Testing the RealTraps Portable Vocal Booth

I record in the lounge. This is because it is the only interior room where I can avoid most of the road traffic noise from outside. The room is wide and therefore early reflections are not a problem but it has a lot of ambience since it’s got no acoustic treatment whatsoever. So as an [...]

How to build a quality home studio for $3000 (part 3)

Buy cheap guitars. Seriously. I do have the expensive ones… at home (9500 km away) but I decided not to bring any of them cos it’s always very annoying to take a guitar through the airports and I wanted to do a little experiment. I wanted to buy the guitars at my destination to prove [...]

How to build a quality home studio for $3000 (part 2)

So continuing with the series, this is the gear that I brought with me on the plane:

Laptop, my Dell Vostro 1500 is more than enough to make as much music as we need with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gbytes of RAM. To many this may seem completely insufficient but when I [...]

How to build a quality home studio for $3000 (part 1)

This is the situation. I am in Puebla, México for work reasons for half a year away from my nice guitars and a lot of my other studio gear but I still want to make music. All I brought with me was the stuff that I could reasonably fit in my suitcases, so not a [...]

Playing mixes in your car

This is related to my previous post. The other day, reading Hometracked I found a link to this article about acoustics and found, to my surprise, that what I instinctively did, checking my mix in the car, wasn’t such a bad idea after all. That way I heard that the bottom end frequencies were exaggerated [...]

Checking mixes on as many systems as possible

Yesterday I was mixing a song and when I was happy with the results on my monitors I bounced it played it on two sets of headphones, an MP3 player with a set of portable headphones, a laptop’s built-in speakers, my Mac’s built-in speakers and my car.
That helped me to assess some details of the mix that [...]