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How Building Cost Effective Acoustic Treatment for the Music Studio Will Help Your Music Production; Part 2: Corner Traps

So maybe you have SONAR X1 Production Suite running on a killer computer, and now you might have a sound cloud over your mix position; what’s next?  Last week I exemplified how I built and installed a hanging sound cloud and this week I will go into detail how I built corner traps to help tame my unorthodox (square) production room.  Before reading this post, you may want to visit my article from last week which goes into some detail on room shapes.

My room, unfortunately for me is dead square.  This is about the worst case scenario so I had to do some research and talk to a lot of friends who are acoustic professionals such as Gavin Haverstick of Haverstick designs.  With my room being about 13.5’ x 13.5’ and 7.5’ ceilings, he has my mix position at 62” off the front wall.  So with my positioning about right, and a sound cloud overhead to take out the first ceiling reflections, the next thing to do was try to knock out the corners of the room where bass frequencies could become a big problem.

I decided to make custom corner traps based on my personal situation.  Once again, every room and everyone’s needs are different, so if you are on a tight budget, I think it’s best to first figure out what’s important to YOU.  For my situation, here were my goals for corner traps:

  • Cost effective
  • *Less square footage (I will discuss this below)
  • Aesthetically pleasing to the eye
  • Effective bass trapping
  • Light-weight

Continue reading “How Building Cost Effective Acoustic Treatment for the Music Studio Will Help Your Music Production; Part 2: Corner Traps”

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Computers In the Studio (Part 2 – Going Online)

Computers in the Studio

Going Online

It has long been held that connecting your DAW to a network, or worse, to the internet is something you should never, ever do. But is it really all that dangerous to your security or detrimental to performance? What kinds of precautions should be taken? Let’s find out.

First of all, why would anyone want to connect their DAW to the internet?

The Advantages:

1) Maintain system updates with less hassle

2) Maintain driver updates with less hassle

3) Perform software authorization with less hassle

4) Transfer samples, mixes, projects, etc via FTP and file sharing sites for collaboration or delivery

5) Search the internet for music theory questions like how to play a diminished chord or engineering questions like how to use a multiband compressor

In other words, it’s much easier to keep your system updated , authorize software and to search and share when your your DAW has internet access. The need to download everything on another machine and then manully transfer it to your DAW goes away.

But if it’s so convenient, why do people so often recommend against it? These are the most common reasons I hear:

The Concerns:

1) You might get a virus

2) You have to run software that will bog down your system

3) Your system might become unstable

4) You might get hacked

5) Wireless drivers can have a negative effect on DPC Latency negatively (see Computers In The Studio – Part 1)

The good news is that with the proper precautions you can connect a DAW to the internet with a relatively high degree of safety while maintaining performance and reliability.

Now you’re probably wondering what these “proper precautions” are. Let’s go through them one by one.

Continue reading “Computers In the Studio (Part 2 – Going Online)”

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NAMM 2012 Videos and CakeTV Live Webinar

Recently we released our NAMM videos to CakeTV. The six videos contain over an hour of footage of SONAR X1 demonstrations narrated by a combination of Cakewalk staff and Cakewalk artists. And there’s certainly a lot of interesting and useful information to be seen (and heard).

However, due to circumstances beyond our control, the video’s audio quality didn’t turn out quite as expected. With our booth in the Roland arena, and with so many adjacent demo booths within direct earshot, said audio contains not only what’s in the demo being filmed but also a lot of what’s going on around it.

Seth Perlstein at the tail end of one of his SONAR X1 demo at NAMM 2012

Continue reading “NAMM 2012 Videos and CakeTV Live Webinar”

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How Building Cost Effective Acoustic Treatment for the Music Studio Will Help Your Music Production; Part 1: Sound Cloud

(Part 1: Sound Clouds)

Just as important as having a killer DAW such as SONAR X1 Production Suite 64bit running on a good machine, one needs to take a good hard look at their recording and mixing environment.  If you are starting to get to the point where the word “professional” (as in making some money) comes into play, you should probably start to think about your sonic room environment as well as your environment’s presentation.

