Brand New Studio/Rig/Setup
Brand New Studio/Rig/Setup Posted on: 29.05.2011 by Cordia Clemensen Hi everyone.I have been off the community for about 6 months thanks to a sudden, involuntary loss of all of my music kit and DJ stuff. I moved cities for work over the Christmas period but due to catastrophic flooding cutting off the route between my old city and my new home, the moving company couldn't transport the container of my belongings. So they left it sitting in their storage yard, which was about 50 metres from another waterway which proceeded to flood thanks to another bout of 30 year flooding. So basically in January, I lost almost everything I owned including keyboards, controllers, mixers, computers, etc. Here's a picture of the previous setup. Now at the end of May I have finally finished the warranty process with the transport company and am about to receive a payout from them, and will be dropping a tidy bundle on new kit. I have been researching this pretty heavily for a few months because it's not too often you get handed a bunch of cash. Plus, I am working on tune production with a friend and he has some kit as well which will be going into my spare room (soon to be called "the studio"). I rent an apartment, so I will also be doing some acoustic treatments (which will NOT be 'installed' as my landlord won't even let me hang pictures, let alone bass traps). I thought I'd start a thread and document the process and ask some questions about some things I'm not familar with, as well as share some expertise I do have through 10-15 years of music and event production. Yes, this is kind of bloggy but I figure some people here will be interested and I can ask/answer questions about the logistics of this whole sh'bang. Gear Shopping List There are two rigs to be put together: Production Rig & DJing Rig. And then there's some general studio kit, and the stuff we already have. Production Rig
DJing Rig
Studio Kit
Existing Kit
QUESTION : Is it possible to run my Traktor library off a laptop's 5400rpm internal hard disk? I used to used Ableton to DJ with but because it streamed off the drive, it wouldn't run properly off the internal without glitching. Anyways, that's the first post. Next post is going to be about the room itself, and what we've got to do about the sound in it. | |
| Cordia Clemensen 28.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by LanceBlaise
I would have thought the current crap monitors were the cause of the poor sound quality. And I wouldn't call killing flutter echo and general room resonance a waste of money. I like my desk. |
| Cordia Clemensen 25.06.2011 | More progress. Today we went and bought 4 x 1.2m high batts of fibreglass insulation and 6m of upholstery fabric. Yesterday I bought two cheap foam mattresses. You can see the dark blue mattresses on the sides and the two columns of insulation in the corners of the room. 267549_159254150810283_159245400811158_336666_1002216_n.jpg The bags of insulation panels are just stacked on top of each other. I have pinned a 3m length of fabric into a little hat at the top and then just draped them down over the front and tried to tuck it in outside. I am unable to attach stuff to the walls so it's the best I can do. The fabric is just to cover up the ugly bags. The mattresses are propped up either side of the mix position on extra milk crates (for height. The difference is remarkable. The mix position is now almost completely acoustically dead. When clapping there is a little ring about 1.6khz coming off the ceiling (which we can't do anything about) but there is no flutter echo from the monitors, the low-end (from the crappy edirol) is very clean which actually has exposed how terribly middy they are (they have no tweeters - only a single speaker which we believe the cone is made from compressed shit). However, the room is sounding better which is making monitors sound better (as much as they can ) which has made US feel better. And a massive 9 hour studio session ensued. I believe another revision will occur once the new Yamaha studio monitors occur. Also, once my Kontrol X1 and Traktor arrive, I will show the back half of the room now with the mix station. Now I will sleep. |
| Cordia Clemensen 17.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by DjWindzOne
Also, 60GB for a full Logic install??!? |
| Cordia Clemensen 06.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by coolmatic
Originally Posted by LoveBass
PROTIP!!! I ordered about $7k worth of gear over the phone and internet in 2 hours this weekend. Went to buy some groceries later in the day and found out that the bank had frozen my Amex - their fraud department apparently thought it was odd that I had run through more spend in 2 hours than I had in the preceeding 3 months. Might be worth letting them know you're going on a spender-bender before beginning. I had to call back the different retailers and get them to reprocess the orders because all the transactions had been declined! |
