Oversight correction

Hey all, Webmaster Johnny here.

Taking a short break from our Adventures in Home Studio Construction series to cover a quick little oversight. Several of our readers pointed out in the first home studio article that we only featured products from one retailer. What actually happened is we covered the exact items that were purchased, from the exact online retailer that was used. We did not intend to slight any other retailer at all, we just documented what we had used, and the same goes for our construction articles. We featured the retailer we actually used.

So here are a couple other options for your music shopping entertainment:










As always, try to shop close to home as much as you can, but if you live in the middle of nowhere, or your local retailer does not carry a full line of products, have a look around at some of these online stores to get an idea what is out there. Then do some research and read reviews about the products you have in mind before you go in and lay down your hard earned money. Some smaller mom and pop music stores have partnered with the online giants listed above, and will price match what you see in their online catalogs (and in some cases, will even beat the price by a couple bucks) and you get to know your local music store folks, which comes in handy when you need to get something repaired or are in the market for something new.

That's it for this quick update! Keep on rockin.



PS; I'm sure there are other things in the construction articles I will have to go back in and fix or update in a few days as people make them obvious to me, so check back from time to time.

Adventures in Home Studios, part 2

In our last installment of Adventures in Home Studio Building, I mentioned that I would tell you later about the physical changes to the room used. Well, here we go!

As mentioned before, the changes had to be weighed against the WAF. The WAF is the wife approval factor, and in this project it was much reduced, as his wife also is a musician and would be using the studio space. So she was willing to make some sacrifices for the sound quality in the room, but she still wanted it to look nice when company came over. Your mileage may vary.

The room in question was formerly a spare bedroom with a built in closet that was less than useful and very poorly placed. It was situated so you walked into the end of it coming in the door and prevented moving any furniture larger than a plant stand in our out of the room without an engineering degree. Simply put, it had to go. So we took the hammers to that right away. It came down with a lovely crash and a pile of drywall dust, and left a wonderful hole in the old carpet where it once stood, along with a substantial scar on the wall where it was removed.

We had planed on laying new drywall over the old, so this was not an issue, but we at least had to smooth out the mess left behind first, which of course made a lot more dust. Fortunately, we had not removed the door to the room like we had originally planned on doing, but unfortunately, it was one of those modern doors with a 2” gap at the bottom and a lot of dust leaked out into the house and had to be cleaned up. And drywall dust is awful on computers and recording gear, just something to keep in mind when you are doing remodeling.

So the next step was to tear the old carpet out, which was actually needed. It was worn and stained, and pretty ugly anyway. That took the better part of an afternoon, as it had been glued to the floor and the glue held the backing foam really well. So after we got that all scraped off the room was ready to start rebuilding. We finished up the clean up and took a break until the next weekend.

Back at it the next weekend we were hampered by rain (which meant no cutting the drywall out in the middle of the driveway like we had planned), but managed to get a lot done. First, and most important in getting the room more suitable, was new drywall over the existing drywall. This does a couple things; it insulates the room for more efficiency heating and cooling, and it adds mass to the walls to help reduce the transmission of low frequency sounds from outside in and inside out. We used a combination of construction adhesive and drywall screws to mount the sheets of 5/8” drywall over the existing 1/2” drywall (which may have actually been 3/8” - it was pretty thin and flimsy). We also made sure to put up the second layer at a 90 degree angle to the original and were very careful to not line up seams so any given section of the room had at least one solid layer of drywall even without drywall compound.

We later realized it may have been a good idea to add rigid foam insulation between the layers of drywall to absorb even more sound, but it would have made the installation a lot more complicated than our skills allowed for, and because the floor and ceiling would not have the same level of isolation, some sound would still leak through.

Then came mudding the seams with drywall compound and tape, and once that was done we let it stand for a few days to dry before we sanded. Our mud work left a bit to be desired, so a second pass of compound had to be done after sanding (some pros can take multiple passes and get a wall finished so well you will never be able to find the seam). A good illustration of how the pros do it can be found here:

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/overview/0,,410343,00.html

About this time, we started talking about finish techniques and what needed to be done for the WAF. We settled on a low wainscoted wall with a textured finish above. (Dammit! Had we known that was going to happen, we wouldn't have had to redo the seams! We could have just textured over it.) We had been given several photos to go from, and printouts of a few different pages from the net.

