Alrighty, more testing and more making of stuff!
The vocals, as I found before, were absolutely unusable. The room that sounded so good with drums sounded like complete buttocks with vocals. I was getting so much early reflections from the ceiling and wall, there was no way to mix the vocals to get rid of it, in fact with any processing it even made it worse.
So the next thing on the agenda was to build a portable vocal screen. Basically, the idea was to hang 3 sheets of rockwool up in a kind of open-backed vocal booth arrangement so it would deaden the sound immediately around the mic and vocalist. The rockwool was wrapped in acoustic cloth and then hung from a frame we made from PVC plumbers pipes and joints that we got from Bunnings! HAHA! Studio construction the pov' way!
The next vocal test revealed that I was still getting reflections from the ceiling. The one thing that's been missing from the live room (and control room too) has been ceiling clouds that stop the reflections between the floor and the ceiling. I thought that would cause a big issue with drums in the live room, but clearly not - they sound great. Vocals, however...
So we made us some clouds, which were half sheets of rockwool, wrapped in chicken wire (HAHA - more pov' studio tricks) so it stays rigid, and then wrapped in acoustic cloth. I'll be attaching those by hangers to the ceiling when I get the chance, but to test it out, I balanced it on the top of 2 mic stands while I did the next vocal test.
Success! Vocals sound great!
Here's some pics!
This is how we made the ceiling clouds:
Rockwool wrapped up with chicken wire:
Then covered with acoustic cloth and stitched up:
Before and after shot:
And here they are with the budget removable vocal booth, balancing on the tips of a couple of mic stands (until they're properly attached to the ceiling):
So how does it all sound?
http://www.lord.net.au/slsstudios/test2.html
There's 4 tracks on there:
1: Vocals with no absorbers in there. You can really hear the room in the sound (assuming you have good headphones or speakers)
2: Vocals with the side absorbers around the mic. Sounding a lot better but still a little echoey.
3: Vocals with the absorbers and cloud. Really good - very dead sounding so it's easy to manipulate later.
4: Well, it's no secret that I'm a big Queensryche fan, and of their 1986 "Rage For Order" album in particular. One of our fans on our forum dared me to record the song "The Whisper" so I thought "Well, this would make a good vocal test", so me and TY smashed through it surprisingly quickly and track 4 in the player is what we came up with! A little rough around the edges and intentionally a little "effected" to tie it in with the original, but as a studio test for both vocals and drums, it passed with flying colours!
So next up is pissy miscellaneous stuff. I need a network switch, KVM switch, 2 racks that are coming soon (and some rack rails to mount in the racks - gotta chase those up soon), 2 small mic stands, 1 mic and a music stand and we're good to go!
More updates soon!
HAHA!