Mornats

My living room where I mix my music is a real pain. I've got bass lulls all over in the double-figures in db! What I've found is that my studio monitors (Yamaha HS7) have little bass in most of my room and my hi-fi speakers which are stuck in the worst position are fine. I can mix better on my hi-fi than I can on my monitors and it's down to room acoustics (and the fact that my hi-fi speakers are sealed so they don't use the bass port which I suspect is what's killing my Yamahas).

So yeah, what Dad (not my real dad) said above about going for a good headset > room acoustics > good monitors is spot on in my opinion.

I sense a hurdy gurdy moment coming on.

Well done Bilbo! And I really do have to give a shout out to my favourite from this month from Bleat.

5 hours ago, lurksalot said:

Just incredible this month 

Aye, I agree.

Here's mine: 

The polar bear isn't talking in mine I'm afraid. I wasn't sure how to approach this one but then thought, why is the bear down here at the car? It's because he's got no polar home any more. So this is a sad one.

Focusrite give away some very good plugins every month to those who've bought their interfaces. There's been some really good ones given away too. More info here: https://uk.focusrite.com/plugin-collective but the highlight for me was the Addictive Keys giveaway. That grand piano is just lovely. The AAS plugins are really cool too.

5 hours ago, lurksalot said:

 You should apolargise for that one 

I'm bearly even sorry for it

Ha, no idea what to do for this one yet But bear with me please...

It probably wouldn't be the weirdest thing I'd have to explain about my place to visitors!

3 hours ago, Skol303 said:

This guy wins the prize for the laziest bass traps ever!

 

Don't laugh, I seriously considered doing that myself!

Congrats to you both! The voting was a close one this month and for good reason

That's a good question, just how rough 'n' ready can you get with bass traps and still have them work?

What a wonderfully eccentric bunch of tunes this month. Enjoyed them immensely and it was difficult to pick my three. Well done all!

Still barely made a start but ended up finishing it. It's a bit rough but I figured that nothing coming out of that contraption was going to sound intricate.

I've barely made a start on mine as I've been away and then I've been ill for a bit. Still gonna give it a go but it may be a shadow of its intended self!

Awesome mate, thanks for posting this!

I can wait a week  Would be awesome to hear how you get on and of course any tips will be appreciated!

I'm mostly just whizzed off that I spent £320 on my Yamahas and they're the least used of my mixing tools! They sure sound good when I'm sat at the back of the room though...

So for the bass trap I'm thinking at least 20cm deep like you said, and as deep as I think I can get away with. Height wise 70-80 cm would cover off where my head and speakers are at with lots of room for movement. For the width, would I have to have it directly in front of both speakers, or just wide enough for me? It's the difference between it being 190cm and 110-120cm.

Actually, I just checked the dimensions of that stuff on the Homebase site. It's 45.5cm tall and 120cm wide so that's about right. A little extra height would be great but that could do it. 10cm thick and 8 in a pack so could go 80cm thick although that would be a bugger to store away... Or 4 deep (40cm) and stack them on top of each other to create a 90cm by 120cm by 40cm trap. Again, that's a bit big to store somewhere! Could double up as a nice footstool though?

Looks like I've got a project then  

If I moved my sofa to just behind my mix position and moved my monitors down so they're at the same level would this give me some indication of how much a bass trap would help? Or is a sofa (fabric one not leather) useless in this regard? I'm just thinking that hearing *some* difference would spur me on to build a bass trap.

Sounds like a good idea. Maybe a couple of bags of that stuff stacked up on top of each other behind me may do! (My DIY skills are zero.)

You know, I did an experiment where I moved my couch to be sat along my back wall. I was hoping the mass of it would act as some sort of a bass trap but it made no difference.

Cheers! Lots of good advice and info. I'll see if I can record some audio or a video of me walking around my room so you can hear the bass. From my seating position heading backwards it starts off as 3/10 (with 10/10 being normal bass volume) then drops to 1/10 then hits pretty much zero in the dead centre of the room then goes to 4/10 in the back third then 9/10 when sat right at the back of the room. It's a lesson in room acoustics and just how much it buggers up yer bass!

One thing I may do is use TeamViewer to remotely access my PC from my MacBook Pro so I can mix whilst sat at the back of the room!

I've got Sonarworks headphone calibration which I find is helping mixes on headphones translate better so I'll keep an eye out on the room version being on sale.

Good question but there's a reason. My hi-fi soundcard (Asus Xonar Essence) is what I use to go into my amp then my Tannoys. Whilst I can play tracks in real time on that at times, it often can't cope with most of my orchestral ones, especially when I'm running synths and effects too. It quite often crashes if I push it hard. One time it crashed and the dogs down the road started barking and I had a little ringing in my ears. So I try to avoid it as it was obviously pushing out some seriously loud high frequencies that I couldn't hear but were in the damage-dealing range. The latency is far too high to use it for recording from my midi keyboard too.

So for recording and mixing I use my Focusrite Forte. I don't have a way of getting that to use my amp or speakers unfortunately. Otherwise that would be a good solution.

Just to add, for general music listening, the Asus soundcard is superb. Can't praise it high enough. For music creation though, it doesn't cut it but to be fair, that's not its intended use.

I bashed my room measurements into a couple of those tools you mentioned. First up is https://amcoustics.com/tools/amroc which gave me this:

Then I popped them into Room EQ Wizard and changed some options to what seemed right (wasn't sure what I was doing really):

Finally, here's how close my monitors are to my wall. Not sure if I can get them any further back as the stands are pretty much against the skirting board.

I guess this means I should rely more on my ATH M50x headphones for mixing. Maybe I should cut my losses, sell the Yamahas, go back to my little M-audio BX5As and use the money to grab a pair of Sennheiser HD 600 headphones... I bought the Yamahas last year as I wasn't getting any bass out of the little M-audios. Seems my room was the issue and I could have saved a bit of cash.