dilemma... how to arrange the studio?

[christian]

I'm having problems deciding how my studio should be arranged. Here's a render of the current setup...



The problem is that with the control room arrangement, when facing the mix position, the doors in the front right and rear right corners prevent me from placing corner traps in these areas. The left side of the room has no doors to get in the way of the corners... so I could place traps there, but I'm worried it would be so asymmetrical it would throw things off...

So here's my question. Would it be better to switch the mix position to along the long wall? I've heard that you generally want to have the speakers facing the long way into a room, but I think that if I put them along the long wall instead I can put traps in both front corners and some on the sides. Sound getting into the kitchen and bouncing around might be wierd... or it might act as a difuser? I dunno...

What do the experts think I should do with this setup? I have 703 waiting for me to figure out what to do with it.

Christian

[Bob]

What did you make that picture with ?

[christian]

blender 2.31a...

its free and open source...

wait till they fix the game engine... I'll be able to post an interactive walk through on the web when thats done... run around in it like Doom or something, using a web plugin. The game engine was removed circa version 2.18, and they're working on putting it back. I could downgrade, but don't have the time to mess with it...

pretty cool, eh? :)

Christian.

[Bob]

blender 2.31a...
Gorgeous. I once considered getting Poser or Brice, but this looks cute.
Certainly your render is exquisitely captivating (for walls).

I was hoping it was a home modeler program though.

[christian]

blender is nice... it takes a little getting used to... but so does any other 3d modeller/renderer. you cant really go wrong, cause its free. If you don't like it, its not like you just blew hundreds of $$$ on max or something.

I've "unofficially evaluated" bryce and max and truespace and some others, but kept finding myself coming back to the free tools like povray and blender...

its not explicitly a home modeller, but can be used for just about anything... check out the blender resources on the web and see what I mean. Some pretty amazing things are being done with it... incredible still shots and mind blowing animations.

I used a couple tricks to make this look nice... I used the toon shader to make the lines pop out and misused radiosity to make the walls glow blue and red in proximity to the mic and speakers (but that was an accident).

anyway, here's a link:
http://www.blender3d.org/
ooooh... 2.32 is out!
give it a try... have fun.

Christian.

btw... blender is cross platform too...

[jcgriggs23]

You don't give dimensions for either length or width (or I missed them) Without them, specific advice is not really possible.

The general idea for monitoring is to provide "one clean pass" from the speakers to the mix position, free from early reflections in the first 20 msec or so. If you are using "near field" monitors, most of your problems for early reflections will be pretty close at hand to the mix position - mixing desk, computer monitors, etc.

Unless you have the depth (at least 12 feet or so from the mix position to the rear wall) to prevent sound coming back in under 20 msec, you really can only do what you can with absorption and diffusion (which take space in themselves.) If the path difference firing the monitors one way or the other is not that great, I'd tend to go with the one that gave me the best possibilities for treating the wall the monitors were firing into.

My $0.02 (Canadian),
John

[christian]

dimensions are as follows:

control
L: 15' 8"
W: 12' 2"
H: 6' 7" (drop ceiling) 7' 9" (real ceiling)

tracking
L: 8' 5"
W: 12' 2" + little triangle in the corner near the mic is 3' 10" deep
H: 6' 7" (drop ceiling) 7' 9" (real ceiling)

kitchen
about the same size as the control room, but with cabinets, stove, fridge.. hard to measure w/ one person right now...

Outer walls are stone. All walls (including outer walls) are finished with 1/8" plywood paneling. There are a couple windows not pictured. Floors are tile on concrete. There are a couple area rugs on the floor. Its a basement apartment.

We're mainly recording electronic music. The only real acoustic sounds being recorded are vocals and a trumpet sometimes... so I'm trying to make the little tracking room/vocal booth pretty dead. We're not doing any acoustic drums or anything, so a nice live room isnt very important in this case... am I right? The main thing I'm concerned with right now is the control room... any advice would be appreciated.

thanks for your help.
Christian.

[Paul Woodlock]

What did you make that picture with ?

hehe - that was my first question after I saw the picture :)

.............................


Would it be better the position the mixing desk/speakers with the kitchen behind you?

Just a thought?

[christian]

Would it be better the position the mixing desk/speakers with the kitchen behind you?

Just a thought?

Thats my question. Maybe I wasn't clear in my original post, but I was asking if I should put the mix position along the long wall instead of the short one.. with the speakers facing the kitchen.

I'm thinking that placing the mix postion so that it faces the kitchen will make things easier. I can place floor to ceiling 45 degree 703 wedges in both (new) front corners this way, making things more symmetrical. I also think it would be more comfortable to work in. But I don't know if pointing the speakers into the room the short way, or having the kitchen behind me to bounce sound around in strange ways would outweigh these benefits. I wanted to run it by the people on here to see if it makes sense acoustically before I go and rearrange the whole thing...

So, if you were setting up this studio, how would you arrange it?

Christian.

[Scott R. Foster]

Me - I'd do it like you got it and just do panels on the walls in the corner [including the backs of doors] where I couldn't do a diagonal/wedge.