Hey Jack,
You know, if you are not producing professionally, in which case you have many expectation to contend with, then you can improve your setup with some small things, but at the end of the day most of these (pseudo)acoustic insulation things are bogus.
Good speakers and good speaker placement (not just compared to the place you plan to sit, but the actual place you are gonna sit) is way more important. Close to the wall, a little further away from the wall (better = more room behind the monitors), sitting on the narrow or wide wall of a room, if there is glass that can’t be covered, where is it in relationship to your monitors, etx. Lot’s of choices to make that can have major impact on the sound quality of your production space that have nothing to do with sticking egg cartons on the wall (useless), acoustic tiling the room (also useless unless you plan on spending 100K+ on a totall rebuild) and Skylining your ceiling (which looks nice and IS effective, but unless you make it yourself is pretty expensive).
Let me do a real quick 101 on acoustic room treatment. There are two factors involved:
1) Insulation. This serves two purposes, keeping your sound IN the room and external noise OUT of the room. Insulation has very little to do with the resulting acoustic qualities of the room. Insulation can be achieved effectively by only two things, preferably in combination, namely mass (concrete and lots of it is a great sound insulator :)) and total disconnection (room in a room). No foam (no mass) or anyother “stick it on the wall for a miracle effect” solution is gonna help seriously with insulation.
2) Acoustic treatment. This serves to make the room as acoustically neutral as possible. NOT DEAD! You do not want to get rid of your room reverb. Mixing in a dead room is really eerie lol. What you DO want is to have a near flat frequency response at you ear level when you send out white noise from you monitors. Near flat, because +/- 6dB fluctuation is considered acceptable for home studio use. Things you want to worry about are standing waves (especially with the low frequencies), which is waves reflecting off hard surfaces and cancelling out part of the original sound, causing “holes” or dips in your frequency chart. The other is strong reflections that DON’T cancel out but reinforce certain frequencies (usually with higher frequenciesbut can happen in the lows as well) causing “bumps” or spikes in the curve. There are some relatively simple and somewhat effective measures you can take at home without breaking the bank totally. But expect some serious investment nevertheless. There is no 50-dollar fix for doing a room. For the low end you can buy some “bass-traps”. The are designed to suck up the original sound and preventing it from bouncing back out and do their cancellation or reinforcing. Corners of the room are an obvious place for them and for the rest lots of trial and measure. The high end excess can be helped by covering up hard surfaces (especially glass which is a veritable sound mirror) with, preferably heavy and thick, curtains. If need be hang them over other other walls too if you feel the are too reflective.
So what is the home studio owner to do. Step one is put your desk in the place you want it and preferably have everything else in the room in it’s place to as it all contributes to the acoustics of the room. Set up your speakers to hit your ears at the exact place (perfect triangle with your head in the front tip, speakers firing down slightly, the tweeters aimed straight at your ears) and have them sit on some acoustic foam (the only true cheap and effective tool). Make sure you have heavy speaker stands (remember mass = insulation) as well and if you don’t buy floor stands that sit on a concrete floor (but wood for example) you can put the entire stand on an acoustic foam pad as well. Now toss in your favorite CD, the one you have heard so much on so many different sound systems that you know how it should sound by heart. LISTEN!
Seriously, this will tell you if a room is bass-heavy (boomy) or bass-light and if there is serious reverb/echo or if the room is overly bright (too much highs) and sounds harsh or dull (too little highs)
If it sounds good to your ears, the room is probably not so bad. Listen for holes in the low end (are bass instruments missing or less prominent than you remember them to be on this track?) and specific areas higher up that seem to be too strong (harsher sound than you’d expect). And listen for unnatural reverb (going towards echo that you know is not in the track). Try putting your desk in a different position if you are not happy with the sound. Move it further from the wall it faces or even another spot in the room (usuall if the room is not square it is wise to start sitting at the narrow end). Once you figured that out and want a more scientific approach, buy/borrow/rent a good Real Time Analyzer with a test mic. set the test mic where your head would be and run some white noise through your speaker (you’ll have to calibrate by having the mic straight in front of you speakers first, to compensate for any frequency irregularities in the speakers). The graph on the RTA now shows where there are spikes and dips in the frequency curve.
Now you know what area’s you might want to treat. Remember if it is within a + and – 6dB of flat, don’t worry about it too much. After treatment (like placing a bass trap) measure again. Keep doing this till you get it as good as you can with the modest means at you disposal. Know that your room now probably sounds better than 95% of the places where people listening to your music will be in (cars, living room, etx.).
Lot of text, but this is pretty complex matter. You can find much more detail online if you feel like reading up more. I oversimplified a few things, but the essence is correct:
1) Get good gear (RoKit are pretty much the defacto standard for home studio use. 6’s have the best ratio volume/bass/price of the 2-6-8 series).
2) Pick the right spot in the room
3) Use your ears first
4) Use technical aids, like RTA with white noise generator
5) Experiment with placement of your listening position
6) Treat the room with some low end solutions like heavy curtains and bass traps
Unless you plan on getting a pro-grade soundcard, don’t worry about it and use the S2. There really isn’t that much difference in quality. It’s a 24-bit sound card, so should work for your purpose.
Keyboards are plenty. Yamaha, Korg, Akai, E-mu, Ion, you name them. They all have budget models. Things to watch for are touch-sensitive keys (semi-weighted is a nice bonus), pitch bend wheel, the more buttons and knobs the better. Some will have trigger pads which is also a nice bonus to have. Couple of short faders can be helpful too, depending on what they can be mapped to.
Shop online, then try to look and FEEL! your favorites at a local musician shop. It’s a personal matter really.
Hope that helps.
Greetinx,
C.
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