RealTraps are very professional and within a few days I had my PVB at home and ready for some testing. The packaging was excellent. The PVB came in a solid cardboard box with protective styrofoam in the corners to easily withstand the trip from the factory.

The PVB comes with a metallic piece that can be effortlessly attached to any standard mic stand, as shown in the picture. I recommend that you get yourself a solic mic stand cos the PVB is relatively heavy and my mic stand tilts slightly by the weight of the PVB when it is at full height for vocal recording, although it shouldn’t really be a problem in any case. The construction of the PVB is good, it looks solid and that will probably last many years of use.

Let’s go into the sound aspects. Even before mounting it I unfolded it and spoke into it and could already hear the damping. I’ve been trying it with my Rode NT1A microphone directly into the Focusrite Saffire and so far recorded vocals and spanish guitar and the results are excellent, the sound is instantly dryer and better than I imagined I could get in that room without any complicated and expensive treatment.

So that you can judge by yourself I have uploaded some examples below.

Guitar Sample Without Portable Vocal Booth
Download audio file (20091019 – Guitar Sample Without Portable Vocal Booth.mp3)

Guitar Sample With Portable Vocal Booth
Download audio file (20091019 – Guitar Sample With Portable Vocal Booth.mp3)

So I walked around downtown a bit and found three shops and finally bought an ok spanish guitar in a little shop downtown Puebla where they didn’t even tune the guitars. After playing anything that vaguely resembled a guitar I chose a Tres Pinos (never heard that brand before) that costed 3000 MXN (that is 226 USD at today’s exchange rate), the other guitars I tried don’t really deserve to be named so, a bit frustrating. The Tres Pinos doesn’t sound as nice as my Alhambra back at home but it actually plays quite nicely, although it detunes pretty quickly.

Later on I found another area of Puebla that actually has loads of nice guitar shops but I don’t regret having bought that one since for the price I won’t get much better quality.

A week later I spotted a red wine coloured Yamaha with two humbuckers sitting in a pawn shop near home. I went in, asked the price and the clerk let me test it… in a Hi-Fi stereo system. It sounded ok to me so I bought it for 1400 mexican pesos, about 105 USD. The guitar in question is made in Taiwan and has a few scratches but other than that seemed ok. Once back in the silence of my home I found that the guitar made quite a lot of noise that makes it quite unusable for recording. After some poking I found that the problem was a faulty tone pot. So yesterday I ordered some replacement pots from eBay and I’ll attempt to replace it, wish me good luck. In fact I feel a bit excited of trying the surgery to see if I can actually fix it since killing it wouldn’t be a huge loss. Although having to do so much work for fixing a 105 USD guitar seems like a lot it’ll still be good practice. I probably wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about doing it to a more expensive guitar.

A couple of weeks later in the same shop I saw a black Yamaha bass guitar and repeated the same procedure. This time I paid 1800 pesos, around 135 USD and this time I made sure that the guitar had no noise by cranking up the volume at the shop and thoroughly trying every possible pot setting.

The good thing about buying them second hand is that I won’t get too attached to them and I can just resell them at a minimal loss when I leave without even worrying thinkint twice about it.

Of course I miss my nice guitars back home which sound better on their own and feel very nice to play but since I’m not going to record classical music and at the end of the day both the electric and bass guitars are going to the DI’d through the soundcard into the sequencer to be processed by a bunch of digital VST plugins and sit in the middle of a mix I don’t think being cheap will make such a big difference to the end result.

