessed it another 1/8-1/4" to compensate, as the panel won't go flush with the jamb. this morning i had the bright idea to knock off the inside edges of the panel a bit, just enough to allow the panel to fit all the way in but still fit snugly in the seal. but in my haste i didn't double-check where i had the rip fence set and midway through the cut i realized i was ripping too deep into the panel and now it fits too loosely inside the seal. so it looks like i'll be making me another panel today. fortunately, they're relatively easy to make.

Posted by Len at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i spent the evening taping all the corners in the iso booth. goddamn there are a lot of corners for such a tiny room, what with the bulkhead and all. on the one hand, mudding and taping is horrible, tedious, monotonous, not very rewarding, emboldening to terrorists, harmful to children, and loaded with transfats. on the other hand, i find it has a certain flow and i can achieve a kind of zen-like state while doing it, which enables me to zone out and plow through stuff without even realizing how much time has passed. i'm probably the only person on the planet who enjoys finishing drywall way more than actually putting the drywall up. the initial taping part isn't as great, but i find doing the subsequent layers almost, dare i say, relaxing. my finishing skillz aren't yet in the "mad" category, but i'm definitely getting better.

speaking of which, when i finished the drywall in the main room, by far the worst job i did was on corners. i was using regular drywall tape to do them, but due to a combination of my corner-taping inexperience and the funky 1/4" gaps at all the corners with the caulk and stuff, i had the worst time getting a nice, crisp, straight line along the corners, and we had to do a lot of trickery during the room painting in order to compensate for the unevenness. this time around i wanted to do a better job, so i decided to ditch the drywall tape for the corners and use strait-flex instead for all the inside corners. this stuff is much stiffer than tape, which helps produce some really straight corners. it's also amazingly easy to work with and i'm very pleased with the way the corners turned out, which is a pleasantly different experience from the other corner product i'm using.

for the one outside corner in the main room and for the bulkhead outside corners, i'm using a different product called ultraflex, which is much wider and better able to span outside corners involving 5/8" dyrwall with gaps and all that fun stuff. however, it's also quite thick and just a little too stiff, even for outside corner material. my general approach to putting the intial mud layer down for taping is to apply it very liberally to make sure i have full coverage and then squeeze all the excess out by dragging a taping knife very tightly along the tape after applying it. however, the ultraflex is so stiff that if you put down too much of a mud bed, it's really difficult to squeeze out all the excess and it ends up feeling really lumpy. i spent a fair amount of time trying to work just the one bulkhead corner so that it didn't feel quite so much like...like....idunno, roseanne barr's thighs or something...when you run your finger along it.

in other news, i ordered a shitload more rigid insulation today so that i can build a couple of superchunk corner traps in the mix area. it's only been in the past week or so that i've found out about these things, and even though they're a bit costlier than other DIY corner treatments, it sounds like the extra dough is worth it.

Posted by Len at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

first 2 room analyses didn't turn up as much as i had hoped. combination of the software being good in the acoustics department but really bad in the software department, and getting my reference mic with the calibration info on a 3.5" floppy. it's bad enough these days when something comes on a floppy, but even worse when the metal slider is broken. so i had to rip off the slider and try on a few machines before i finally got stacey's old laptop to read the files off of it.

last night i stumbled across a free java app called Room EQ Wizard which has some really nice features and is really easy to use. below are some graphs of measurements i took in the room. there was a speaker near one end of the room doing a log sweep, and in each test i moved the mic to a different location in the room and took a reading. the graphs you see show frequency vs. amplitude vs. time; in other words, they're a very good way to visualize the overall frequency response as well as the reverberation response of the room:

the goal of a well-tuned room is to have a nice, smooth reverberation. overall i'm in the right ballpark, but there are some things that stand out in these graphs:

1. the area around 60Hz going up towards 70Hz is resonating like crazy. long after everything else has decayed, that frequency is still going strong. this will most likely need to be addressed through the use of bass traps in the corners (that's where low-frequency energy is the strongest--particularly in trihedrals, where wall corners meet up with the floor or ceiling)


2. there is also a slightly less intense, but still noticeable, spike right around 300Hz. i will probably tackle this with one or more helmholtz resonators. the convenient thing here is that 300Hz is also the area where kick drums can get boomy-sounding, so in drum rooms and other spaces where drums will be regularly recorded, it's recommended that this frequency be absorbed anyway, even if there aren't any problems there with the room itself.


