Update 2023.7 - Getting There

I finished hanging the “acoustic cloud” panels/bass traps in my basement studio about a month ago. It was a lot of work and we had family things and vacations planned too so it was the last real work I got done in the room.

3x 48”x24” hanging bass traps/acoustic clouds

I still have about 8 more acoustic panels to assemble and hang on the walls. I think often about how much work still has to be done - with the reward at the end of it all being the new sound measurement and seeing what kind of an impact all this treatment will have on the finished product. I was explaining to my mom when she visited that the goal of the room isn’t to be perfect, but to train myself to accept the limitations of what I can do and have it be a finishing exercise. “Done is better than perfect” is the motto essentially.

Perfection CAN exist, you can have anechoic chambers, a fully decoupled room, blah blah blah. But number 1 it’s too expensive and number 2 would anybody really notice the difference? The type of electronic music production I’m aiming for relies quite heavily on coloration of the sound - in particular lately I’m obsessed with saturation and drive on my main bus. Mixing and mastering requires the room to be as good as you can make it - as flat an EQ curve as possible - but over a certain point the rewards diminish quite quickly with a project studio on the scale of the room I’m building out. So it’s a matter of “perfect enough”.

Not to be confused however, with the fact that the room is sounding great already and I’m only about 60% of the way finished with the treatment! My ears pick up the difference already. It’ll only get better as I go along. The carrot on the stick is getting closer, I can feel it!

While I’ve been working on the acoustic panels and planning where they go I’ve also been accumulating a few other pieces of gear to finish up everything. Today a Samson SM10 stereo mixer arrived, which should allow me to run all my analog synthesizers and other gear as a sub mix to my interface for processing into the computer. I did a lot of worrying, hand-wringing and fretting over how to get everything from outside the computer into the computer and in the end I’m thinking it’ll all just go as two channels (left and right) into the interface. From there I have virtually every option known to man, be it analog or VST/digital processing.

So what is the schedule on all of this? I’ve been working towards having a room like this for over 20 years. I’ll never be described as a patient person, for sure. I’ve only just started assembling my plans over the last year and the buildout has been about 3 months in the making at this point, so perspective is important. Without committing to a deadline I imagine I’ll have the first new videoscape out on August 1st for the Patreon subscribers, and then out to the general public on August 15. I think the 1st and the 15th are good goals with one videoscape out per month (along with other fun things like EPs, an album, streaming sessions on Twitch, etc.

This will be fun. I hope you stick around to see how much fun it’ll be.