| Cordia Clemensen 28.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by LanceBlaise
I would have thought the current crap monitors were the cause of the poor sound quality. And I wouldn't call killing flutter echo and general room resonance a waste of money. I like my desk. |
| Efrain Scharr 28.06.2011 | You wasted all that money on mattresses and housing insulation, you also should spend some money on a better desk or some real monitor stands. Those crates are going to be adding to the poor sound quality. |
| Cordia Clemensen 27.06.2011 | Well last bits of kit arrived, pretty much done apart from a little bit of backordered gear. Here is a full photo set in the Show Your Setup thread. |
| Cordia Clemensen 25.06.2011 | More progress. Today we went and bought 4 x 1.2m high batts of fibreglass insulation and 6m of upholstery fabric. Yesterday I bought two cheap foam mattresses. You can see the dark blue mattresses on the sides and the two columns of insulation in the corners of the room. 267549_159254150810283_159245400811158_336666_1002216_n.jpg The bags of insulation panels are just stacked on top of each other. I have pinned a 3m length of fabric into a little hat at the top and then just draped them down over the front and tried to tuck it in outside. I am unable to attach stuff to the walls so it's the best I can do. The fabric is just to cover up the ugly bags. The mattresses are propped up either side of the mix position on extra milk crates (for height. The difference is remarkable. The mix position is now almost completely acoustically dead. When clapping there is a little ring about 1.6khz coming off the ceiling (which we can't do anything about) but there is no flutter echo from the monitors, the low-end (from the crappy edirol) is very clean which actually has exposed how terribly middy they are (they have no tweeters - only a single speaker which we believe the cone is made from compressed shit). However, the room is sounding better which is making monitors sound better (as much as they can ) which has made US feel better. And a massive 9 hour studio session ensued. I believe another revision will occur once the new Yamaha studio monitors occur. Also, once my Kontrol X1 and Traktor arrive, I will show the back half of the room now with the mix station. Now I will sleep. |
| Cordia Clemensen 17.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by DjWindzOne
Also, 60GB for a full Logic install??!? |
| Vernie Beharry 17.06.2011 | @Biru It looks like yer getting on yer feet again. . .Sorry to hear about yer loss (Making it sound like you lost yer children ) I'd say keep the milk crates for your monitor stands! *Thumbs up* |
| Cordia Clemensen 15.06.2011 | Well! My Apple custom build arrived today as did the RAM upgrade for the MacMini I ordered. After work I zipped over to the office store to buy a desk and chair (crap but effective desk - $44!) then by electronics store for monitors ($177 each = win!). Then I came home and worked for 2-3 hours solidly on work stuff then retired to the studio-in-progress with a knife and a screw driver. Not bad! Got a call today - no Yamaha HS80s in the the country for a few weeks so in the meantime it's the Edirol MA7s (shudder). I am still waiting on Traktor and Kontrol X1 too. The Xone:42 arrived a few days ago, and although there are three different flavours of IEC cable in the box NONE OF THEM fit Australian sockets! Now I have the studio computer to look at until I finish my current crop of marking and report-writing. I need about a day to install Logic and sample/look libraries, but I will order Nexus tomorrow and get that in the post - hopefully that will arrive sometime next week along with the remaining DJ gear. I am waiting till the Yamaha monitors arrive before the acoustic treatments. I need to get the HS80s up and running before I can determine the exact spot for the foam to go in. |
| Cordia Clemensen 08.06.2011 | 12.29pm : Receive E-Mail from retailer's automated despatch system - DJ Gear Shipped, tracking number, etc 12.36pm : Receive E-Mail Newsletter from retailer - 10th Birthday Sale - A&H Xone:42 Reduced by $230. |
| Cordia Clemensen 06.06.2011 |
Originally Posted by coolmatic
Originally Posted by LoveBass
PROTIP!!! I ordered about $7k worth of gear over the phone and internet in 2 hours this weekend. Went to buy some groceries later in the day and found out that the bank had frozen my Amex - their fraud department apparently thought it was odd that I had run through more spend in 2 hours than I had in the preceeding 3 months. Might be worth letting them know you're going on a spender-bender before beginning. I had to call back the different retailers and get them to reprocess the orders because all the transactions had been declined! |
| Ola Fornwalt 06.06.2011 | don't go djm 800. Go Ecler or xone |
| Jacquelyne Amponsah 06.06.2011 | Really interesting post about the acoustics dude |