3. there's a strange dip centered roughly around 90Hz and spanning as much as an octave or so depending on the position in the room. i don't yet fully understand the data here--i consistently see this behavior regardless of speaker or mic position, and have verified the data with 2 separate analysis programs and separate sets of readings. before finalizing room treatment plans, i need to do some more research to better help me interpret this particular data point.


4. the low mids as a whole could probably benefit from a little absorption. up to about 400Hz there are some peaks that jump out a little more than they should.

the really nice thing about this data is that it confirms what my ears have been hearing, which is a relatively decent reverberation save for some beefiness in the lows and low mids.

Posted by Len at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

this weekend i spent a considerable amount of time planning out how everything is going to be wired together once i start putting gear into the studio. in the past i was very haphazard with my wiring and ended up with lots of half-implemented and unintuitive signal flow. not to mention the lack of attention to the physical running of the wires, which led to some nice copper-and-rubber spaghetti all over the floor. i've decided that this time i'm going to think everything through before connecting a single wire.

my primary goal is flexibility--i want to be able to connect any mic to any preamp to any channel to any effect to any output. i also want to have a nice, intuitive setup. like a rack of patchbays with a nice top-down flow. and when it comes to hooking everything up, i want to have a very clean, streamlined flow of wires and do a better job than i have in the past with strain relief and the like.

anyway, if you want to see what i have in mind for the signal-routing aspects, click on the image below.

Posted by Len at 01:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

just a few minutes ago i finished putting up the final piece of drywall inside the studio. this means i can finally start thinking about life beyond drywall. i've been putting this shit up on and off for nearly 4 months now, and i was beginning to think i'd never actually get to this point. as i was putting sheets up tonight, i began to do some calibrations and found that each sheet of drywall was taking me on average 1 hour to do. this includes measuring, cutting, loading onto the lift, rasping down edges that might be too long, poking holes for electrical and other stuff, chalking lines, screwing, and doing the foam-and-caulk stuff at each corner. there are somewhere on the order of 120 pieces of drywall in that room, so i've spent somewhere around that many hours just hanging drywall. and then on top of that there's the final layer of foam and caulk and mudding and taping and all that fun stuff. man, drywalling is a bitch.

anyway, i'm going to do some cleaning up tomorrow, after which i'll take some photos of the vox booth and iso booth.

Posted by Len at 02:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

last night we got the rest of the second wall layer in the iso booth up. tonight i hauled ass and got all the first ceiling layer up in there and caulked and mudded everything. tomorrow night i'm going to do the same for the second layer. and then i am going to consume massive amounts of alcohol to celebrate finally getting every last piece of drywall up in the studio. i still won't be completely done with drywall--i still need to mud and tape everything, not to mention putting up more pieces elsewhere in the basement--but just getting all the pieces up in the studio is a monster accomplishment.

in other news, i bought all the laminate flooring today and ordered all the wiring panels and connectors and stuff for the audio wiring. and now that the drywall is all but done, i'll be contacting the electricians tomorrow to schedule them to come out and hook up all the electrical outlets in the rooms.

