51m0n

That's it mate - you're soooo screwed

Yep all sounds great, but the problem with subs is time alignment with your mains around the crossover point. The whole idea that a sub can go more or less anywhere and sound great is misleading at best, it must also be the same distance from both mains (or they will skew, you will get comb filtering and other weirdness etc etc), and any wall reflections need to be taken into consideration. Eventually you find there may be nowhere where your sub doesn't do something funny to the sound in the area where you mains produce something (not enough) and the sub top end. It can be done, but it is very difficult to do (very very very difficult) even with software, and IME you're better off getting full range speakers to do the job and just take all that guess work out of it

Well probably not. Your ears dont really do sub 40Hz very well, Fletcher-Munsen curves and all that. So given we struggle to hear that low anyway, if your mains are attenuating that low by a further 6 to 9dB (not unusual) then you have pretty much no chance of telling if there is anything there at all. Now in a mix situation this is not such a huge deal. But when you are mastering it really does. Anywhere you can get rid of garbage you should. Not only is it wasted energy but its wasted bits and that equates to less apparent level. Now I am by no means an advocate for the loudness wars thing but if it taught mastering engineers anything it was stow all that rubbish. So you say, big deal, hi-pass filter sorted. Yeah but sometimes what is down there is real weight thats good, in the bass maybe, and losing that makes the mix weak, but the kick is just phat tubby lard as well so now you need to set up a multiband compressor limiter situation to deal with this. And that is when you'll be all kinds of happy that your monitors can give you some definition and decent clues that deep....

Well you want to be able to hear the bad stuff that might be going on down there. People tend to forget that 20 to 40Hz is an entire octave (like 10KHz to 20KHz is only one octave). If your monitors can't do that then who knows what rubbish low end energy you might be chucking out!

that way madness lies, I warn you

I hate subs. They are nightmarish to get right. If they arent right or you get a skewed mix you are always left thinking "Is it the sub set up?". Give ne some mahoosive monitors every time 😆

Heh! My mains are floorstanding transmission lines, they are indeed immense and also very very old, but I know them ridiculously well, and as a reference for deep bass, and I mean close to 20Hz if you need it, as well as for reverb and other spacial fx levels they are fantastic for me. One day I will upgrade them, I love transmission lines though and I have always wanted a set of PMCs but the 40k+ price is a bit of an issue I tend to use a variety of tools when mixing and mastering, headphones are superb for setting up transients and compression, anything where real detailed listeing is required, the big mains are superb for balancing bass/mids and the aforementioned spacial fx, I like to use TV/ mobile phone/laptop speakers for checking and mid/top attack settings and that mixes/masters collapse to worst case scenario playback, and the car is great to make sure I've not over done the booooom Its slow and time consuming to reference on this many systems, but its how I've worked for years, and the result tends to be mixes that translate across pretty much everything.

Now that is fascinating... My main speakers are over 14" deep. They are therefore placed about as close to the wall as I can get them, about 3" away. Never really noticed a big dip in the bass, this probably has helped 😆 Worse than that dip in many situations was the problem of putting your mains on the back edge of your mixing desk. The reflections off the desk would comb filter with the direct sound to your ear blowing not just frequency response but stereo image as well!

Particular issues lie wherever you have two dimensions or more as multiples of each other, ohhhhh boy inherent unsolvable badness incoming! I've built non parallel internal rooms to get out of this whole before now for serious studio builds, yes its massive ballache, but you can't beat it in the end.....

Generally speaking the best bang for the buck and bang for the volume required of bass trapping is achieved with a corner design absorber known as a 'superchunk'. A good example for how to build Superchunks is here:- http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=535 Whenever dealing with bass absorption the place to put your absorption material for maximum efficacy is where walls meet ( you can check this out by playing some good bassy music in your room and walking up to the corner where two walls meet, you get a significant boost in bass, soaking this up here gives you more bang for the buck). This is even more apparent where three walls meet. However this also applies where floors meet walls and walls meet ceilings, effectively it is possible to super chunk every internal edge inside the room, giving a maximum of 12 places to put bass traps for absolutely maximum efficiency! For more general absorption the most important place to put it is where the sound from your speakers is bouncing off the wall and then coming back to your ears in your central listening position. You can find this with the help of a mirror and a friend. You sit in the listening position, they move the mirror along the wall, when you see you speaker in the mirror, thats where the absorption panel goes, same for the neares and furthest speakers, in many cases an absorber can cover both speakers at once on a wall. After that A good idea is the wall behind the speakers for a couple of panels, again you can use a mirror to locate the best places for this absorption. Points to note, too much absorption is not great, the room will go 'dead', at this point you need to consider adding diffusion or a sheet of foil or plastic over the front face of the absorber behind the fabric and in front of the rockwool (or equivalent), or to use plywood with strips cut out of it to cause diffraction/reflection over 500Hz. Obviously the precise nature of the pattern cut into the board has a massive affect, plenty of examples on gearslutz in their acoustics forum. You often see diffusers placed on the wall behind the listeing area (the 'backwall' of the room). There are extremely specific designs required for diffusers, they generally only work for higher frequencies, and take up a lot of space if you want to get deeper frequencies affected (up to 6ft deep is possible for a diffuser wall, the diffuser room at Nashville's Blackbird Studios being the best example of this I know of:- https://www.blackbirdstudio.com/studio-c Note George Massenburg, who designed this room, is a genius, he invented parameteric eqs!) This will breath life into the room, massively improving it as a space for mixing and tracking and mastering. Panel absorption across a corner is way better than nothing, but it isnt as good as a well built superchunk. Panel positions within the room are very important to get the best of them.