Here are a few links that can get you started if you are going to try this route yourself – note that we did no cross troweling, so all our texture runs up and down:

http://www.hometips.com/diy-how-to/venetian-plaster-paint-textures.html

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/venetian-plaster-and-strie-technique/index.html

What we did is pretty much a really horrible drywall compound job, as opposed to a real, proper venetian plaster job. We got some compound on the wide drywall trowel and just dragged it up the wall with the trowel at about a 45 degree angle to the wall, then pulled it back down leaving a ragged texture behind. It didn't take very long to get the room complete, and in a few hours we went back in and did a second coat to add depth to the effect. It is worth noting here that we did not use colored compound, we had planned to paint over the walls after everything was dry. So after the game, we finished the walls down to just below where the wainscoting was going to stop and let it dry for a couple days.

After everything was dry, we realized we had some high spots in the compound, so we did a light sanding of the rough walls to knock the high spots off. We had some left over compound and an idea, so we tried it out, and sure enough, it works! We had several plastic stencils from Hobby Lobby that were intended to do painted borders with, and we simply troweled drywall compound over the stencil onto our test board and lifted it off. It leaves a beautiful, raised image of what ever you have a stencil of. So after sanding and wiping the walls, we did a stencil pattern to give the walls even more texture. Even in the ugly nearly monochrome of drywall compound on Sheetrock, it looked pretty cool.

What we did is pretty much a simplified (read: lazy) version of classical carved plaster walls, which if you are feeling really artistic, you can get a feel for here:

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-make-plaster-relief-walls/index.html

Now for a minute, lets step back and explain a little theory. Which is probably wrong. The thought is making a textured wall would help to break up sound reflections in the room. In reality, the differences in height on the rough wall are so small as to do little more than slightly blur the reflections, so overall the effect is only visual, not sonic. But it does add a lot to the look of the studio room, and having a room that is pleasant to be in helps the creation process. If you don't believe it, paint your studio a color you really hate and see how much time you spend in there. Fluorescent day-glo colors with really bright light for example vs a nice comfortable room done in warm golds and greens or what ever you like. The room done in comfortable colors will be much more inviting and you will write a lot fewer “I hate this room” songs.

Once we got the plaster relief stuff dried and sanded slightly to round the edges, we cleaned the bejesus out of the room and got ready to paint. We did the base coat of primer with a roller and the color coats with a wide brush, to add even more texture. We only brushed the paint up and down so all the brush strokes lined up with the direction of the texture work. We had some issue with the raised texture bits catching paint and creating drips, but it was easy enough to fix. Then we allowed everything to dry while we worked in the driveway on creating all the wainscoting.

Instead of using traditional beadboard wainscoting, my buddy wanted a more European paneled look. To do this, we kind of cheated. Normally, the large open panels are made from lots of boards glued up into a solid panel, or laid on next to each other. We used a kind of plywood called Luan, and stained it. It is about 10 bucks a 4'x8' sheet at our local Lowes Hardware store, and is about 1/4” thick. One side looks really awful, and the other is usually pretty decent. We had to dig through the entire stack to find a bunch of boards that all looked similar, and had interesting grain. While there, we got a bunch of 1x6 to rip down with the table saw and make the stiles that will cover the gaps between the sheets of luan once everything is in place. We also picked up stain at this time, and our total bill for that trip was about 145 bucks. It turned out we had to go back and get a couple more sheets of luan, since we didn't get enough to account for cutting mistakes.

This is the page we used for our idea on what we were doing, with substitutions in materials:

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-cut-stain-and-install-wainscoting-panels/index.html

We did not use the stain conditioner mentioned in the article, and in retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to have done so; the stain is uneven in some places. We had a couple cutting errors when it came to outlet box placement (which should not have happened, since we had the exact same problem with the drywall and should have learned our lesson then). The drywall errors were easy to hide, since they were behind the wainscoting, but the screw ups in the panels really showed. We were able to use the scrap panels for other stuff though, so it wasn't a total waste.