The beauty of the music industry today is that you CAN make extra money as a part time job utilizing tools such as SONAR, but there comes a point in time where you need to step it up if you have what it takes to succeed on certain levels.  In my personal situation, as a writer/mixer/producer I take on some decent paying side jobs once in a while when time permits such as recent tracks that I sold to ESPN Sports center, but I can tell you that if I didn’t have SONAR X1 Producer Expanded and a decent mixing environment, there’s no way I would have been able to deliver those tracks.

In the upcoming weeks I am going to be talking about, as well as be demonstrating how I recently treated my new music studio room with great looking acoustic treatment panels.  I built all the custom panels myself so it cost me a fraction of what it would have been to order these panels online; and in my opinion they look better because I elected to design them with exposed natural wood where the cheap ones online are just basically fabric-wrapped.

The three types of panels I built which will be discussed on this blog were wall traps, corner traps and sound clouds.  Today I will go into detail on how I built the sound cloud that goes over my mix position. Continue reading “How Building Cost Effective Acoustic Treatment for the Music Studio Will Help Your Music Production; Part 1: Sound Cloud”

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NAMM 2012 Backstage Pass: SONAR X1 Music Production Live Demo

Live from NAMM 2012 at the Cakewalk booth in the Roland arena, Cakewalk’s Mike Trujillo demonstrates creative music production and recording techniques with SONAR X1 Production Suite.

Mike’s demo features SONAR X1 Producer Expanded’s Browser, Track Templates, Matrix View, FX Chains 2.0, ProChannel, Session Drummer 3, and more. Plus he lays down tracks with Rapture and Z3TA+ 2, records guitar, and captures a Matrix View performance in this dynamic, unique, up-beat demonstration that’s packed with information for the initiated and uninitiated alike.

Upgrade to SONAR X1 or or find a dealer to become a new user today.

 

 

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NAMM 2012 Backstage Pass: The perfect computer for SONAR X1?

Live from the Cakewalk booth in the Roland arena, take a look inside the perfect computer for SONAR X1 as HP’s Dan Bennett opens up and tears down the powerhouse HP Z800 workstation.

Featuring a BMW designed, tool-less chassis, an incredibly unique power supply, a plethora of powerful under the hood options, and so much more, the Z800 truly is a dream machine for making music with SONAR X1.

Upgrade to SONAR X1 or or find a dealer to become a new user today.

 

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How do I record audio on a Windows PC?

While recording audio is one of  the most basic function in SONAR X1, it still remains among the frequently asked questions. Within one minute this get-started video demonstrates the 4 basic steps necessary to record audio.

1.) Insert a new audio track

2.) Select your input

3.) Arm your track

4.) Hit record

If recording audio is this easy, you’ll be accepting your Grammy in no time!

Haven’t tried SONAR X1 yet? You can download your free trial today!

Or you can check out more videos to help get you started with the basic setup and operation of SONAR and its features at CakeTV.

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Why you need a subwoofer. Or, "What's goin' on down there?"

So your newest masterpiece is ready to be mixed in SONAR’s pristine 64bit audio engine for the rest of the world to hear, but are you really hearing the full range of your mix? If your monitoring system does not include a subwoofer, then you most likely are not.

While an ear can be trained to work with almost anything over time, a good monitoring system is crucial for making more accurate judgments in mixing. In my early days as a fledgling engineer, the studio I worked out of had a nice set of monitors but no sub. So what does that mean? Endless time wasted making (at that time) cassettes to run out to the car with so you could find out that the low end was either too high or too low or not hitting the right frequencies. Back to the board, hope your guess at the eq adjustment was right and then back to the car again. Better fire up the coffee machine, this could take all night. Continue reading “Why you need a subwoofer. Or, "What's goin' on down there?"”

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Computers in the Studio (Part 1)

Musician or IT professional?

It seems today’s musicians must be part artist and part IT professional. It’s a difficult dance that requires knowledge, time, and patience in order to achieve a level of success. The intention of this series of blog posts is to help with the IT part or the equation. My goal is to help with questions related to system optimization, maintenance, organization, networking, and other IT-related concerns important to musicians in the 21st century.

In this first post I’d like to talk about basic practices for achieving a smooth running PC-based DAW. I’ll also offer my thoughts and suggestions on OS “tweaking” or “tuning”. In subsequent posts we’ll get deeper into specific areas and talk about other aspects like organization and networking. Most of these tips will assume you’re running a PC with Windows 7 installed. Continue reading “Computers in the Studio (Part 1)”