Creative Solutions (my studio) is open!

[sabianq]

Creative Solutions is Open!

Yea, It is about time!

I want to focus on local talent doing Voice-Overs, Cutting Tapes for Grandma, transferring old VHS, Cassette, Vinyl to a Digital format, live venue for public address and local band audio engineering and recording.

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/consoleBW.jpg

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/playingcopy.jpg

:D

[spam]

Awesome sabianq! Is that ghostly apparition you? That's kinda spooky because I thought you were an actual person.;)
All the best to ya' and good luck.

[sabianq]

Awesome sabianq! Is that ghostly apparition you? That's kinda spooky because I thought you were an actual person.;)
All the best to ya' and good luck.


Thank you Sir!


and yes that apparition is I, apparently, I was a real person at one point, But ever since I fell into the bottomless hole of AudioLand, Well, you know the rest...


:D

[dcwave]

Nice. Should be a decent amount of business for what you want to do.

[vulcan_dc]

cool... best wishes man... hope u have a lot of fun...

regards...

[87PRS]

congratulations on hanging out the shingle sabian....I thought you were taller and way older than that and not transparent :D best wishes on your venture.

btw, what kinda mic is that in pic 1 top ?

[sabianq]

congratulations on hanging out the shingle sabian....
thanks again for all of your support! This should be a fun venture, something i really enjoy doing! I thought you were taller and way older than that and not transparent :D best wishes on your venture. Yea, i get that a lot, it is some sort of birth defect, I'm adopted so i was never able to ask my mom about where it comes from.

btw, what kinda mic is that in pic 1 top ?

That microphone is an original, vintage RCA SK46 Velocity Ribbon Microphone.

http://www.coutant.org/sk46/sk46.jpg

I salvaged it from a trash heap and replaced, cable and pushed out the dented steel pop screen. The ribbon is in pristine shape and the microphone sounds sweet.

I like it better than any of my other microphones.

[87PRS]

do you have any soundclips recording acoustic guitar using the RCA SK46 ribbon mic?

[sabianq]

do you have any soundclips recording acoustic guitar using the RCA SK46 ribbon mic?

I do, but i gotta warn you, im pretty terrible at playing the guitar.

I got my hands on a soundcraft studio mixer. the Pres are amazing, to bad that there are problems with the foldback circuts, I cant keep it. but before i get rid of it, I intend to use the a chanel strip to sample the RCA.

I will post it when I can.

[87PRS]

which model Soundcraft are you messing with, yep the pres are some real bad boys lol. Is it on loan from work?

waiting for the sample sabian

[BIG SHANE]

thats really nice... it would be a dream if i had a studio like that

-BIG SHANE

[homestudioguy]

Very Nice!
Is that a Mackie 8-bus?

[87PRS]

hey sabi...any live bands in the studio yet? just wondering how biz is going? oh yeah, and the soundclip??

[sabianq]

After many months of work, and some heavy advertising on craigslist, i got myself some real money paying clients. YEA!

I have since upgraded my studio and i have dropped out of the live sound industry except for the corporate clientel that need the occasional wireless microphone and reinforcement system. gone are the days of the lone engineer lugging 800 pounds of equipment through rickety old freight elevators at noon to be ready for a sound check at 3pm then being the last to leave (next to the drummer and bartender when the place finally closes)

setting up multiple systems (FOH, Monitor, wireless, mixes and loops) is a great learning experience but when you have only yourself doing it for a measly 500 bucks, the payoff just aint worth it.

On a side note, if anyone here is thinking about reinforcing large bands, please don't shoot yourself and your fellow sound engineer in the foot by underbidding a job like i did.

I can still provide sound reinforcement for any show, but the price has gone up.

My studio is faring better.
and as for that sound clip you asked for 87prs
go to:
http://www.archive.org/details/WhatWeCouldDo

(I was never a big fan of the MP3 format, but like VHS, it became the standard that everyone and their mother can run. I need to learn more about MP3 encoding)

I use my RCA ribbon microphone to mic the guitar cab at a 45 degree angle at .5 meter while at the same time i place a SM57 pointed directly at the center of the driver sitting at just over .7 meter to reduce phase imbalance.

the vocal microphone is a ceiling mounted (pictures coming) Sterling Audio ST55 LDC mic which is really sensitive even with the 10db pad. I think i like the microphone and I will be posting a review of the unit after i have had more time working with it.

I work primarily in Adobe Audition as the software has all the tools needed to track, record, master and write cd's

My new computer is awesome and super fast so much so that I will be diving into video editing later this year.

needless to say,
2008 will be a great year
:D

[sabianq]

Well, i needed to do something about the loud rush of air moving to the tracking room from the vent

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/th_DSC00064.jpg (http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00064.jpg)
I removed the vent
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/th_DSC00065.jpg (http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00065.jpg)

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/th_DSC00066.jpg (http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00066.jpg)
attached 2x4s to the joists with screws,
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/th_DSC00067.jpg (http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00067.jpg)
thens covered the 2x4s with two sheets of 3/4 inch plywood
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/th_DSC00068.jpg (http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00068.jpg)
there, nice and strong and the vent air is directed to the sides of the room rather than straight down. this really quieted up the room.

[sabianq]

(I am going to copy this over fro a previous thread)

the cheapest way to get a fantastic absorption panel.