| Cordia Clemensen 05.06.2011 | Acoustics As promised, here is my little bit on the room and what we're doing to treat it as best we can. Background I did a year on acoustics whilst studying music technology, wherein all the principles were laid out, and we ended up having to do a full work up on a room (sound proofing, acoustic paneling, designing traps and QRDs). That was over 10 years ago though, so I did a little bit of researching and online reading to refresh my memory on some formula and things. Ethan Winer's Acoustics was pretty good reading as was just googling "Studio Acoustics", "Bass Traps", "Acoustic Treatments" and so on. With acoustics there's so many different ways you can treat a room so I would suggest spending a bit of time reading as widely as you can before dropping money on any products - you may not need them or those products may be pretty ineffectual in your situation. And sometimes you can solve the problem by just moving your kit around the room. What acoustic treatment ISN'T is just sticking egg cartons to every wall in your drum - you do that, you might as well be creating an anechoic chamber. And if you've ever been locked inside one, and heard the blood pumping through your veins and your eyes scratching around inside your skull you'll appreciate why we don't want to spend hours in a completely 'dead' room. We need to do something about the sonic character of the room, so that we produce and mix a tune accurately so that it sounds the same on properly tuned systems wherever we take them, either to a club, a hall, a car, another studio or (hopefully) the A&R department of some mega-huge label. The Problem How to improve the sound in small room in a rented apartment in a concrete building, without affixing anything to the walls. The sound needs to be improved for production purposes, rather than for DJing. Sound proofing is not so much a concern as three of the four walls face outside and the other wall backs onto my kitchen. Measuring Up Here's the room - 4 walls. One has a built-in wardrobe and the door in it, one has a nice large window in it and the other two (the longest ones) are bare apart from an airconditioning unit up high in one of them. First things first - we know there's some funny high-end crap going on in the empty room because when we "excite the room" (clap our hands) we can hear about 500-800ms of ringing going on. Kind of metallic sounding, so we know there's a bunch of harmonics going too. Secondly, because it's a small room with nice 90-degree corners and hard walls we know there's going to be an issue with bass. Small Room Syndrome it's called. You can get the same thing singing in your shower - sing in the middle, then bring yourself closer and closer to the corners and see how the bass kicks up. That being done, we whip out the tape measure and measure up. 4m long 3.3m wide 2.55m high Now we plug those into Bob Gold's excellent Room Modes Calculator. Luckily we pass the comparison to recommended Room Ratios - these are ratios of L:W:H that are recognised as being the basis for sounding "good" or having the potential to sound good. Next we find that we have Room Modes dominating from 43Hz to 135Hz, which would be the sub and bass end of the spectrum. This is where the room size matches the physical wavelengths of sounds that allow standing waves to build up and resonate off these tones. Diffraction and diffusion dominate from 135Hz to 540Hz - something we can do something about. These are the frequencies that the room is really resonant at, where parallel surfaces allow standing waves to develop. Upwards of 540Hz we have ringy, bouncy echoes with sound bouncing off every bare surface in the room. Our solution First of all, we have decided to go with a Live End/Dead End room. This means that we will treat the room around where our monitors are but leave the back of the room live. Plus, because we are using near-fields we want to make sure that the only sound we get in our ears is directly coming from the monitors. To that end, the first thing we do is make sure that the monitors are pointing at our mix position, with the tweeters going straight into our ears. We juggle this by using our awesome milk-crate speaker stands and angling the monitors with something like Auralex foam wedges or similar. Second thing we are going to do is try to kill off any "flutter echo" stimulated by our near fields. This will be 135Hz and upwards. For that we have one person sit in the mix position whilst the other holds a mirror against the wall. They move the mirror along the wall and we mark where we can begin to see the monitor and again when we can't see it. We do this horizontally and vertically. Then add a little extra around for good measure These areas will be treated with something to absorb the sound and to stop the sound from echoing off the walls in these areas. This means that we should only be getting the direct sound from the monitors and not the combination of the