Okay, I'll go into more depth about my situation here.
My rig consists of:
Monitors:
Macke Hr824's
Alesis Monitor Ones
Klipsche Hifi system with 12" powered sub
Mics:
6 SM 57's
MD421
SM 91 kick mic
Audix tom mics (I can't remember the model number)
2 Oktava MC012s
1 AKG 414
Preamps:
Vintech 2 channel 1272 Re-issue
Mackie 1604 VLZ
Compressor (which I seldom use going to disk)
Presonus ACP 88
Soundcards
2 Delta 1010 Soundcards
Software
Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3.0
Plugins
Waves Gold Bundle
A bunch of Sonic Foundry Plugins
Rooms (see image)
My 20 feet long and 15 feet wide "live room" is an old living room. I tore out the carpet and the drop ceiling. The ceiling is 9 feet tall and I believe it's surface is plaster. I know a junk of what looked like concrete fell and and hit me on the head once. The floor is unfinished hardwood.
The walls are parallel, but I decided to play with power tools one day and went to the hardware store. I built some gobos. Two of them are 4x8 and two are 4x4. They are plywood on one side and pegboard on the other. I filled them with R-11 insulation. The 4x8 Gobos ended up weighing about a million pounds, I so just lean them to break up the parallel walls in the room as best as I can. I generally leave the plywood side against the wall and the pegboard side facing the center of the room.
The control room is probably a nitemare from an acoustical point of view. It's half plywood floors and half 1 ft x 1 ft plastic tiles. The walls are are square and finished with wall paper or paint. The ceiling is 9 ft but I left the drop ceiling alone so it's probably about 7.5 - 8 ft.
It's important to note ( I think ) that everything is open. As you can see in the picture, the opening between the live room and control room is about 6 feet wide and 6.5 feet tall. It has no doors. It's just an opening. (I'm not sure what the official term is). I left it alone to save cash, work, and time. I also figured that it may help the room seem bigger. This was a blind guess.
The control room as shown actually has a kitchen on the opposite side of the control room. It's open as well. As far as your concerned, you could probably extend the control room another 10 feet or so. Toss in a stove, a microwave, cabinets, a sink, and a fridge. Once again, I thought dividing everything would cause the small room problems I've read about.
Okay, that's my situation as best as I can describe it. My desk with my computer, monitors, etc is at the bottom of the control room image, but I forgot to put that in there and it faces the live room.
Here's the link to my amazing graphical layout of my studio
http://www.brandondrury.com/MP3/layout.gifI appreciate everyone wasting their time on me.
I figure why you all are in the charitable, feed the homeless, plant a tree type of mood, I would go ahead and post a few samples to demonstrate where I am and where I need help.
I have a feeling that the mere mention of better convertors will be laughed at when you hear my work, but fuck off!!
Anyway,
Sample 1 is supposed to be the stripped down, shitty song at the end of a rockin' album. You'll hear me say go and hear the uncut strings rattling on the headstock. I turned the 1272 preamp all the way up and compressed it pretty hard. It's a dude singing with his acoustic guitar. I used my AKG 414 probably in omni mode. You can hear the room sound pretty well. More than likely I ran it through my "mastering" bus which consists of of an eq that cuts 400 Hz by about 1 db an boosts 4k by abuot 1 dB. It also contains an imaging expander which is supposed to widen the stereo image. I don't know what it does to a mono signal, but I more than likely left it on there. The mastering bus also contains the Wave L1 limiting thing.
http://www.brandondrury.com/MP3/room1.mp3Sample 2 is one of their rockers. Drums and bass were tracked at once. (The bass amp in another room). Guitars and vocals were overdubbed.
http://www.brandondrury.com/MP3/room2.mp3Feel free to bash the living shit out of me in all ways. I would prefer constructive critism but I could stand hearing "you have no talent and should quit".
This is the sample chapter. If anyone would like to order my entire book entitled "Bugging People with Better Things To Do About Problems With Recording" please send me $19.95.
Thanks a lot,
Brandon Drury