Once we got the panels stained and cut, we mounted them with construction adhesive and left over drywall screws, making sure the screws were located under where the stiles would cover. Then we got all the stiles cut, sanded them and did some basic router work to give them a little detailing and stained them. This article pretty much covers how we did that:

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-dress-up-a-dining-room-with-custom-wainscoting/index.html

The only exception here was we hand drove the nails, and in a few places a missed hammer blow marked the wood. Ah well, it adds “character” I guess. We also took a couple shortcuts here, just butt-jointing the stiles instead of routing the ends to all lock together. Some small gaps show in a couple places, but only at the top and with the little lip nailed on top, you don't really see it unless you are sitting on the floor and know where to look.

We had tacked the baseboards in place to install the stiles, but removed them to allow room for the carpet installation. Fortunately, we had remembered to leave space for the thickness of the carpet and new carpet pad, or we would have had a hell of a mess to fix later.

We took some of the left over 1x3 material we had ripped down out of 1x6 and made a sort of crown molding around the upper edge of the room as well, and installed that with finish nails.

Now the walls were done, so most of our work was done. My buddies brother in law came in and did the electrical reinstall. Since we had made the walls thicker, he had to mount box extenders and reinstall all the wall jacks. He also laid the new carpet, and once that was down we were able to go in and install the baseboards, completing the room work.

If I do say so myself, it looked pretty damn good for a couple of amateurs!

Next up, we cover sound treatment in the room and how to make that wife acceptable.

Adventures in Home Studios, part 1

Ok guys, time to talk gear.

I just helped a friend set up a home studio over the summer, and I figured that was probably what a lot of readers out there are probably into these days. I will cover live music tips and tricks in other posts, so stay tuned for those.

I have to say, this was something of a surprise. Back in the old days, we built home studios out of what we could get our hands on, and learned to make do with some pretty awful crap. From radio shack mixers and mics, to old couch foam stapled to chipboard, nothing in our old home studios could be counted as “semi-pro”. Sure we had fun, but the recordings were really pretty awful. Some of the songs were ok, but the sound quality was just so bad you didn't want to listen long enough to get the song stuck in your head.

I had done some work in pro studios over the years, and knew the quality and sound of their gear, but only in the last couple years have I started playing with the idea of a home studio again. But I found out things have changed a whole lot since the days long gone. For the same price we spent on crap that barely worked, you can get some pretty good gear now days. And a lot of the stuff we jury-rigged, you can now buy for peanuts, and it works better to boot!

So my buddy wanted to build a little studio in his house for podcasting and recordings of he and his wife playing acoustic guitars and singing. They are both talented players, but know very little about recording gear. He asked me about giving him a hand late last year and we finally got to it in early spring. Hey, at least I didn't have to help him move into a 3rd floor apartment. We came up with a plan after looking at his budget, and figuring in the WAF (wife acceptance factor). We are all pretty handy people, so we did not have to budget for hiring a contractor or the like for some of the renovations.

I will go into detail about all the fun we had renovating in a later blog about home studios, as I want to do a little more research and get some links together for you guys in one easy location.

Once the drywall was up and the paint dry, we started unpacking the boxes of gear he had ordered online. We did some searching, and found a good price point on all the gear he wanted, and used that to base our ordering plan on. We decided to get everything through Music123.com, since we could save shipping costs (they have free shipping on most orders over 30 bucks, unless its something big or way heavy, like a 4x12 cabinet).

This was the link that sold him:

Cash Back and Free Gear at the Music123.com Rebate Center


I never did figure out the points system, but he read up on it and decided it would help him save some dough (which I was hoping would be spent on beer, I will admit it).

So here is the gear we got him (part 1 – in a later post I will show you the rest and explain it all and give you some tips we learned). First was his microphone choice. He has been doing a lot of research, and went over to a couple other guys home studios and used their gear to see if it works for him. He settled on the MXL V63M condenser microphone. For his voice and guitar, this was the smoothest choice at under a C-note.
Here's a link if you would like a look:

MXL V63M Condenser Studio Microphone Standard World-class large-diaphragm sound at a rock-bottom price!

