Studio SOS
Article Preview :: Your Studio Problems Solved
Technique : Theory + Technical
This month’s challenge was to turn a heap of boxes into a fully working studio!
In the box: there was plenty of setting up to do before Bill could call his room a studio!
Bill Price took up guitar playing and singing later in life, to discover that he was actually a very capable singer/songwriter. After making a few recordings in home studios belonging to his friends, he decided to set up his own studio in a spare bedroom in his house in Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. After he’d sought advice from various quarters and checked the suitability of his proposed shopping list with me via a couple of phone calls, I agreed to help him set up his studio with a Studio SOS visit.
So it was that, some weeks later, Bill called me to say that he had a pile of boxes sitting in his spare room, and to ask me to come and help him turn them into a functioning studio! He’d settled on an Apple iMac, Logic Pro and a Cakewalk UA25 EX two-input interface. He’d also bought a pair of Alesis Monitor 1 MkII active monitors and an Audio Technica AT2020A mic for his vocals. However, he hadn’t yet got a mic for his acoustic guitar, so I took a spare mic and stand along just to get him started.
Bill’s room turned out to be fairly small, at around two by three metres and not much over two metres in height. He had a desk set up at one end of the room facing down the three-metre length, with a window to the right and a mirror-fronted cupboard to the left. A few guitars and other instruments inhabited the rest of the room, but first we had to deal with that pile of boxes!
Installation
Stage one was to unpack the iMac, set it up on the table and start loading Logic Pro while we dealt with the rest of the system. Loading all the software takes at least a couple of hours because of the number of loop- and sample-library files included with it. Bill made us lunch, which was interrupted only by the need to feed new DVD ROMs into the iMac. Once everything was installed, it was time to run Apple Software Update to bring both Logic and the Mac OS up to the latest versions.
Welsh company Silent Peaks had kindly donated a set of their speaker-mounting pads, which are designed to sit between speakers and the desk they’re placed on, to minimise vibration transfer. Silent Peaks also supplied a mic shield, and I’d packed half a dozen two-foot-square panels of Universal Acoustics foam.
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Mon 21 May 2012
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985