Posted by Len at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i've been really dragging my ass on the remaining critical drywall work, so i dragged myself out to monroeville today to rent a drywall lift. again. i put up the last pain-in-the-ass piece of drywall up in the vox booth today. the room and the bulkhead are both funky shapes, which makes for a really funky shape for the bulkhead ceiling--no right angles or parallel surfaces at all. these things are such a nightmare to measure, cut, and get into position. but i don't care anymore because it's up, and after putting up two more small pieces the vox booth is completely drywalled now. woohoo!

i'm going to turn my attention next to finishing up the drywall in the other booth. thankfully, the shapes in there aren't nearly as bizarre, so it should go at least relatively quickly. man, i am so sick of drywall. doing normal rooms isn't so bad, but for studio stuff it's soooooo damn tedious with the layers and the caulking and the weird angles and shit. the worst part is, even when i finish the other booth, i still won't be done with the drywall--i'll have to come back at some point and do parts of the garage, lounge, and bathroom. but i'm going to defer those as long as i possibly can because i'm tired of being covered in white powder 24/7.

i spent friday and yesterday working on door tweaks and putting foam and caulk in the gaps between the jambs and the drywall.

this week i hope to buy all the laminate flooring as well as order all the boxes and connectors and stuff for the audio wiring. i'm also going to try and start on the window assemblies and do more door work in between drywalling. did i mention i'm sick of drywall?

Posted by Len at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i got 2 more doors hung this week, one for each of the booths:

i'm slowly getting better at my hanging skills. the last jamb i put up was almost entirely square and for the first time i didn't have to do any shaving along any of the door edges to make it fit.

there's still a lot of work to be done on these doors, though--i still have to install the stops and foam gaskets, as well as settling on a door-closing solution. oh yeah....and i still have to break off all the protruding shims and fill in the jamb perimeter with acoustic caulk.

window stuff will have to start happening soon, so i've begun tracking down the various pieces i need for the window assemblies. looks like the only really tricky thing for me to track down will be the neoprene to hold the glass tightly in place, and i found some leads on that front last night.

Posted by Len at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

painting was finished last night. disco came over tonight to help me run the rest of the cabling, make a pass at cleaning up and organizing the mess that was the basement, and take some photos of the finish paint job in the main room.

i've included some of the better photos below. we still don't have the lighting fixtures installed, so getting good lighting is still a bit tricky, especially for photography. but these should at least give you a general idea of how the paint looks. it's hard to see some of the detail on the gold-ish colored walls, so disco took a few close-ups to better show the funky lines and patterns and stuff.

Posted by Len at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

several people have asked for more pictures of the painting and other progress. i plan to take a bunch of photos as soon as the painting is done in the main room, which should happen by about monday. michelle started working on the last 2 walls today, and it'll take 3 separate coats of paint. each of which requires 4+ hours to dry, so it'll be spread out over at least 3 days. the paint is coming out really well. only thing is, metallic paints bring out every slightest imperfection in the drywall and mud, so before she started painting this morning i went through every bit of those two walls with a flashlight at an oblique angle to find any dings, dips, bulges, or other imperfections, and fix them up. it was tedious work, but it'll be worth it.

mic and preamp for the room analysis software arrived today. now i have everything i need to begin analyzing the room once the construction is done.

set up the table saw last night, but i haven't had a chance to use it yet. because i'm a moron. only i can cut myself on a table saw, not once but twice, and quite seriously at that, before the thing has even been plugged in or been given a blade. the first time i cut myself was while trying to remove the styrofoam block holding the motor assembly in place. yes, i cut myself while removing styrofoam. how? i have no clue. then after i attached the rip fence i was gliding it back and forth to make sure it moved straight and smoothly and all, and in the process i accidentally rammed my finger pretty hard into a sharp metal piece that was jutting out of the scale adjuster. the metal ended up sliding under my fingernail and made quite a mess. fortunately all i needed were some band aids, although it's still really sore today. especially when i type. which i'm going to stop doing now.