So a chain with some or all of these will see you right 95% of the time:- Multiband compressor with up to 5 bands, if you really know how to use it 3 band very broad eq for some gentle eq 'Surgical' hiQ eq if there are any nasty frequencies to get rid of Mid side compressor for widening and control of the stereo field Multiband saturation Feedback comp for gentle level control across sections Decent brickwall limiter is a must Check in mono too...

Just one last look, I promise (those walls!):- https://www.gearslutz.com/board/photo-diaries-of-recording-studio-construction-projects/161575-manifold-recording-studio-construction-thread.html

Yes. I have spent the better part of 30 years learning sound engineering. Still learn new stuff every mix/recording session/mastering session. Its been brilliant, I was lucky enough to be mentored by some superb engineers/producers and experience some name bands with actual budgets working in 'real' studios. Beats the hell out of youtube videos when you are immersed in it 24/7 even for a few weeks. You never seem to forget stuff from those experiences. Its been challenging (deadline to complete soldering the 32 channel fully balanced desk for the new B Studio we needed to be ready within a couple of weeks was'optimistic' at best). A certain guitarist's attitude was rather trying at times. My ears could only last so long back then because I didn't know how to listen as well, that was hard to understand. I know I have forgotten more about mic placement than I think most modern chaps learn in college and the next few years of their careers. My ears a pretty good, they could be better, but they are better than most. The kit never guarantees a recording, learn the theory and practice of sound engineering as much as you need to to get the results you are hoping for. It not worth learning more unless you are serious about a career in it. A lack of skills will prevent a reasonable recording more than anything else. Budget gear these days is insanely good for the money, not as good as the big boys toys, but still, unbelievable really. Having said that, with decent mics/board and just 2 tracks I can record a live take better than most people can mix umpty and three tracks; if the band are on it and the room is good. HAVE FUN! Don't beat yourself up, your efforts are going to be woeful for far longer than you stay with GB if the bug bites. Keep learning, go and look at the Gearslutz website (the beginner and budget areas are where your interests should take you, forget the big boys toys, they are useless to you).

Not necessarily true, but they probably haven't needed to push the limits of what GB can do yet and so haven't seen what a DAW is actually capable of either.... Or, and I am not trying to seem rude, they have found a DAW too complex or confusing or just different enough from GB to be a too significant a learning curve to get over in order to find the benefits of the power of a fully operational Death Star, sorry, DAW....

Best bang for the buck cans for recording are Studiospares m1000 . Beat speakers 5x more expensive IME. Loads cheaper than monitors which are not really going to help much if the room isnt treated, theyll just confuse the issue to a greater or lesser degree.

Oh yeah ☺

Cool Things have moved on so far since the first DAWs I used 😆

I was referringvto Reaper's amazing internal routing. Every track can be as many channels of audio as you need. Any track van be a group You can route sends of tracks in a group through extra channels in the group. So you can have global fx tracks receiving signal via groups Which means that you can set group volume and aux sends just on the group fader. A group can contain grouos and tracks do you can nest things in a very logical manner. A track can contain any type of data, audio or midi or whatever and it all just works....

I'm not sure what you mean by that. I've been tracking, mixing and mastering exclusively in the box for about 15 years now 😆

Honestly. The routing options arent there to maximise yoi workflow. The processing power of even the newest tablet is not up to doing serious work. It may get there eventually but I've not seen anything that comes close yet. I dont use izotope for mastering because I get better results using the various fx I have spent over a decade honing for that particular purpose. Again I use Reaper for everything except getting a cd DDP image together for a cd plant. I use dedicated software for that specific part of the process. No plugins do it very well...

As a simple tool for putting together song ideas its fine. For any kind of serious mixing or arranging you will definitely need a more fully featured DAW. Personally I like Reaper, it does what I need, it comes in at the right price and it performs superbly in my experience in mixdowns upto 120 multichannel tracks with very advanced routing options.

Anyone looking to take a step up from Focusrite further down the line I cannot recommend RME enough. Best interfaces I've found. Immensely stable drivers great preamps....

To do a simple recording of a song as a record of what your intent is is really simple and easy, and loads of fun. Plenty of good advice given, especially a nice decent simple interface and garageband for a start. I warn you now, you are on a very, very slippery slope.... Two of them in fact, one is downhill all the way, this is the dangerous one, it gets steeper, and ends in financial ruin, this stuff makes bass GAS look like wanting a cup of tea compared to heroin addiction, I kid you not. Bass gear is cheap, all of it, compared to top quality recording kit. My dream is to own Manifold Recording Studios, or a UK equivalent, can we say Euromillions? IMO the finest studio build the world has ever seen. Owned by the CEO of Redhat. The desks are works of art, and the machine room is frickin' incredible (sharks with lazerbeams bad-assery at work) let alone the acoustic control in the live rooms - I may have to go and have a lie down in a minute ;). Hell the entire complex is carbon neutral and has its own solar farm to power it! The other slope is the tricky one, where you are now it looks pretty much like a cliff face, and it too is very slippery, this is the learning curve. At first you think you know where the top is, and you can figure out with a lot of help a route there (again youtube videos are excellent ways to find out how to get there). However what looks like Mount Everest from the bottom turns out to be a pebble on the way to the summit once you get over it. This is normal, get used to it! There is a lot to learn, and a great deal of enjoyment to be had doing so, even for simple "4 track" style pre-production recordings of demos of new tunes for the band. Getting the most out of your simple interface a couple of cheaper mics will take you a while, getting the most out of garageband a fair while longer. Getting the most out of a full featured DAW? You never will quite, but you will get better and better, I hope you really get a kick out of it Glad there is another recordist on the forum!

Bingo....

With tube gear the plate voltage also makes a huge difference...