I had only used the MXL 990 and SP-1 large diaphragm condensers in the entry level category prior to this, and the V63M is probably worth a few bucks more than either of those mics for his application. This can vary for yours though. If you know someone with another microphone (or better yet, many more) go try them first and see if they fit your voice. Microphones can be surprisingly subtle, and sometimes you may find that something that sounds good for your band mates voice sounds horrible with yours. That's ok! That's why they make more than one model of mic.

So we got him a nice entry level microphone, now we needed some way to keep it from falling on the floor. He asked me about the crude shock mounts we used to build out of aluminum cans and rubber bands that we just taped onto our mic stands, and I suggested we keep looking, since those sucked, looked awful and tended to cut you if you got near them. And for clarification, the MXL comes with a mount on it, but you get a bit of noise up through the stand with that style of mount. A shock mount is much better for isolation, just in case you bump the stand.

So for a few more bucks, we picked this up as well:

Musicians Gear Studio Microphone Shock Mount Black Condenser Cloth-lined clamp interior. Die-cast steel adapter with 5/8" - 27 threads. Angle adjustments lock into place.

Now we had his microphone and a shock mount. I gave him one of my old heavy as heck stands and some mic cables and he was ready to hook up to his board. He had picked up a Peavy 6 channel USB mixer without tellin me about it (I would have suggested getting the 8 channel or 12 – it can't hurt to have extra channels and its not much more in cost):

Peavey PV6USB Compact USB Mixer Standard 4 RQ (reference-quality) low noise microphone inputs. USB jack. Channels 3 and 5 with stereo line inputs. 3-band EQ on channels 1-2. LED clip, signal. 1 effects send with stereo output. 1 stereo effects returns. Control room output. Global 15 volt phantom power, tape to control room and tape to mix assignments. Stereo Output 1/4 inch balanced connectors. Rugged console design.

So the basics were all set unpacked and we made a hell of a mess of the room with all the wrappers and boxes. We had the table set up in the studio a week before, and the computer and all of it's gear was already up and running.

Set up only took us a half hour, and that wouldn't have been as long, but we had managed to loose the power supply for the mixer in the pile of junk, and my buddy was pretty sure that Peavy had forgotten to pack one. So he called their customer service while I cleaned up the junk, then got to explain to their customer service rep that we were just idiots when I found the adapter. By the way, good response time on customer service! We were both pretty impressed. We had no trouble plugging in everything and firing up to track.

Here is where my one tiny bitch about the Peavy mixer showed up; we had to find a pen to push the recessed button for phantom power. (Phantom power is power from the mixer to the mic, since condensers require a small charge between the diaphragm and the plate to work – if you plug a condenser into a mixer without phantom power, it won't produce any signal at all.) I guess they do that to keep it from being accidentally turned on or off while you are using the controls on the board though.

We got him in position with his guitar and he started playing, and in no time we had a track. Then we reset the microphone and had him do his vocal take. Also quick and easy. We plugged in headphones for him to listen to his guitar track so he could get the take lined up and all was well.

Until we listened back.

Now, don't take this the wrong way. The mic is too sensitive. It picks up everything including me scratching myself while he was singing, the neighbors really loud car stereo and every tiny little sound in the room while we tracked. Now this is actually a good problem to have. All those sounds were pushed down in the track, as the guitar and vocals were close to the microphone and were much louder, but its pretty amazing how much this thing picks up.

I see this post has gotten pretty long, so I will tell you how we fixed that issue in the next installment. Stay tuned, that's where the really useful stuff starts!

The Loudness War

The loudness war is a phrase that describes a trend in recorded music over the last couple of decades. This trend is to make everything seem louder by reducing the level between the loudest part of a song and the quietest part. Now, this topic is a pretty heated one, so let me lay out some of the basics for you so you can study it with a better idea whats going on here.

Music is a series of waves moving through the air that make our eardrum move so we can hear it. Well, all sound is really, from your dads “pull my finger” explosion to the sound of a train in the distance, to your favorite band live on stage. These waves are recorded in a studio with electronic equipment so that other electronic equipment can reproduce it for you to listen to when ever you feel like it. Cause hauling a band around in the back of your geo metro is not the easy to do.