Posted by Len at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i have decided that i loathe my table saw. now that i'm working on some things that require very accurate cuts (like for the boxes that will hide the lights' junction boxes), and my crappy ryobi is failing miserably. the fence is wobbly, the miter gauge is wobbly, part of the crappy tabletop plastic cracked, there's very little table space in front of the blade, and so on and so on.

i have like 3 ridgid saws that i've been extremely happy with, so even though their table saws are a good bit more expensive than my ryobi, my experience with their other stuff says it's worth every penny. i was very tempted to get their stationary table saw, but it's just a bit more than i can afford right now. goddamn is it nice though. the rip fence is like buttah. i decided to go with the smaller portable table saw instead. a fair bit less table space, but still more than the ryobi and plenty enough for my needs. the rip fence and miter gauges are so much more reliable than what i have now, which are my biggest problems with the ryobi. i went back to home depot this evening to buy it, but it was way up on a shelf and they apparently didn't have any licensed forklift operators in the store. so i'll just go back tomorrow.

the green walls are all finished now. man they look awesome. i will put up pictures soon--i just need to get the right lighting in there first. the yellow/gold walls will be started in the next day or two.

disco came over tonight to help me run the mic and midi cabling. took longer than i thought, but we got quite a bit done. 2 of the 3 panels are completely wired up now and we're going to finish the last one tomorrow night.

Posted by Len at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

friday's ceiling painting turned out to be another suboptimal day. michelle just couldn't get the metallic paint to come out smooth and even. after much research, we found out that most metallic paint applications require at least 3 coats, so we went ahead with another try. also, we learned that there's a roller made specifically for applying metallic paints, so we got some of those and things came out great. the ceiling looks fucking awesome now.

tommy came over to help with drywall today, and we managed to get another two pain-in-the-ass pieces up. the vocal booth is now 2 pieces short of drywall completion. woohoo!

8-channel mic snakes and midi cable should be here tomorrow. i also ordered a copy of ETF and the corresponding reference mic and preamp for doing room analysis/tuning.

i've been kind of slacking on doors lately...i need to get back in the swing of things with those soon.

Posted by Len at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i bought a jig saw today. this means that since i embarked on this process i have purchased the following cutting devices:

• rotozip
• table saw
• mitre saw
• concrete/masonry saw
• hand saw
• hack saw
• small band saw (never actually used>
• large band saw
• router
• jig saw

and the following drilling devices:

• 3/4" drill
• hammer drill
• SDS hammer drill
• right-angle drill
• impact driver
• dammit, i know i'm forgetting one

Posted by Len at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

yesterday i ordered the mogami 8-channel mic snakes and midi cable to run throughout the studio. the main room will have 3 panels, each with 8 mic channels + headphone + midi in/out. permanent studio cabling alone has run me around $600 total now, and that doesn't even include the mic panels, connectors, plates, removable wiring, and all that other fun stuff.

disco came over on wednesday to help me with drywalling the vox booth ceiling. after 3 hours, we managed to get one piece up. it was a real bitch because the weird shape took a long time to measure, and we had to be very meticulous with putting the markings on the walls so we'd know where the screws go for both the first and second layers of drywall. as i've probably mentioned before, the floor joists and their placement are extremely bizarre in that part of the ceiling for reasons that are still unclear to me. once the piece was finally cut, it took us forever to maneuver into the room and into place and then we had to put together a makeshift T out of 2x4s to hold the drywall up while i fastened it. hopefully the second layer will be much quicker, seeing as how i've already measured the shape and we already marked the screw holes and stuff and i know what all the pitfalls are of getting the piece into place.

not much to update on paint. on tuesday we returned the ceiling paint to lowes and i got my money back. then we went to home depot and got some more ralph lauren paints to use on the ceiling instead--we got some metallic silver and metallic green, which michelle then mixed together until she got something very close to the color of the crappy lowes paint. it looks pretty slick, but the second coat still hasn't been put on yet--that will theoretically happen today.

i had a scrap door piece from when i had to cut the door down to size, so i tested the stain on that to see how it's going to turn out. not too bad, although the wood on the door has a tiny bit of a pinkish hue to it that is still showing through the stain a little, but i suspect that isn't going to be too big a deal. besides, to try and fix it would probably entail gobs and gobs of trial and error.

one of my coworkers does woodworking, so i consulted with him on the best way to make wooden boxes that will both cover the junction boxes for the lights and also look good. hopefully i'll get to try my hand at making one of these this weekend sometime.

tommy gave me leads on a couple of good, local glass places which i'll call sometime next week or the week after once i have money again to begin plunging in to that part of the project. and once i track down the other parts i need to build the window assemblies.

