Auralex to the Rescue!

As some of you may know, my wife and I are expecting our first kid in June. It became clear pretty quickly that, as our second bedroom, my writing/recording room was to become the nursery. Thankfully, we had some space in our basement that showed potential for becoming a devoted space for creating music.

There was really only one main problem: with concrete/plaster walls, the room basically acted as a rectangular reverb chamber. It was obvious that something needed to be done to address the acoustic situation. This is where Auralex came in.

Here are some pictures of the basement room before I brought in my recording equipment:

We decided to start by repainting the walls a more vibey green color (these pics were taken while the paint was still drying):

Here's where the Auralex came in, along with my recording setup:

My new man cave!

My co-writer's seat

The vocal booth, enclosed by movable Auralex ProMAX panels

The Mopads were the perfect thing to separate the monitors from the stands, isolating the vibrations

I suspended the foam from the ceilings with these gold hooks

Eric Smith from Auralex

Not only does the new setup look cool, it actually encourages creativity. I've been told that it's easier to focus when there are less rogue sound waves bouncing around the room, and I've experienced that to be true. I've never heard the stereo image like I have in the past couple months. My mixes are improving, and I'm enjoying listening to music more now than I have in the past couple years. 

The room's acoustics are so tight now that, one day, I noticed what sounded like a static problem in my left monitor only to discover that I was actually hearing a candle burning on my desk. That's a good sign of an accurate acoustic environment!

If you have a dedicated space for writing/recording, I highly encourage you to invest in the room's acoustic treatment. If you can't accurately hear what's coming out of the monitors, you'll have trouble competing with those who have a proper setup. Check out Auralex.com for ways that you can turn your room into a space that serves your creativity. Treat yourself to proper acoustic treatment!

Keep writing (a treating acoustics), 

Ben

23 Hz

Science of Sound

I took a class at Belmont called The Physics of Sound, and here are some of the most fascinating truths about how sound interacts with our ears and brains:


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Physics Meets Photography

Though on the surface physics and photography don't have much to do specifically with songwriting, inspiration to write songs can be drawn directly from them.

Here's something I found inspiring: photographer Caleb Charland looked at a common thing like a houseplant and used his imagination to show us that plant in a new and exciting way. And isn't that what we try to do as songwriters? We try to see daily occurrences with a fresh perspective.

Photo by Caleb Charland.

Here's the explanation of how the artist managed to create this image of a growing plant (as quoted in Wired Magazine):

The initial spark of a match. A nail as it jitters toward a magnet. A bud on a plant that’s poised to grow into a branch. These moments of inception are often ephemeral to the point of being undetectable, but Caleb Charland manages to capture them, turning those flashes in the mind’s eye into thought-provoking photographs. 

His latest endeavor (working title: Node Project) focuses on those points on a plant from which leaves and branches sprout. “Each of the little nodes—they just felt like they could be an armature for an image,” he says. To create the effect shown here, Charland spray-painted a shrub black, then highlighted each node with glow-in-the-dark paint. Next, he stuck the plant in a ceramic pot and rotated it under a black light, exposing a sheet of 4 x 5 film to an illuminated pattern of potential growth. As Charland puts it, “I like the idea of taking something simple and ordinary and making it mesmerizing.”

Keep writing,

Ben