Where the magic happens

September 16, 2010 7:24 PM

Care to post a pic and description of your recording environment?

I finally got around to totally rejigging my so-called studio (actually an attic which was part of a new house we built, and which doubles as my office and workshop). Haven't quite finished, so no pix just yet, but it made me really interested to see where other MeFiMusos are coming up with their stuff. Is yours as lofi and chaotic as mine? I'll post pix later, I promise, along with some pictures and descriptions of of studios past.
posted by unSane (13 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

I bet I'm among the lo-fi-est.
I'm in a concrete-floored basement that I can JUST stand up in.
I finally got around to spending my birthday money last week and bought some new HS50M studio monitors (amazing, btw). I decided to reconfigure the entire layout of everything in the room so I could have the speakers away from any walls beside, behind or above them, which was no easy task. After moving 20 years of accumulated crap and trying to fit shelves of books, cds, albums as well as drums and computers into their new homes, I noticed a puddle of water on the floor in the back corner.
Yesterday when it rained the puddle came back in a big way, seeping up from under the baseboard. So today's fun task is called a waterproofing guy and hoping it's not going to cost thousands of dollars.
I used to have a nice little cozy upstairs room that was warm in the winter but we kept having children and I got booted out.
posted by chococat at 8:03 AM on September 17, 2010


If I knew how to post a photo on here I would... Mine is a tiny box room - a laundry/utility room really - that I commandeered as Operational Headquarters when we moved in and dubbed it The Gin Palace. Hardly room to swing a cat, and I know because I've tried.... There's an outside door in the room with a catflap in it. The Dundee family moggy likes, when circumstances dictate, to avail herself of this facility. Usually hurtling through it at warp factor 5 being pursued by one of the local bruisers. Tail like a bog-brush, ears flat etc. Strangely enough this entertaining little sideshow frequently occurs when I have a mic open and am going for a take. I'm sure the sound of that catflap rattling open/shut is on more than one of my recordings. The cat now has, by my reckoning, about 2 lives left. Thin ice, Sooty, thin ice.......
posted by MajorDundee at 11:31 AM on September 17, 2010 [1 favorite]


The best thing about my attic is that it has sloping walls so there are no standing waves. The only reflections are from the wooden floor, which are generally pretty nice. The worst thing is the tin roof so it's impossible to record while it's raining. Oh, no, hang on, that's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the near-vertical narrow stairs. I managed to get my Fender Twin up there somehow but I'm pretty sure it's never coming down.

It's also my office, which is both a blessing and a curse -- I can pick up the guitar and noodle whenever I want, but it's way too easy to spend a day writing a song instead of writing the film I'm being paid to write.
posted by unSane at 7:46 PM on September 17, 2010


Mine's a laptop sitting on an ikea cabinet, a full-size electric piano, and a few stringed instruments hanging from the wall, in a corner (and I do mean corner) of the kids' playroom. And the kids' drumkit and other instruments are in there, too. Absolutely no concessions to sound quality have been made beyond a rug under the drums.
posted by davejay at 10:41 PM on September 17, 2010


I should take some proper pictures, but I have more of a serious of places where music happens than any dedicated space as such at this point. Drums are in the basement, closest thing to a static setup with a little mixer for the various mics camping out on a TV tray. Guitar amp is down there as well, in the far corner. Electric guitars and banjo currently living on a 3-instrument stand down there, though that changes from month to month.

Upstairs on the main floor I've got the electric piano in the living room. The upright bass in what will in the long run turn properly into The Music Room—add a small desk to use as a workstation, hooks on the wall to hang the various guitars and their cousins, probably the likeliest place to put up some actual monitors if I ever get any. For now it's only gotten as far as having been The Cat Room for about a year, after which we trained them to piss in the basement instead and have recently ripped up the urine-soaked carpet to make the room no longer smell like hell.

Acoustic guitar currently living on a stand in my office; uke lives on the desk or some other flat surface within reach. Condenser mic lives on a boom stand that travels from room to room and floor to floor along with my macbook and my M-Audio interface, the latter two of which are my entire studio as it were. Various small instruments and accessories live on the piano, in the closet of the Music nee Cat Room, or in the basement. Guitar picks live apparently nowhere at all when I actually need one.

It'll be nice to have things centralized somewhat in the music room eventually. I should also look into maybe building some simple baffles for the basement, would help a lot with containing some of the Big Concrete Chamber reverb that tends to land on all my drums and electric guitar tracks.

If I knew how to post a photo on here I would...

If you've got nowhere to post it online, you can just email it to me and I'll happily put it on my flickr account and link to it for you.
posted by cortex at 11:41 AM on September 18, 2010


Hi! Here is where I do stuff.

It is not particularly viable in an acoustic sense, but, well.

So on the top shelf -- just out of frame -- is some rack stuff, like a cheap effects rack and a midi patch bay. The other shelf is "Anders," for a long time my main keyboard but not so much anymore.