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

yesterday i ordered the mogami 8-channel mic snakes and midi cable to run throughout the studio. the main room will have 3 panels, each with 8 mic channels + headphone + midi in/out. permanent studio cabling alone has run me around $600 total now, and that doesn't even include the mic panels, connectors, plates, removable wiring, and all that other fun stuff.

disco came over on wednesday to help me with drywalling the vox booth ceiling. after 3 hours, we managed to get one piece up. it was a real bitch because the weird shape took a long time to measure, and we had to be very meticulous with putting the markings on the walls so we'd know where the screws go for both the first and second layers of drywall. as i've probably mentioned before, the floor joists and their placement are extremely bizarre in that part of the ceiling for reasons that are still unclear to me. once the piece was finally cut, it took us forever to maneuver into the room and into place and then we had to put together a makeshift T out of 2x4s to hold the drywall up while i fastened it. hopefully the second layer will be much quicker, seeing as how i've already measured the shape and we already marked the screw holes and stuff and i know what all the pitfalls are of getting the piece into place.

not much to update on paint. on tuesday we returned the ceiling paint to lowes and i got my money back. then we went to home depot and got some more ralph lauren paints to use on the ceiling instead--we got some metallic silver and metallic green, which michelle then mixed together until she got something very close to the color of the crappy lowes paint. it looks pretty slick, but the second coat still hasn't been put on yet--that will theoretically happen today.

i had a scrap door piece from when i had to cut the door down to size, so i tested the stain on that to see how it's going to turn out. not too bad, although the wood on the door has a tiny bit of a pinkish hue to it that is still showing through the stain a little, but i suspect that isn't going to be too big a deal. besides, to try and fix it would probably entail gobs and gobs of trial and error.

one of my coworkers does woodworking, so i consulted with him on the best way to make wooden boxes that will both cover the junction boxes for the lights and also look good. hopefully i'll get to try my hand at making one of these this weekend sometime.

tommy gave me leads on a couple of good, local glass places which i'll call sometime next week or the week after once i have money again to begin plunging in to that part of the project. and once i track down the other parts i need to build the window assemblies.

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

i started working on some of the door assemblies. the studio-side door leading to the lounge is now hung:

this is just the basic frame and the door; i still have to do the stop, gasket, closer, and caulk the perimeter and install casing over top. plus hang the door on the other side and insulate the space in between.

this evening i started working on the studio-side door to the garage. i also picked up some samples of the floor moulding and door/window casings i want to use, and found a really nice stain that brings a tone out of pine very similar to the laminate flooring we picked out.

theoretically, painting is on full speed ahead this week, but michelle ran into some snags today with the ceiling paint. we're using this weird 2-coat system where you put down a semi-gloss base and then another coat that's really thin and metallic. but apparently it's a little too thin, to the point of having a consistency like water and making it really difficult for michelle to roll on. several phone calls this evening didn't turn up much in the way of a solution, but as luck would have it, a rep from the paint company is going to be at lowes tomorrow, so we're going to trek out there in the morning and show them the paints that were mixed for us and see what they have to say.

in other news, this weekend i ran all the cat5 lines for the headphone feeds throughout the studio. i also ran 2 audio lines from the main studio to each iso booth, in case someone needs to sit in the studio with their guitar and put the amp in the iso booth or something. in that scenario, they can just jack their guitar into a panel into the studio and then connect from the iso booth panel into the amp. this week i'll be ordering all the 8-channel cable snakes and midi cable so i can run 8 mic lines and midi in/out to each of 3 panels distributed throughout the main room.

