My recording room: A short and painful horror story, with a graph

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nightlight

nightlight

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Mine is a total mess. It's a relatively small room, packed to the brim with cabs, amplifiers and a drum kit. There's a chest of drawers right next to my left speaker that is about the same height as it is sitting on my desk. On the side of the other speaker, there's a metal server rack where I keep a lot of my stuff.

Here's a graph after I measured the room:

Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 10.57.47 PM.png


What a mess, right? Look at those peaks at around 150khz (even lower on the left speaker) and then again at around 300-500khz, followed by a deep valley. The mid range is all pokey and things rapidly start to drop off around 2000khz. Hope I'm reading the chart right, there are no numbers in a lot of places, so difficult for me to tell.

I know that room treatment is the obvious solution, but my studio also doubles up a guest room, so I can't use bass traps, diffusers, etc.

Anyway, the room is horrible for mixing and mastering, or even for just dialling in a tone. Sounds great in the room, believe me, but it's next to impossible to get stuff to translate in others' listening environments. I mean, it's no wonder my bottom end sounds anaemic most of the time, just look at the left half of the graph.

Anyone else got horror stories about their recording environments?
 
I have no clue about any of that stuff and I’m sure my setup isn’t ideal, but I’ve listened enough to know what’s gonna translate through the few playback devices I use, ive got my sub and low end pretty dialed in to what I’m hearing in my earbuds
 
I'm trying to make do with room correction software, but it's far from ideal.
 
I"d probably consider asking my guest to move out if they were being a crybaby about a diffuser.
 
Room correction software helps a ton. Thought it was total snake oil but really helped me.
 
Room correction software is great and all but you aren't going to correct the problem by treating it so why bother? Get a kickass set of cans and mix on headphones. Check your mixes in your car. There really is no alternative for you. I just did up a soundproof ( more or less) room and i am going to have to treat the shit out of it. It still won't be perfect. This is what home studios are all about. I am going to need a ton of bass trapping all over. It's just the nature of the beast.

Alternatively, build 7 foot tall gobos on casters and place them around you. Pull them out of the room when you have guests. Still won't be perfect.
 
Kapo_Polenton said:
Room correction software is great and all but you aren't going to correct the problem by treating it so why bother? Get a kickass set of cans and mix on headphones. Check your mixes in your car. There really is no alternative for you. I just did up a soundproof ( more or less) room and i am going to have to treat the shit out of it. It still won't be perfect. This is what home studios are all about. I am going to need a ton of bass trapping all over. It's just the nature of the beast.

Alternatively, build 7 foot tall gobos on casters and place them around you. Pull them out of the room when you have guests. Still won't be perfect.
Click to expand...

This. I do all of my mixes in a shitty room, too. It certainly makes things more difficult, but the more mixes you do (and the more you practice) with your shitty room, the more you understand what you are and aren't hearing because of it.

The biggest additions I can recommend for a shitty room are some kind of diffusion directly behind you (if the monitors are facing you) and some kind of bass traps.

Just those two things, and then checking mixes in a car and on really nice cans is more than enough to get shit sounding good.

Specifically with your room, the big problem is the giant peak around 100hz, which is right around the "Riff area" in standard. That's enough to make it difficult for anyone.
 
Get an axe fx if you can't treat the room.


Seems to be the most obvious solution.
The room can't affect it.

Or record through 2notes.


Or not. Whatever. 🤷‍♂️
 
ChuggNorris said:
Get an axe fx if you can't treat the room.


Seems to be the most obvious solution.
The room can't affect it.

Or record through 2notes.


Or not. Whatever. 🤷‍♂️
Click to expand...

He's talking about mixing..you aren't sending your mix through two notes ... though i suppose you could for some effect.
 
DanTravis62 said:
This. I do all of my mixes in a shitty room, too. It certainly makes things more difficult, but the more mixes you do (and the more you practice) with your shitty room, the more you understand what you are and aren't hearing because of it.

The biggest additions I can recommend for a shitty room are some kind of diffusion directly behind you (if the monitors are facing you) and some kind of bass traps.

