Probably doesn't look much different than the other photos I've been posting, but today the concrete guys did the "second cut". It's very smooth to the touch, and the little tiny stones are becoming visible. This is usually considered a good thing, but it depends on your taste and a zillion physical factors of how they mixed and poured the original concrete (and keep in mind they weren't originally doing it with cosmetics in mind). I'm OK with some of little stones showing, but I'm glad it's not going to be so exaggerated that it looks like a granite countertop. The only thing that scares me a bit is that there's a fairly large number of various divits and damage, mostly from carpet tack strips in the hall, foyer, etc., but they tell me they can fix all that up. Good news is that they're telling me that the entire slab is very even overall, and I'm told if it isn't, it doesn't look as nice when it's shiny. Tomorrow or the next day they'll start using the grinding wheels that make it shiny, so perhaps that'll show up in the pics (otherwise you're all going to have to come visit me here. Kegger!). Lester seems happy about the whole deal, and between the floor improvements and successfully locating his tail, it's a swell day for being a cat.
In the meantime, yesterday I finished almost all of the screw-down-the-floor process in the upstairs studio, and it's a whole new world. I have to take a picture of the ten zillion nails I yanked out- my back wasn't feeling so good yesterday. However, on yet another trip to Lowe's to buy more drywall screws, I sprung for some ten-dollar kneepads, and those made a big difference (insert your own kneepad joke, and while you're at, feel free to make one about having a flat head for your beer and turning into a cheeseburger at midnite).
Scale almost correct.Today I worked on the "blueprint" for the wall I'm gonna build up there to create a vocal booth. Initially I was going to build something small in the "nook" of the back corner of the room (the part to the left of the gray area, which is actually a little larger and squarer), but I decided to make it go all the way across for a couple reasons. 1) that whole area of the room is going to be kind of wasted anyway; the bulk of my setup will be in the big part of the room, and 2) any small room, especially one not much bigger than a phone booth is going to sound awful. I know the majority of people reading this aren't musician/engineer types so this is about to get either super boring or really interesting depending upon how much you like to don your Mr. Science hat...
Rooms tend to have two inherent sound traits- internal resonance (think of how sound rings in the shower) and reverb (think of a gymnasium). These are kind of the same thing, except that one takes far more time to propagate (and is typically more pleasant), but since our room is gonna be small, let's stick with our shower/resonation idea. When sound is contained in small spaces, for example, inside a saxophone, the shape and materials of the resonating chamber emphasize and de-emphasize certain frequencies. That's why a clarinet, though functioning almost identically to a saxa-ma-phone, sounds different. Now, let's take a singer, who has their own vibrating reed (their vocal cords) with its own unique resonating chamber (the throat/nose/mouth). Now, take our little tiny room square room with four hard walls, and that sound is gonna bounce around like nuts because the walls are so close. The sound is bouncing too quickly to be heard as an audible reverb (as in a gym), so instead it "rings" at certain frequencies... and dies at others (just like our aforementioned saxophone). Now, just as much as we don't want our saxophone to be playing inside a clarinet, we don't want our beautiful songbird singing in a crappy-sounding resonant chamber wherein certain notes will be super loud and others will die.
The best way to fight this is with a larger room where the effects aren't so drastic. The are a whole bunch of other ways too; acoustic sound absorbing foam works at higher frequencies, carpet, drapes, etc. But if you go nuts with those, your resonating problems go away, but your singer will sound (and feel) like they're singing into a pillow and in addition to recording crappy, it doesn't encourage spirited performances, so you have to strike a balance. Making the walls non-parallel helps too, and since I'm angling my wall, I'm doing that. There are some other acoustical tricks one can do (something called "bass trapping" for getting rid of the ringing at lower frequencies), but suffice to say, it's tricky business, and a bigger room in the first place is better. With all that in mind, I decided to go complete across the back of the of the room with one angled wall about 95" wide, plus it'll have the part all the way in the "crook" which will add roughly another three feet. So, it'll be somewhat narrow (about four feet down to about three feet on the other end), but at least it won't be teeny tiny, and I only have to build one wall this way.
I've never framed a wall before, so that'll be a new one on me- reading up on that fun now. It's gonna have a solid-core door and a window with two panes of glass, so I have to frame those too. I'm going to use a pre-hung door (i.e. includes jamb and hinges) because mounting a door and having it close and swing properly is harder than it seems.
None of this is really a recipe for 100% super soundproofing, but unbeknownst to many, properly soundproofing a room is really difficult and expensive (the only thing that stops sound is mass and airtight seals everywhere), and I really don't need an insane amount of isolation in my already pretty quiet neighborhood. I just need enough so I can have a singer in there, have my speakers at moderate volume without sound bleeding into the mic and I can swivel my desk chair without worrying about recording it.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 2:53PM 