Posted by Len at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

nothing particularly exciting to report for this week. lots of waiting. i once again found myself running out of acoustic caulk way more quickly than i realized and i'm currently waiting on another shipment of 12 28oz tubes which should be here tomorrow. i can't really do anymore drywalling in the iso booths until i get that stuff for the wall corners. painting in the main room is at least a week and a half behind schedule. the only work that has been done thus far is a coat of primer on the ceiling.

in general, this has been a real shit week. the reality of how much money i'm spending on stuff and how much money i no longer have is really catching up with me. the reality of how long everything has taken and the mountain of stuff left to do is really getting to me. i'm realizing that had i known months ago what i now know about room acoustics, there are many things i would have done very differently and i'm worried i may have really screwed myself over in terms of certain angles and stuff. i'm having lots of "oh shit" moments, like the discovery tonight that temperature/humidity changes of late seem to have caused portions of the floor leveling stuff i put down months and months ago to start cracking all the way through and lifting off the floor. i'm trying to work my way out of several corners i unwittingly backed myself into over the past few months, like the way i wired things for lighting, or the way i sized the doorways, or the way i framed the bulkheads. overall i'm in a real "i don't know what i'm doing, i've fucked everything up, i'm really fucking stupid for trying to do all this shit myself, this thing is going to be a complete disaster when it's done. if by some miracle it ever is done" funk.

it's been really wearing down on me too that for every evening i do have help with the studio, there are 4 or 5 other evenings where i was supposed to have help, but the people offerering to help were sick/had something come up/forgot about prior plans/had water pipes freeze/were abducted by aliens/god only knows what else. and it's kind of weird, but the reliability of any given person is actually inversely proportional to the amount of money i'm paying them. go figure. i think about 1/3 of my life right now is spent having "can you still make it tonight?....no?.....well, i'm really sorry your dog died....and your grandmother's sick....and your house was robbed....ok, when can you make it again?....well, tell you what, how about you call me when you do know?" conversations. when i do get help, it's usually only for like 2-3 hours at a time. i'm more than grateful for the help i do get, but all that non-help in between is wearing me down.

i would kill to find people to come help me for like a good, solid 8 hours on a saturday or something, but i've long since resigned myself to that never happening. i'm trying to juggle sooo many different things right now and the degree of multitasking i'm finding myself having to do right now is making me sink further and further into the lake of despair and insanity. i'm no longer thinking clearly about the studio, or anything for that matter. sleep is sucking royally these days--my brain keeps me awake spewing angst continuously until about 6am every day until i finally crash and get a few hours of dreaming-about-everything-negative-imaginable sleep. the rational part of me knows that the best thing to do would be for me to take a break from studio stuff for a week or two and clear my head and recharge my batteries. but the rest of me....well, yeah, whatever...

sorry for being all down and goth-teenager-like, i just figured that if i spewed my thoughts into the intarweb, maybe they'll leave me alone tonight and let me sleep.

Posted by Len at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

argh. i'm so tired of looking at lighting. nothing i look at seems to fit the space and my budget. i keep going back and forth as to what kind of style i want and what will work well with the space in terms of room colors and all. i stumbled across this light last night that looks potentially promising:

Posted by Len at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

painting didn't start tonight like originally planned, but we did spend about 3 hours hashing out more interior design details and then went to home depot to drop gobs and gobs of cash on paint and painting supplies. michelle's gonna come tomorrow morning and start working on the ceiling. in a related note, i've found a few more minor bumps and depressions in the ceiling. mostly minor stuff that normally wouldn't be that noticeable, but with the color being used on the ceiling it sounds like any spots that aren't completely flat and smooth will stick out like a sore thumb. so i'm going to go be all OCD with the ceiling shortly and try to catch the rest of these buggers and deal with them once and for all.

i have some really cool information on the psychology of colors to be used for the space. i was going to provide sample swatch images the colors we'll be using, but there seem to be some significant inaccuries in the pantone color numbers that were transcribed for me (that gold looks awfully.....black), so instead i'll just provide textual descriptions and you can use your imagination.

the general color themes for the room are yellow/gold, green, and silver:

• silver: sleek, classy, stylish, modern, cool


• green: calming and harmonious. green says balance and beauty drawing from the shades of nature


