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Saturday, January 08, 2011
Rooms, Racks, and Dumb-Asses
George Sanger, The Fat Man | 01/08
A Tour of Weird Features of an Effective Studio (from the out-of-print book The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness)
To make proper sound effects and music, you’ll need enough room to swing a Dobro. Here, “Professor” K. Weston Phelan produces a Joe Richardson blues session for the Cast of 1000’s slot machine. It may or may not turn out to be the best blues ever played, but it will be the best ever played for a slot machine. Bet on it.
Very few game audio houses have a room big enough to comfortably house a mid-sized musical ensemble and the equipment necessary to record them. To play well, people must be happy. A room is big enough for a band and its equipment if, and only if, you can throw a good beer party in it. If you are fortunate enough to be able to use such a room for your audio production, Team Fat recommends constantly monitoring any deviations in the room size by periodically calibrating it with such a party.
 Hot glue, foam, and Plexiglas make a nice isolation case for loud gear. Remember where your bottom is. It should be clearly labeled.
Soundproofing is overrated. Don’t spend a million dollars to block out the sound of the train, just get a place a little farther from the tracks. Book your sessions around the train schedule. Or do a second take for safety; that won’t kill you. You only need a small area that’s really quiet: Large ensembles usually play loud and nearly always drown out the occasional loud sounds that happen to leak through normal walls. On the inside walls, certainly only a small area of your room should feel dead and padded….Dead rooms can be good for voice-over, but they’re no fun to play in. The room should be near eating establishments. Musicians, like human beings, need to be fed. Most studios ignore this fact, choosing instead to host long mic set-ups that plow right through feeding time. I have found that long set-up times for recording sessions are largely an outgrowth of the engineer’s desire to prove to somebody, perhaps his father, that he is a good engineer. Given the choice between a long set-up and a relaxed, happy, fed musician, I will take the latter every time. I assure you that all good musicians can make sound that is pleasing when they are fed. All pleasing music can be recorded easily with a stereo pair of microphones placed at the ear-level of the person who is pleased by the music. If one wishes to have both a long set-up time and a well-fed musician, the room must be near eating establishments. QED.
Let’s get the gear vertical, too.
A vertically mounted amp head takes up little room and serves as a very good amp modeling modeler, emulating the functions of the software that emulates non-virtual amp heads. A couple of tubes placed on top will rattle around, giving you that highly desired “tube sound.” You can also use a Pod Pro or similar device to emulate that emulation emulation, or you can emulate all that with the Guitar Port (pictured).
To address the challenge of the crowded studio, Joe pioneered the incredibly efficient Joe Rack, used at one time or another by all of Team Fat. A Joe Rack is a floor-to-ceiling 19-inch-wide rack made entirely of two-by-fours or something close. To keep it from toppling forward, the rear-protruding feet are held down by sandbags or cinder blocks. Other than that, it’s pretty much what it appears to be. Joe is an artist, and his medium is two-by-fours. His father taught him that if it’s not overbuilt, it’s not finished. Somehow Joe took that to mean “never paint furniture.”
Joe’s Joe Racks. Note the speaker and mouse-pad shelves. The equipment is held in place by wood screws. Joe achieves the illusion of black metal rack strips by spraypainting a vertical stripe on the inner quarter-inch of the vertical boards.
The genius of a Joe Rack reveals itself gradually with use. First, it’s dirt cheap and easy to make. Also, floor-to-ceiling rack space is by far the best way we’ve found to get lots of equipment into a little bit of floor space and into easy reach. Joe Rack users find that they have rack space to spare, and they can be picky about mounting their favorite gear at its optimal height. Furthermore, by running wood screws straight into the rack, your rack spacing is infinitely variable. You aren’t limited by the spacing of the holes on those metal rack brackets, and you don’t have the problem of having to stock those special rack-sized screws. Because your Joe Rack is made entirely of raw lumber, you can easily screw more bits onto it, creating shelves for speakers, mixing consoles, keyboards, and mouse pads. I had bull horns on mine before they migrated to the Rolls.
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