In or on the secretary is a Tascam 788 digital recorder, an old '80s Roland sequencer, one of the drum machines, a couple of little keyboards, and various scrap paper, tuning keys, music boxes, and toy amps.

On the table is the Alesis Micron and Mopho Analog synth. The bookshelves have books and also some more drum machines. Then rest of the room has amps, marimbas, mic stands, parts of drum kits, more bookshelves, and a large "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride poster (if I mention the "Pirate Room," this is it and why).

To the left, out of frame, is a closet containing a half-assed vocal booth and stacks of zithers.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 12:53 AM on September 19, 2010


Karlos, holy crap do you have a lot of cool instruments judging from ya Flickr stream.
posted by unSane at 5:23 AM on September 19, 2010


Okay, here's mine. We built this house about three years ago and designed in a massive attic (about 1200 s.f.) to be my office and general storage area. I just finished reorganizing half of it to be more of a studio kind of thing. Although there is no sound absorption anywhere, it sounds great because of the sloping walls. although it's incredibly inconvenient for storage etc.

This is my desk, for once not piled neck high in notes. There's a Mac Pro running logic, a Tascam interface, a little Behringer USB control surface, and a pair of little MA10 monitors, plus a midi keyboard that really needs replacing.

Then there's an early 70s Fender Twin and resissue reverb, tele and bass, plus my vocal mic. An Alesis DM-5 which I still haven't been brave enough to track drums with yet. Then a bunch of other guitars including an S&P acoustic, American Jazzmaster, 335 and a Burns Doublesix 12-string.

Unseen are a few cabinets and milk crates with mics and cables and percussion and stuff.

Oh yeah, and this is the other half of the attic, which I am trying to summon up the energy to address. You can see the ridiculously narrow and steep stairs on the left.

The acoustic drums are down in the basement in the kids' playroom, which means they get used quite a lot.
posted by unSane at 8:48 AM on September 20, 2010


I've rearranged my studio a bit, but it looks pretty much the same as this. The desk with the monitor on it has been moved to the wall on the right so it is up against the window. That new position coupled with these huge absorption panels up against the wall behind the desk has improved the sound quite a bit.

The ceilings in the room are about 12ft high and the room goes on towards the back about 20ft. In the middle of the room I have a large IKEA EXPEDIT shelf filled with books and other knickknacks. This does a lot to reduce the echo. In order to further reduce the echo when doing vocals, I bought a reflexion filter from SE Electronics. I also made an adjustable gobo by attaching a 2m X 1m piece of eggshell acoustic foam to 2 microphone stands with big carpenter clips. I put the reflexion filter in front and the gobo in back curving around me a bit and the reflections are almost completely eliminated.

This is also good to use when you just want a bit of separation when tracking something quieter and you want to minimize the noise coming from the fans in your gear.

The Studio construction section over at gearslutz has great ideas for building inexpensive absorbers and filters for studios.
posted by chillmost at 5:21 AM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]


What's the organ you have there, chillmost?
posted by unSane at 6:58 AM on September 22, 2010


The big one is an Elgam Broadway 444. I got it for free when a shop around the corner opened up. The previous tenant left it there and they just wanted it gone. It sounds like this. It's fun to play but it takes up too much space. The little orange thing on top is a toy keyboard called a Bontempi B103 that I found on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up with the trash. It actually makes sounds by blowing air over tiny plastic reeds. It makes really interesting drone sounds. Other than that it's pretty worthless.
posted by chillmost at 2:26 PM on September 22, 2010


The little orange thing on top is a toy keyboard called a Bontempi B103 that I found on the sidewalk waiting to be picked up with the trash. It actually makes sounds by blowing air over tiny plastic reeds.

Wow, I've got a Magnus Chord Organ -- works on the same principle -- that was also found out waiting with the trash. Weird. I use it on this song.

Karlos, holy crap do you have a lot of cool instruments judging from ya Flickr stream.

It's a bad habit, especially since I can't really play any of them.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 4:57 PM on September 22, 2010


Things haven't changed appreciably since I took this picture. I've added some hard drives, a better wireless router, and it's generally more of a mess (I took that picture to celebrate a rare cleaning). Since this is just a corner of my living room, I do most of my playing with headphones on, plugged direct into the MOTU, which doesn't sound all that bad.

My amp lives at my guitar player's house where we practice -- I need some pictures of it-- Mesa Boogie D-180-- and I usually keep a bass or two (ooold picture) on a stand within reach of my back. The majority of my collection is, again, at my Guitar player's house because his very un-friendly pit bull has free reign over the house all day, and no one knows where he lives. I kinda wish the vintage guitar market wasn't so insane -- I have no intention of ever selling anything, and the sky-high values make me nervous to even take a couple of them out of doors any more. I miss playing my Thunderbird. I really am going to do a "family portrait" one of these days -- I have basses that haven't been out of the case in 10 years. I'm forgetting what the look like.

I wish I had a room where I could set up some mics and stands, but alas.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:37 AM on September 24, 2010


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