Ok, I could be off there... some music is recorded live, sure. Either with good equipment, or the tape deck you have taped to your butt. But lets just talk about studio music here for this post.

In a studio, the engineer, producer and band all work together to get that band's “sound” on record. Now days it's usually done with digital equipment, but it used to be all analog with the stuff recorded to a wide spool of magnetic tape. Magnetic tape allowed the engineer to do some tricks that cant be done with digital these days. If you push more sound onto tape than actually fits on the tape, you get distortion that sort of smears the sound. In small doses it actually sounds pretty good to us. That distortion is what makes analog sound “warm” to us. But when you do the same thing to digital, it makes a sound a lot like listening to your computer modem on dial up... it is friggin awful. Not only does it not sound “warm” it doesn't sound like anything pleasant at all. Its hissy, screechy noise. So engineers really try hard to not let that happen.

The problem is, producers and some bands want everything louder, pushed as close to that horrible screech without going over as they can get it. Sometimes they goof. Not only is it louder, sometimes its screechy too. Metallica's newest album, Death Magnetic, is a very good example of this. It's really loud, and in a lot of places, it is too loud. Some people don't seem to mind, but a lot of us do. Now if you rip it to mp3 and play it on your discount, knock off iPod, you might not be able to hear it. But on a good home system, its pretty awful. Which is a pity, there are some great songs on Death Magnetic.

Metallica is just another victim of the loudness war. It's hard to say who goofed here, and not the purpose of this blog to point fingers at all. It is just a good example of what can happen.

So why push everything so loud? Well, a lot of people seem to follow the theory that louder is better. Certainly, the quiet parts are a lot harder to hear in your car with the windows down in heavy traffic. So the thought was “if we make the quiet parts louder, people can hear them better”. It actually sort of works. The problem is that when you aren't in your car, there are far less dynamics from quiet to loud. The distance between quiet and all knobs on 11 is way less. So two things happen. The music comes out as a sort of solid stream, it doesn't build up and fade back to create tension. When the soft guitar jumps to the singer screaming all out it doesn't blow you back in your seat like it used to. The second thing is it makes our ears fatigue faster, so we don't feel like listening as long. And that sucks.

So making things louder over all isn't really like turning the volume knob all the way up. It's a lot more like putting your favorite song on Ritalin... no excitement. Just there. Boring.

Now, if you had the same song with more dynamics, it feels more alive, more energetic. If you have remasters of some old stuff and the original versions, you can probably compare for yourself. The remaster is probably a lot louder, but doesn't have as wide a space between loud and quiet. Not every remaster has been compressed like this though, so you might hit a freak that managed to not be a casualty of the loudness war. A good example might be the new Beatles box set... I have not heard it yet, but I am suspicious its been compressed and made louder.

Now that we have these basics covered, I will probably come back to this again in a few posts. More than likely, I will get all cheesed off when I hear one of my favorite songs remastered louder and come back here and post a heck of a rant again.

Til then, try to keep track of your marbles!

Music and the Man

Ok, so now that I have this internet thing kinda figured out, let's really get after it.

I was big into the local music scene a while back. I played in some pretty awful bands, and I promoted some other pretty awful bands. Since no one seems to have heard of them, I was probably not a great promoter (ha!). But it allowed me to learn a lot about what was going on at the time, and some of that still applies today.

The big dream of every band is to get signed to a major label deal. But if you read about it today, it sounds like an awful idea. There is so much crap on the internet about how labels are screwing bands and that sort of thing. To some extent, some labels do screw bands. But music is a business, and the labels know screwing their money making cash cow isn't going to make them rich.

Sure, the labels using the RIAA to hunt down fans and sue them into the stone age looks like a dumb idea from the outside, but let's face it, they are actually trying to protect their bands and their revenue stream. Some labels may have been unwise when it came to digital downloads, and thought it was another flash in the pan fad, like 8-track tapes, cassettes and CD's. And yeah, some labels thought all those technologies were not worth investing in until it was damn near too late then as well. But not all.

