Building a workstation from scratch ...

[mojobone]

Your room is your room; the single most expensive item in your studio to replace. With care, time invested and careful measurement, its worst failings can be tempered, if not eliminated. Even without treatment, you can train your ears to adjust for your room's deficiencies, but if your monitors are also lying to you, you have no frame of reference; you are lost at sea.

The order of budgetary importance is thus: Transducers, preamps, outboard hardware/cabling, software, and last of all, converters. (everybody can buy the same software, so the other stuff is where you get an edge) The room might be the most important thing, but not everyone is in a situation that allows properly dealing with it; many people rent, or have little choice in the matter of a room, and until you can take measurements, make calculations and understand what they mean, there's little point in worrying; just do the due diligence and compare your mixes to known good ones, and check your work on other systems. Quality nearfields, positioned so as to reduce the influence of the room and at a listening level that doesn't excite the rooms modes or standing waves, should let you get a handle on how your mixes sound.

Barring evidence to the contrary, don't assume your room is killing your mixes; I thought mine was, until I did some measurements and calculations; (using ModeCalc and some other basic tools) turned out my room is (entirely accidentally) very good, due to it's rather unusual dimensions, and my speakers were the culprit. My room can still benefit from some adjustments to the speaker placement and there are a few problem areas (such as above the mix position) that can be further improved, but the point is that I can get professional work done, because I can rely on what I'm hearing.

Due to the vagaries of manufacturer pricing, $1500 is probably not the most cost-effective price point; the 'half the budget on transducers' mishegoss is just a guideline. Monitor speakers are competitive at $500, $1k and $3k; after that, it's $10k, $25k and sky's the limit. (Google Barefoot Audio for some perspective) Of course there's a point of diminishing returns for spending mo' money, meaning that past a given price point, you pay a lot more for smaller and smaller performance increases, which is particularly true of hardware. Oddly, the same need not apply to software, which appears to have nearly identical actual cost to produce, whether the end product is poop or peanut butter. (this says nothing about the retail price, nor the profit margin, mind you, just the cost to invent it)

[mazz]

I think before you start spending money, it's important to determine your short and long term goals for the types of music you are going to be producing.

For instance, if your goal is to produce pop styles, reality show cues and dance type stuff along with some rock, you could do well with a middle of the road DAW computer and Komplete 8 to start with, a decent USB two channel interface if you are only recording vocals and guitars, and maybe some better speakers.

If, on the other hand, you want to jump right into full blown orchestral extravaganzas, then you'll need a stronger computer with more RAM, etc., and at least 3K in sample libraries. Given your budget, I'd call this a longer term goal.

You already have musical skills and good ears, maybe you need to gear up enough to get your sound sources competitive, and then just study and practice mixing in the room you have with the gear you acquire (you'll acquire a steep learning curve at the same time anyway!). By taking your mixes around to several different systems (cars, boom boxes, headphones, friends' houses, etc.) you'll start to learn the anomalies in your room that cause your mixes to be boomy on one system and bass light on another, and you learn how to come up with an "average" that might not sound totally awesome or well balanced in your studio to an outsider, but that translate really well to the outside world.

There's just some things that can't be solved by throwing money at them, and knowledge, experience, skill and taste are just a few. You'll continue to develop those (a lifelong journey, right?) while at the same time upping your production skills and eventually you'll be turning out broadcast quality material.

The studio is our instrument, like it or not, and like any instrument, it takes time and practice.

My 2c

Mazz

[RichardCharles]

Good interview on building a project studio

http://thisweekin.com/pensados-place/40 ... gineering/


21:31 – Introducing Thomas Jouanjean of Northward Acoustics Engineering
24:50 – Where should people place their subwoofers?
27:30 – What should one listen for with speakers?
31:08 – Should I pay more attention to what treatment I put on the walls as opposed to the corners of the room?
37:05 – Why are square rooms considered bad for acoustics?
39:02 – Are having “Clouds” above the mixing position good acoustic treatment?
39:40 – Preferring wood floors over carpet floors
40:22 – Are there any accessible measurement tools that anyone can get their hands on?
42:15 – Can a low ceiling sound good?
43:45 – How Thomas “floats” studio floors

[mazz]

I just want to offer one more thing here by way of comparison:

Our friend matto works in a dining room area that is open to his living room. He has one piece of treatment between his speakers that he also uses as a vocal gobo when vocalists come over. He has Yamaha NS10 speakers and he works at surprisingly low volumes. Up until a couple of years ago, his computer wasn't the most powerful one available. If you went to his house (I've been there several times), you would see that his studio is not all that visually impressive, no large racks of gear or fancy treatments, floating floors, mixing consoles, etc. And yet, his music always sounds great, it doesn't leave his studio until it does.

Our friend matto has well over 1500 pieces of music published and his music is played several times a day literally every day, all over the world, on TV and films.

Just goes to show that it's ultimately not about the gear, the room treatments, etc. All of that stuff is great and fun and useful, but the bottom line is: write great music that is well produced and the rest will come eventually.

In other words, putting the cart before the horse is fine if you can afford it, otherwise, just get to work on the music!!

Mazz

[PeterD]

Wow Mazz!!

GREAT advice!! I was thinking that too. What good is all that fancy stuff if the person using it sucks?? haha
I mean to say what you said - Be the best with what you have and the rest happens. I made a deal with myself... The first check from a music deal gets reinvested! I like your monitors & Komplete 8 components.

Back to work!

[andygabrys]

Good interview on building a project studio

http://thisweekin.com/pensados-place/40 ... gineering/


21:31 – Introducing Thomas Jouanjean of Northward Acoustics Engineering
24:50 – Where should people place their subwoofers?
27:30 – What should one listen for with speakers?
31:08 – Should I pay more attention to what treatment I put on the walls as opposed to the corners of the room?
37:05 – Why are square rooms considered bad for acoustics?
39:02 – Are having “Clouds” above the mixing position good acoustic treatment?
39:40 – Preferring wood floors over carpet floors
40:22 – Are there any accessible measurement tools that anyone can get their hands on?
42:15 – Can a low ceiling sound good?
43:45 – How Thomas “floats” studio floors

and the other episode they mentioned with Bob Hodas:

http://www.pensadosplace.tv/2011/09/13/ ... bob-hodas/