Just those two things, and then checking mixes in a car and on really nice cans is more than enough to get shit sounding good.

Specifically with your room, the big problem is the giant peak around 100hz, which is right around the "Riff area" in standard. That's enough to make it difficult for anyone.
Click to expand...

and a good "hack" is that if you can at least more or less hear things with no cans on, you avoid ear fatigue physically from having them on and then you only go to them when you need to or when reference mixing. We'd all love to have 10 foot ceilings and separate control and live rooms but that just isn't reality.
 
Kapo_Polenton said:
and a good "hack" is that if you can at least more or less hear things with no cans on, you avoid ear fatigue physically from having them on and then you only go to them when you need to or when reference mixing. We'd all love to have 10 foot ceilings and separate control and live rooms but that just isn't reality.
Click to expand...

this is literally my process, most of the time :ROFLMAO:

Honestly people assume that the pros always use perfectly balanced rooms and that is almost never the case
 
using near-field monitors for mixing may not be effected by the room as much, unless the sound is bouncing around?

Carpet on the floor, and makeshift traps using blankets over the wall, a few inches away or behind you when you're at your mixing desk, make a makeshift way to hang the blanket, or portable traps you can put away when guests stay.

One band I was in, we practiced in the singer's parents basement, thick carpets on the floor, and he had tapestries hanging a few inches away from the unfinished concrete walls, and some blankets hanging down from the ceiling; made a difference in the room, we didn't have as much sound bouncing around off the hard surfaces; not perfect, but it helped.
 
DanTravis62 said:
this is literally my process, most of the time :ROFLMAO:

Honestly people assume that the pros always use perfectly balanced rooms and that is almost never the case
Click to expand...
rsm said:
using near-field monitors for mixing may not be effected by the room as much, unless the sound is bouncing around?

Carpet on the floor, and makeshift traps using blankets over the wall, a few inches away or behind you when you're at your mixing desk, make a makeshift way to hang the blanket, or portable traps you can put away when guests stay.

One band I was in, we practiced in the singer's parents basement, thick carpets on the floor, and he had tapestries hanging a few inches away from the unfinished concrete walls, and some blankets hanging down from the ceiling; made a difference in the room, we didn't have as much sound bouncing around off the hard surfaces; not perfect, but it helped.
Click to expand...

Don't forget also that taming reflections is not correction. you still have a ton of low end build up in most cases. That will mess with your mixes. But yeah, even those youtube " experts" only let you see one end of their room with snazzy lighting half the time, the other side is full of all sorts of crap and is in a room with a low ceiling. But hey, they are " experts"!
 
nightlight said:
Mine is a total mess. It's a relatively small room, packed to the brim with cabs, amplifiers and a drum kit. There's a chest of drawers right next to my left speaker that is about the same height as it is sitting on my desk. On the side of the other speaker, there's a metal server rack where I keep a lot of my stuff.

Here's a graph after I measured the room:

View attachment 341144

What a mess, right? Look at those peaks at around 150khz (even lower on the left speaker) and then again at around 300-500khz, followed by a deep valley. The mid range is all pokey and things rapidly start to drop off around 2000khz. Hope I'm reading the chart right, there are no numbers in a lot of places, so difficult for me to tell.

I know that room treatment is the obvious solution, but my studio also doubles up a guest room, so I can't use bass traps, diffusers, etc.

Anyway, the room is horrible for mixing and mastering, or even for just dialling in a tone. Sounds great in the room, believe me, but it's next to impossible to get stuff to translate in others' listening environments. I mean, it's no wonder my bottom end sounds anaemic most of the time, just look at the left half of the graph.

Anyone else got horror stories about their recording environments?
Click to expand...
The resonance at 150Hz and 300Hz are likely related. 150 is the fundamental, 300 is the 2nd.

The way you read the graph is the X axis is log(Freq) so every 10 steps is 10x from before. The vertical lines show you where the even increments are. 100, 200, 300, etc.
 
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