Audio Recording Tips

You might have read before our tutorial on “How to Improve Home Studio Acoustic Treatment” .The solution to the problem is not yet provided, below is the suggested room set up that can be applied to any home studio:

Some very important things you need to know:

a. length x = length y = length z , so it means that x , y and z formed an equilateral triangle.

The purpose why this should be an equilateral triangle is for optimal stereo listening. Of course, you should point the monitors to you in such a way that it forms a triangle like what is shown in the above screenshot.

b. The optimal length e can be calculated as: 38% x length h. length e is the distance from the engineer to the wall facing him. The reason for the 38% is discussed here thoroughly: http://www.realtraps.com/art_room-setup.htm

c. The blue colors on the corners are the “bass traps”. The overall purpose is to absorb low frequencies and to prevent reflections which will distort the “real” bass sound level. Read the rest of this entry »

Update July 29, 2010: If are looking for tips on how to setup your recording studio in terms of acoustic placement. Refer to this tutorial: Home Studio Recording and Mixing Studio Setup Acoustic Design.

For beginners in home recording and mixing, it is of primary importance and priority that you acoustically treat your room for flattest frequency response. Flattest frequency response tells the truth, nothing more nothing less. So it means that what you really hear during mixing can translate “accurately” to a wide variety of audio reproduction systems (like iPod, CD discman, television, radio, or even hi-fidelity systems with subwoofers or not).

If the room is not acoustically treated to handle “frequency” biases, your mix might only sound good in your studio but sounds awful when reproduced in other audio monitoring systems. No matter how expensive your nearfield monitor, you still need to acoustically treat your room.

If you are successful on this, it means that what you really hear can “accurately” translate to other audio systems. So if you mix it great, it will surely sound good in other audio systems. This is how important to have a mixing studio well acoustically treated.

What are the causes of this “frequency” biases problem that makes your mix lie to you (sound good in your studio but sounds bad in other studios or audio monitoring/speaker systems)?

Consider the arrangement below (which is not correct and not optimal placement for mixing records at home):

Problems of this setup:

1.) Standing waves and reflected waves, distort the real level of the frequency being heard by the engineer. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a short guide on how to effectively use low pass filter and high pass filter in your home mixing and mastering sessions.

Let’s start with the properties of a filter. You might have read our post on What does a High Pass Filter do? – Technical Explanation and Plot , so you have a clear idea of how the high pass filter works.

A filter is a signal processing unit that “attenuates” specific range of frequencies. Based on that definition, you might consider a parametric or a graphic equalizer as a “filter” also; yes it is.

But what makes a low pass filter and high pass filter special is the ‘shelving” action on a wide limit of frequency ranges or even to infinity.

By definition>

A “low pass filter” allows frequency lower than the cutoff frequency to pass while severely attenuating above it.

So for example, if the cutoff frequency of the low pass filter is 16Khz, then it is said to pass or allow 16Khz below while attenuate severely the frequencies above 16Khz.

This is opposite to high pass filter which allows high frequencies and block lower than the cutoff.

So how are you going to use these tools in a mixing and mastering session? Read the rest of this entry »