Bass traps etc.

It can be seen in the previous post that minimal treatment has been applied at this stage. Three wedge tiles were left over from the booth, so these have been positioned behind the three front monitors. However, it is hoped, when funds allow(!) to apply a few more to the rear wall and ceiling and also to incorporate a bass trap in each corner. The bass traps will either be off the shelf from the same place as the tiles were purchased from, or they may be made following Paul White's design in SOS - (based around a 125mm deep wooden frame, wedge tile on top and rockwool insulation behind) - chec out http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul06/articles/studiosos_0706.htm for further information.

Photographs

Today, my brother very kindly came round to take some photographs using his very expensive digital SLR :-). I hope to use some of these in my new website. Shown here are a few of the ¨proof¨ pictures.

I especially like the one in the Booth - shot with the camera sat on the floor.

First session a success

Friday 23rd February saw the first session in the new studio. The session consisted of writing a new song together with laying down some basic rhythm guitar (routed live through Amplitube LE in ProTools) and some guide vocals. I played around the following day adding some string parts and basic percussion. This was a basic session, but it was really nice to actually USE the space at last!

Is the garage cursed?!

OK, everything is now working (am still waiting for the new monitors though). I have to say, the Mackie Control is the best piece of kit I have ever seen - it controls ProTools as well as the Control 24 and its implementation with Sony Vegas is amazing. The jog and shuttle control for controlling video playback is superb and you can switch the faders to control either audio or video mixing, meaning realtime crossfades between shots can be recorded in, in realtime using the desk. This piece of kit is just stunning.

Getting to this stage of actually being able to use the kit has been absolute hell and I hope I don't encounter similar problems again. Last Friday evening, all was working as expected and then suddenly the "Delayed Write Error" message kept coming up for the new 250GB SATAII drive I fitted for AV work. This was worrying as my entire work for audio and video was on this new drive. Upon rebooting, Scandisk did its thing, but to no avail and the message, along with a clattering sound, kept occuring. Upon inspecting the drive in Explorer, the entire file system had gone, along with all of the work. After calming down, I remembered that the original drive which I copied all the work from was still in tact, so thankfully (and very luckily) the work is still in tact.

Another problem(!) was that the old P4 motherboard which was taken out of the main PC died too. Upon refitting it into my second machine's case, nothing would happen, completely dead. The board worked when it was taken out, but not anymore. This is a pity as the second machine, as well as housing backups, has Steinberg's THE GRAND 2 on it (incredible Grand Piano virtual instrument) which is triggered via ProTools on the main machine. Unfortunately, its old PIII processor isn't quite up to running it, so installing this P4 board and chip would have hopefully sorted it out; alas, this is not to be.

Sound on Sound article

The other day I thought that I had discovered a way to beat the latency issues with LE systems and to use all available physical outputs whilst still in low latency monitoring mode. Sound on Sound magazine were approached and they were keen to read my findings with a view to publishing the article. However, since then I have realised that what I was trying was not really working as I thought it was :(

Further ProTools Problems - finally resolved

Upon finally getting ProTools to install and run, more problems were noticed with the Digi002 RACK audio interface. For some reason, unbeknown to me at the time, every 30s, the 1394 Firewire light would flick on and off and ProTools would stop playing or recording (as it was obviously temporarily losing its communication). After changing Firewire cards with no luck, it was decided to replace the motherboard, CPU and RAM (a bit drastic but the PC was in need of an upgrade any way). After replacing the various bits and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch, the same problem appeared yet again!

After more head scratching, both wired and wirless network adapters were disabled and even without re-starting ProTools, the problem disappeared instantly. More research will be carried out on this, but it is probably down to the network adapters hogging the same IRQ as the Firewire interface? With the network disabled, ProTools runs brilliantly on this new machine (Dual Core 1.8GHz) - as well as any TDM system I have encountered. Even with the playback buffer set to 128 samples, the machine refuses to fall over, meaning that headphone mixes can be set up in what is perceived to be realtime via software sends. The problem with any LE system is the latency encountered which means setting up things such as cue mixes, plugins on live inputs etc., is tricky unless the playback buffer can be reduced sufficiently (as already discussed, the 128 samples option works well). The Digi002 does have a "low latency monitoring" option but this diasbles all sends and mutes all physical outputs apart from 1 and 2 meaning that creating a separate headphone mix is basically impossible. This article in Sound on Sound discusses this further by the way: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun06/articles/ptworkshop_0606.htm.

Finally, the studio is becoming useable - just waiting for the monitors and contol surface.

Update with pictures

Here are some pictures following some work today. Just awaiting the Blue Sky 5.1 monitors and the Mackie Control surface which will take centre stage. All cabling is now in - it just needs a bit of a tidying up. Corner foam bass traps may be installed together with a few more foam tiles behind the monitor position.