direct sound and the sound reflecting of the walls either side of the mix position. In the image below (although this is for home theatre, the principles are the same) you can see the idea: Green is the direct sound, red is the indirect sound coming from the monitors. Without treating those points to absorb that indirect sound, we would get a variety of reflections that would cause a "smeared" stereo image and usually a bump in the mid-range frequencies. The blue is other indirect sound, but we won't be cranking our monitors that loudly so we hopefully won't have too much issue there. Third thing we're going to do is deal with the corners a little. The room is too small to benefit from anything other than a full sealed bass trap (which needs to be affixed to the wall with no gaps). Plus, the HS80Ms are ported at the rear and will be angled towards our mix position pushing the bass straight into the corners (which are already bass hotspots thanks to proximity effect). We need to do something to soften those corners a bit. What we've decided to do at this point, is to get 4 single foam mattresses (cheap and nasty at about $50 each) and lean them against the walls either side of the mix position to kill flutter and across the two walls meeting in each corner in front of the mix position in order to lower the amount sound entering those bassy corners. There's not much we can do about small room syndrome with the low, low bass but the HS80Ms roll off quite significantly around there so we hopefully won't have too many problems. --- Anyways, that's what we be doing about the sounding. Thoughts? |
| Thelma Magdanz 04.06.2011 | Sorry about the flood. Did you swim to the steps okay? |
| Cordia Clemensen 04.06.2011 | Week from hell - student reporting dates released and stricken with a horrible flu bug. On the plus side the insurance deposit has arrived. I have ordered Yamaha HS80M Studio Monitors, and am awaiting the quote on the Xone:42, Roadcase, Kontrol X1, X1 Case and Upgrade to Traktor Pro from Traktor LE from my DJ Store. Finally, I have ordered MacBook and MacMini with associated peripherals and Logic Pro from Apple. I have elected to not have them upgrade the RAM in the MacMini as it's pretty easy to do myself and their upgrade price ($300ish) vs $140 from a third party Apple RAM supplier saves me coin. A bonus this week was the offer of 13 milk crates which I happily accepted - they will be put to use as monitor stands. Their hollow and plastic design means that they won't resonate audibly and colour the sound of the monitors, and they're pretty steady and solid. The only thing I need to do now is find a good price and supplier for the 24" LCDs and to order Nexus and some Waves plugins. I'm a bit swamped with work at the moment but next post I will show some pictures of the empty room and talk about the acoustic work-up we did on it, and how we're going to deal with "small room" syndrome and apply some NON-PERMANENT treatments that won't be attached to the walls. |
| Cordia Clemensen 29.05.2011 |
Originally Posted by mr.drumer.boy
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| Marva Cupid 29.05.2011 | could i set it up so one channel on the back is my main output and one of the headphone outputs as my headphone cue ??? |
| Cordia Clemensen 29.05.2011 |
Originally Posted by mr.drumer.boy
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| Marva Cupid 29.05.2011 | How do u find the notation 2 |
| Chasidy Heckenbach 29.05.2011 | i'd completely forgotten about the "bass boost" button a quick look on uk ebay show's mc303's going for only about 150gbp. not too bad depending on the condition i guess? i remember i had mine on preorder for ages and was lucky to be one of the first to get one in the uk. used to love the arp though having more fun with the one in reason now i guess. edit: released in 1996 according to wikipedia? wow that was a while ago then... |
| Cordia Clemensen 29.05.2011 |
Originally Posted by zestoi
Good times. Especially that pointless "bass boost" knob at the back. |
| Chasidy Heckenbach 29.05.2011 | nice mc303 u used to have. that's the only bit of kit i didn't sell when i sold off all my studio gear a few years ago. i know it's more of a toy than anything but i like it for being a kind of "musical scratchpad". i used to have a mackie as a secondary mixer to my "old but good but way too big" soundtracs 16:8:16. ah... those were the days... sorry for being bugger all help but reading that made me believe about the good old days. also sold off my 1200's at the time which was a mistake probably... even though they wouldn't get much use any more. |
| Cordia Clemensen 29.05.2011 |
Originally Posted by Bisimoto
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| Latina Ebrahimi 29.05.2011 | i run my tracks from a 13'' mbp like the one you want and i never had a bug good luck lookin forward to seeing the development !!! |
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