• yellow: sunshine and light yellow projects a radiant look, creating instant warmth

two of the walls will have a golden yellow base with a slightly darker gold gradient over tissue paper, darker on the top, lighter on the bottom. the other two walls will have an olive green. both of these are from the ralph lauren metallic collection. they're shiny but in a metallic sort of way as opposed to a glossy sort of way. the ceiling is this sort of metallic green that looks really slick. here's some psychology/evocation info on at least some of the colors:

• golden yellow: nourishing, buttery, tasty, sunbaked, wheat, hospitable, comfort & comfort food


• olive green: calming, sophisticated, classic, earthy


• gold: rich, glowing, divine, intuitive, luxurious, opulent, expensive, radiant, valuable, prestigious

Posted by Len at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

earlier this evening i met with the artist to go over the paint/floor/lighting plans for the studio. she picked out some pretty swank colors and i think they're going to work really well in the room. we went to home depot and spent way too much time agonizing over laminate flooring. in the end, we just kind of accidentally wandered past a display that had some laminate flooring that was exactly the right tone for what she had in mind, is a really good price, and best of all, is in stock.

the plan is to start painting wednesday evening, which means i have to make sure all the main room is all prepared by tomorrow evening. on that note...

i got the corner bead material today. it was wide enough to span the frankencorner without any problems. initially i was a bit dubious as to the adhesion strength of paper-based corner beads which don't use any fasteners, but so far it seems to be pretty strong, and i really like the fact that this stuff isn't susceptible to the problem that the metal beads have where a dinged-up corner can wind up exposing the underlying metal. i need to do another skim coat or two of mud tonight/tomorrow morning, but other than that it's pretty much done.

the rest of the mud in the room is touched up and ready for sanding.

i spent a good chunk of the evening installing the foam rod and acoustic caulk along the base of all the walls. i'm slowly getting better at getting a not-too-terribly-sloppy caulking application on the corners. it's really tricky when all of the gaps are 1/4" or more--i'm used to dealing with much narrower caulk beads. i've gotten pretty good at cheating with the help of some putty knives.

i'm beginning to work out the details of the speaker soffits. more on that later.

Posted by Len at 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding's all done, so i figured i'd take a few pics before starting into the priming and painting.

Posted by Len at 02:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

mudding of the main room is essentially done now. all that's left is to apply the exterior corner bead once it arrives, do some spot fixes, and then sand everything down. in theory the bead should be here tomorrow or tuesday at the latest.

i got another 20 sheets of drywall delivered yesterday for finishing off the iso booths and other areas of the basement. ii also rented a drywall lift to help with that task. i've been working on the vox booth today and making some decent progress. the smallness and weird-shape-ness of the space is making it a bit tricky to put the upper wall pieces up, but it hasn't been too terribly bad thus far.

tomorrow night i meet with the artist to go over room colors and flooring and lighting and all that fun stuff.

i've mentioned here and there that a couple of the supply outlets are still really noisy, owing to a combination of mechanical noise and excessive air velocity. it's also the case that the far end of our house is really cold, and the two aren't entirely unrelated. i ordered an air volume damper to control the amount of air coming into those registers off the trunk. i'm still looking for a canvas duct connector to help decouple the mechanical noise of the furnace from that duct run--it was tapped just before the canvas connector for the main supply trunk for the house.

i found a place that can do the laminate glass for me for the vox booth windows. they have 1/2" in stock, which will cover one of the pieces just fine, but they don't have anything bigger for the other piece. they're looking into ordering a piece of 5/8" or 3/4" for me. hopefully i'll know tomorrow whether that's doable, and then as soon as i have exact measurements for the glass i can go ahead and place the order. i think what i'm going to do, since i need to be very exact with the measurements and all and angling of the glass may make things a little tricky, is get scraps of 1/2" and 3/4" plywood to test-fit the dimensions before ordering.

still waiting for the door gasket material to arrive. still trying to track down a source for magnetic weatherstripping. still trying to track down other door/window assembly odds and ends like u-shaped neoprene setting blocks and all that fun stuff.

time to go put up some more drywall.

Posted by Len at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

whilst looking for something completely unrelated i happened across a scan of the window construction diagram from the rod gervai