Let's take a quick look at what the myth is vs the reality of it. Just know a lot of this is a sweeping generalization, and presented with my limited view of it, just like most of the other stuff you read on the net. It may or may not be the golden word on this. Ready? Let's do this;

The myth: the labels are money grubbing bastards out to screw bands.

The reality: the labels handle all the parts of the music business that the band doesn't have the time, tools or skills to do.

What that means is the label exists so the band has more time to do what they should be doing, and that is making music. This could be in the studio to create a new album, or on the road playing gigs from tiny bars to packed stadiums. The band just has to think about playing, not about things like who will pay the caterer for the tiny sandwiches backstage, who will clean the bathrooms, who will rent the bus, maintain it, hang the lights, print the tickets, push the broom and turn off the lights at the end of the night.

If you are in a small band playing bars, you probably do some of this yourself while the bar staff does the rest. It sucks having to load you own van don't it? Well, that's a hidden part of getting signed to a major. They make sure you have a couple of instrument techs, a cartage company and loaders to take your 20 foot tall blow up devil off the truck and get it set up behind the drum riser.

They also do a ton of crap tiny independent bands have to do for themselves. Things like calling radio networks to broker deals to get the bands music on air, setting up the bands website, making sure the CD art isn't printed upside down in pastels, and a ton of other suck job stuff you never hear about. There are dozens of other people working, and working hard, for every member of the band you see on stage once you have hit the big time.

Then there are the hidden costs the label swallows you almost never hear about. You know that local indie band you and your buddies liked that got signed to a label and went on a tour of every dive in 38 states? The band that so far hasn't sold more than about 12 CD's to their moms? The bigger bands are also paying for the little bands road crews and all the helpers to give them a shot at becoming a big band as well. Without the big band covering the cost through the label, and spreading the money and risk, lots of great bands would have never gotten a chance to get out and get seen.

Back in my day, Guns N Roses was that little band. They had a good following on the strip in LA, but no one in the middle of the country had any idea who they were, until they got signed as a tiny little band and were allowed to tour with the big boys like Areosmith. And then their album suddenly exploded through. You just about couldn't spin the FM dial without hearing Sweet Child 'O Mine on every station, from the rock stations to the tiny indie stations. Hell, I think I even heard it on the local country station, and that was back when country was country and we didn't have things like "hard country" or crossover players like Kidd Rock or Sheryl Crow. They went from a local act with a decent following, but small by national standards, to megastars in about 8 months. Not only did they pay back the label for the loan that allowed them to get started, they made money. A lot of money. And some of that money had to go to pay all the bus drivers, guitar techs, helper monkeys, top hat polishers and what ever else it took to get out and tour like maniacs for years on end. Sure, the label took that money off the top, but either way, someone was going to have to pay it out, or the tour would never have happened. And something else the "evil" label did with some of the money Guns N Roses made happened: they used that money to help other upcoming acts have a chance to be as big as Guns.

So is the label really evil here? Or are they more like a bank or savings and loan? A pain in the butt sometimes, but there to allow you to do what you want? I know a lot of the bands I was into were pretty small, and this "unfair" system allowed them to have a chance to hone their craft, and eventually release the album that would make them a major. And just to name drop a band that is the perfect example of where this post was designed to go in the first place:

Metallica

Yeah, that's right. The biggest hard rock/metal band ever was another tiny little band at one time, and someone at one of the majors took a chance on them. Their first album sold a pretty decent number of copies for an underground band, but without major label support they would never have been able to do the Black Album. Sure, they could have labored on as an indie band for as long as they have been out there, dozens of indie bands are still doing it today. But they would not have had the resources available to them to make that album that would make them a name your mom's hairdresser knows today. That's the "evil" labels doing their job.

So I will talk about this more later, with some more in depth examples. But up next I want to get into something that has been bugging the crap out of me and is part of the reason I decided to try this blogging thing in the first place. And that is... (insert scary music here)

The Loudness War

If you don't know what it is, you will after my next few posts.

Try to hold on to your Marbles until then.

Johnny finally found his Marbles!!

Hey all J. Marbles here, I finally found my way online to do this blogging thing after all these years. No idea where this will go, but probably me complaining about traffic, tellin ya what I have been up to and so forth.

See ya all later!

Johnny Marbles