TwoTimesBass

Totally agree, I often find myself singing a song and playing air bass along with it even though I don't know the actual notes. It gets the song structure and rhythm into your head before you have to worry about actually playing it.

Welcome Jeff, Plenty of folk with a similar background to yourself, and always good advice freely available to all around here. Ask any questions and share your experiences. Enjoy getting back to bass 👍

From the thread title, I though it was an app that could make me the Peter Frampton of the bass world 😀

I say bide your time, I was in a similar situation a good few years back and looked at some new basses as I wasn't confident to buy off Ebay/Gumtree. I still own a lovely bass that I bought from the classified section of this very site, which came setup and strung as a working instrument from an excellent player, and got great advice in the process. I got much more bass for my money and piece of mind too. Stick it out a bit longer and the bass will find you 😀

I respectfully disagree, although in the past (and certainly in classic 70's Tom Jones clips) it was necessary and largely where the 'mic technique' myth comes from. The loss of tone by pulling away from the proximity effect of most cardiod vocal mics means at the moment of peak vocal power it sounds thin and lacking in bass. Like a weird filter-sweep on the loud notes. Compressors, engineers and PA systems with large dynamic range make this technique (IMHO) unnecessary and counter-productive in modern times.

As an engineer my take on singers with good mic technique is that they stand perfectly still with their mouth 1" away from the pop shield/SM58 and don't move. I can then set the pop shield-to-mic distance as appropriate. There is a terrible pub karaoke habit of moving the mic further away from your mouth as you sing louder that i've see being taught to singers as good 'mic technique'. Utter rubbish. Sorry, it's a particular bugbear of mine 😁

Darn it, that was going to be my killer solution for you 😀 Pea Turgh makes a good point in that it's hard to make a larger room sound like a small booth and vice versa. Given that you've already got the SE screen, some portable free-standing acoustic panels that you can use to wall yourself in with might be an option when recording at the desk. Cheaper than treating the whole room and can be deployed elsewhere or stacked away depending on the circumstances. Yes very true, I used to do a lot of solo voiceover and audio-description recording and it's interesting when the HPF is having an effect at 150-200Hz on female voice! Editing spoken word with a sub in the monitoring setup was one of the best tips I ever was given, all the plosives, pops and bangs you can miss... I have a roughly 3' x 4' vocal booth in the studio at work which we never use, it's basically a cupboard for my instrument collection as it always sounded too boxy regardless of the acoustic treatment. We do all the recording in the control room as acoustic instruments really do benefit from a bit of space to breathe, especially the lower down the frequency range you go. For Double Bass you really want to put the mic at least a meter away. Good luck with your experiments, you'll find something that works for your room and sounds good to your ears, which is ultimately what counts. Have fun in the process!

Engineers historically would have you believe there is a magical voodoo art to acoustics when really it's pretty simple unless you're dealing with huge or odd-shaped spaces. The Sound on Sound books/articles on studio acoustics are really well researched and explained IMHO and a great resource. You seem to have a decent handle on what you're trying to achieve and how to go about it. Most rooms typically need a mixture of diffusion and absorption, killing any flutter echoes while flattening the frequency response. Hence the fairly generic diagram from MSR dealing with sidewall and ceiling reflections then some general dampening. I've done a similar thing (with similar problems) double tracking harmony parts. I've done the base parts standing at the mic properly, but for the double/tripe-tracks it's quicker to sit in front of the computer and do them. Biggest thing that was upsetting the sound in my studio was the wall of 2x monitor speakers and dual screens in a semi-circle behind the mic! Another thought, what are the dimensions of your booth? It could be that actually the booth has an acoustic that can't be replicated by you sitting in a more open room. I've found this particularly in smaller vox booths, usually manifesting itself in the low-mids freqs of vocal recordings.

Don't you want me? - Human League

Yeah, the great thing about DAW's and plugins is that you have the option to set things up as you please. There aren't any rules and you aren't limited in the same way we once were with only one reverb unit on an aux to do everything! I've become joyfully slapdash in the way my sessions are set up these days now that processing power and track counts are less of a limitation. Horses for courses I guess... Using your situation above, if I had a reverb set up for (as an example) multitracked harmony BV's then I'd do the same and include the FX return as part of the 'BV' mix group.

Yeah, I agree with your take on things BigRedX, it was particularly drums I was thinking of when talking about tracking in a studio. Getting a good room for drums is hard for home recordists given the space needed to get anything other than a close-mic sound. Likewise piano or acoustic instruments that need a bit of space, depending on style of music of course. Absolutely the house engineer can be what sells a studio... I've seen ££££ wasted on state-of-the-art kit by someone who doesn't know how to deploy it, but also recordings that naturally went down track by track with no effort or fuss using a couple of quality but carefully chosen mics...

This is a Low - Blur

I do use a lot of insert effects too though, even down to individual reverbs for certain instruments, which just sit in the individual channels routed to the mix...

I normally go via dedicated faders/channels, one per effect though, which I guess is 'dedicated FX return buss' in your question. I usually try and group any FX return channels on the right/bottom of my mix setup which is an old-school hangover from analogue days when the stereo channels were generally on the right hand side of the desk

What make/model is the condenser mic Nicko?

Money for Nothing - Dire Straits

Steinberg as a company have never been a hardware manufacturer until they were bought by Yamaha, so when it comes to soundcards read 'Yamaha' for 'Steinberg'. Which is not a bad thing as Yamaha have had excellent build quality on their pro-audio products over the years, even if the aesthetics sometimes look a bit old fashioned compared to others.

Get a Pelicase. Boring, predicable and quite expensive but there's a reason that you always see them following touring guys in airports...

Dry Bones - Delta Rhythm Boys (and many others)

To be honest if I had the money I'd do the tracking in a commercial studio with good room acoustics, plenty of space and expensive mics/preamps/engineer, then do the mix at home using all the same plugins etc that everyone has at their disposal. Too many 'commercial' studios are converted storage units with some acoustic panels and well read copies of Sound on Sound anyway. Sadly most mid-range commercial studios have gone to the wall over the last 20 years as space becomes more expensive and the technology has become within the price range of home recordists. Plenty of currently available music has been recorded in home studios, probably quite a large proportion in reality. I would spend the cash having a track/album commercially mastered though...

My 2 cents: Bass traps in the three corners that don't have the boiler. Panels round the walls at playing/singing height, portrait orientation. You can leave a bit of a gap between them of a couple of inches without too much of a problem. You're trying to avoid reflections from parallel walls mostly. Keep a couple of panels free and suspend them at the same angle as the roof above the desk/mix position. Just above the light looks about right Rugs on the floor 😀 But you might want to leave an uncovered area as acoustic guitar sometimes benefits from a bit of floor reflection when recording. Have fun, and if it doesn't work just move things until it sounds better 😀

Yamaha TF series would be my recommendation at that price point. Lots of busses, good connectivity and part of the Yamaha family workflow that translates onto their bigger desks.

At the Zoo - Simon and Garfunkel

That's reminded me that I need to get in touch with him to get some work done. From experience he doesn't always respond to email, best to give him a call...

99 Problems - Jay-Z