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Old 03-08-2010, 08:37 PM   #63
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BananaFish View Post
Hi Yep,

First, thanks for all of your helpful advice in this thread and in 'recordings sound like ass' - I've been learning a lot from these - much appreciated.

Just wanted to clarify your quote above, as I wasn't sure if you meant that this size of room is a problem that is not solvable by any amount of treatment, or if you mean to imply that the DIY broadband absorbers would allow a small room to become a usable recording space for acoustic guitar / male vocal.

I have a small room for recording where I think the shortest dimension is around 10 foot or so.

Thanks
Your ears and your recordings are the best arbiter, but I did not mean to imply that it's impossible to make good recordings with sub-12-foot ceilings. You can make good recordings with sub-7-foot ceilings, but it's harder and more limiting.

Without looking up tables and wavelength values, there is a sort of useful cutoff at about 12 feet/3.5 meters where you have enough room for medium-low bass waves to develop (like the bottom string of a guitar). This also extends to low baritone voices, etc.

Close-miking and nearfield monitoring can mitigate (but never eliminate) a lot of the room effects, simply because the mic or your ears are picking much more of the direct sound, and less of the room effects.

You can get a decent monitoring situation in almost any well-treated space.

Recording becomes trickier the more you get into physically bigger sound sources. I.e., a combo amp is easier than an upright bass, and a grand piano is almost impossible in a small room (assuming you want it to still sound like a grand piano-- you can always stick a mic right up against the strings).

But in all cases, good sound is good sound. In a recording sense, even though the acoustics are harder, the judgement is easier: does it sound good through the monitors? But that requires monitors that give an accurate picture to begin with, which is trickier to determine.

So the baseline is to start with a trustworthy monitoring setup, which basically means a monitoring space where mixes sound the same when you play them back on earbuds, in the car, in the living room, at a friend's house, through a nightclub PA... just like real records "sound the same" even through different-sounding speakers. If you have that, and use that as the basis for the rest of your decision-making, everything else falls into place.
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