1. 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 started making music with computers I had excellent results using a Pentium IV at 500MHz and 256Mbytes of RAM. Oh! and it comes with a little firewire port to use with my Focusrite Saffire, happy days. So the laptop should be fine.
2. Soundcard, you know I love my Focusrite Saffire, so why change it? The only annoying problem (which was very annoying indeed) is that I lost my original power supply so I bought a new one from Focusrite itself. However, only a few hours before leaving when I checked it I realised that the power supply only accepts european voltage, not north american one, very well done Focusrite! So since the power supply this unit needs is an AC to AC adaptor and most electronic shops (physical and on the internet) only sell AC to DC it was a bit difficult to find one. The alternative would have been to buy a voltage step converter, but it would be very annoying having to use two units to power a simple soundcard.
3. Keyboard, my old M-Audio O2. I know now there are loads more USB keyboards to choose from but back in 2005 when I bought it it was super slim and still is very usable for creating bass lines, electric piano chords and, with a little patience, simple solos.
4. Microphone, Rode NT-1A, cheap and clean sounding quality condenser microphone. Cardioid pattern. It even comes with it’s own shock mount. Just make sure your soundcard can provide the power supply before buying it.
5. External Hard Drive, Iomega UltraMax 1TByte. I use this for all my media, movies and music but since it has multiple ports it can handle USB, Firewire, eSata. Good for music production too. Cool.
6. Belkin Sata II expresscard, I’m not very happy with the speed of USB for music making. Firewire is a bit better, I’ve done mixing up to 90 tracks with external hard drives. However, the firewire 400 ports from my iMac never were able to handle the quick triggering of drum samples from external hard drives so I always had to store the drum samples in the local drive. Very annoying. The theoretical much higher speed of SATA II should be more than capable of handling this. I’ll write about that when it’s due time.
7. Headphones, my old Audio Technica ATH-M40fs headphones, flat response, a little lacking in bass so I’ll try the mixes in cars or with a cheap set of multimedia speakers, etc. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do any proper monitoring since I will not be able to have an acoustic treated room or a decent set of monitors. But that should not stop us from getting good results.

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 lot. I’ve decided to turn this into an experiment.

My target is to build a quality home studio for 3000$ (USD). The total price of all the gear must come within that budget and the final result should have excellent quality.

In the next post I’ll talk about the gear I took on the plane with me.

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 compared to the rest of the mix, this is explained by the effect of small rooms acoustics on the listener’s perception. I overcompensated the lack of bass in my room by applying more bass in the mix.

Fortunately, listening to it in the car provided a different perspective. I spend hours every week driving so I know its frequency response very well and I knew straightaway by listening to the mix that the bass and kick were too loud. So I went back home, reduced those instruments’ volume by a few dB’s, bounced the mix and back to the car. Then repeated this process until I was happy with the results. It was definitely worth the effort.

This is what the article said about it:

I want to share with you some conventional wisdom that is valid, in spite of the fact that few people understand why. Many recordists who don’t have proper acoustic treatment have learned to play mixes in their cars in order to get a better sense of the bass levels. Of course, most car stereos are a poor second to a good pair of monitor speakers. Yet that method works surprisingly well, discounting the nuisance of having to keep burning CD-Rs to play in your car. Many people think that a car is a good place to assess mixes because we spend so much time listening there, but they also listen through their studio monitors.

The reason is explained in the article. Cars do not have such as bad a low frequencies response as small rooms as the energy just passes through the walls to the outside instead instead of being reflected causing dips in the frequency response. This makes the low frequency response more uniform. Cool.

That helped me to assess some details of the mix that I hadn’t perceived until then. The most important being that the kick and the bass were too loud and the intro was too quiet, so sorted the problem by using a bit of volume automation on the intro and lowering a few dB’s both the kick and bass. Now everything sounds a lot more balanced.

That has shown me the importance of checking the mixes on as many systems as possible as the limitations of these can show details that weren’t audible or obvious before.

Just consider how many hours the average person spends on a chair every day. If you are uncomfortable your back will suffer and so will your creativity. Until last month I was using a tiny desk and one of the chairs from the lounge to make music and I wasn’t happy with the results. I would actually sit on my bed working on my laptop to avoid sitting at my desk, this was an unconscious decision as I wasn’t comfortable with my setup. So when I realised I made a trip to my local Ikea shop and bought a Kläppe chair and a Vika Byske table. This has made a world of a difference to me. I can sit for longer hours without feeling tired and the bigger table makes my workspace clutter free.

A note for guitarists, the Kläppe chair comes with foldable armrests, they fold to the back of the chair, turning your chair into one without armrests. This is perfect for when you switch from mixing/recording/general work to playing guitar. Nice touch. Before I always had to choose a chair without armrests which I find slightly less comfortable.

This is a part of your studio where you really want to put money into, consider that when writing your new gear wish list.

Have you had similar problems with you studio furniture?