I was desperate for acoustic treatment in my tracking/live room, the room was a nightmare to deal with. 2 walls are Luan over 1/2 inch "studs" glued onto a very rigid concrete filled cinder block wall half buried in the earth.
one picture window facing outside to the street (fortunately there is very little traffic). the other walls are framed 2x4 studs covered with gypsum board and wood panel painted white. the ceiling is 3/4 inch plaster.

a 100 db broad band impulse would literally ring the heater vent and cause bad HF slap back making the space unusable for anything but spoken word

the noise floor of the space without any treatment and no vehicles driving by is an astonishing -60 ~ -70 db (bettering a blank cassette tape)
a refrigerator in the kitchenette adjacent to the space hums along at 50 HZ and is audible at -30 or so db but a high pass filter or just unplugging the reefer stops that noise.

a side note on unplugging your refrigerator, if your wife is storing food in the reefer, Just use a hi-pass filter to keep her happy and the food from thawing as it is very easy to forget to plug back in the reefer after tracking all day.

back to the absorption panel.

well, having my own studio, i also have no money being that i spent it on all that other stuff like computers software and microphones.

i did have a Queen sized mattress that really needed to go the the dump.
and i 100% understand that duct taping a mattress to a wall can be more problematic that anything both in acoustic and safety related issues.

so i got to thinking,

i grabbed a knife and proceeded to take apart the mattress to see what it is made of.

sure enough, the mattress (Sealy Posturepedic) pad is one piece and sewen on the side material it is called a pillow top


and can be cut away from the rest of the unit reveling egg crate high density foam (the same crap that is being sold on ebay as "acoustic treatment" for cheap) covering the spring architecture.

while this foam itself does not make a good acoustic absorbing panel by any means, i found that by combining the pillow top and the foam under pad makes for really nice sounding acoustic absorption material.

so i took the foam pad and the pillow top off the dissected mattress, held them together with the foam pad against the wall and the pillow top covering the foam pad, (very heavy) I proceeded to hang the contraption to the wall using 1 inch drywall screws. well, as you might have guessed it was sagging off the wall, so i added more screws, and literally battened the pad to the wall with 30 or so screws randomly "patterned" paying attention to the edges and the "field" if you will of the pad.

after i was done i ran white noise at 124 db and used my RTA with a calibrated mic to see how well my "el cheap o" ugly wall hanging worked.

I was surprised that the the RTA showed a relatively flat response with a 12 db attenuation of most of the frequencies below 100 hz.

that annoying HF slap back was gone. but i was still having issues with the ringing of the air handling vent in the ceiling.

Later I removed the vent air direction thingy exposing the the large gaping hole in the ceiling. I considered covering it up completely with 3/4 inch plywood but in the end i ended up building a box made of 2x4 and thick plywood around (attached to the ceiling joists) it so as to direct the air to the side of the room rather than straigh down, this really quieted the rushing noise of the air as it entered toe room. and i didnt have to block anything. aparently by pure luck i tightened up the metal air vent and that annoying ring was silenced.

so what to do about that ugly yellowing mattress pillow top battened to my wall. out came the old white and blue latex wall paint from an older project and "poof", instant abstract art.

Thinking the ad hoc, mattress derived absorption panel was going to be an ineffective and laughable ugly wall wart designed to scare away potential clients, i was convinced this experiment would fail and just end up being more work than anything, but i was very surprised at the result and thought it warranted a write up.

i hope this information is useful, but please don't take it to heart, i have not had time to do proper NRC rating measurements on this project. but at the very least, it has a good fire rating.
cheers!

here is the result
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00084-1.jpg

[sabianq]

I needed a cheap way to hang microphone booms and cans from the ceiling.
I racked my brain and thought about going to Home Depot to purchase some of these:

http://www.abledata.com/product_images/images/02A0667.jpg

to dissect and repurpose for microphone booms.
the client was scheduled to come in in the morning the next day so having the proper booms would have been impossible to get.

what did i have lying around that could work for me?

A while back i bought the 10 pack of microphone stands from Musicians friend for 100 bucks to utilize with my live gigs.
I hated the Boom Arm and remove them on all of the stands so i had a surplus of boom arms.

I noticed that you can attach them together at the pivot point and make a pretty good and sturdy fold able boom.

the cap i attached to my air vent was strong enough to hold up any weight i put on it so it was the best candidate for attaching the booms.

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00070.jpg

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00071.jpg

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00074.jpg

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00075.jpg

[sabianq]

my next issue was routing the cables to the snake
i decided to go overhead, bu looking through my spar parts bin i found a stack of old Ikea bed brackets and attached them to the ceiling joists.




I used 3 hex nuts to space them from the ceiling surface.
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00078.jpg

http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00079.jpg
they made a good cable race.

[sabianq]

finally i wanted a reflector in the corner to help disperse the low frequencies.

I used the Memory foam mattress that was on the bed and rolled it up real tight then studded it in the corner and placed the old head board from the bed frame in front of it, I squished the foam pad into the corner with the reused headboard and secured it to the wall with screws, painted it blue and added guitar hangers to the board.


http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s252/sabianq/DSC00082-1.jpg

it seems to make a pretty good resonator

[Bops2000]

Good old inginuiety sabi !
Thats what i'm talkin' about dog !
Send us some musc don't be bashful