Well after 5 years of recording, I've finally decided to take room acoustics seriously. I've read

several books on the subject, but those don't do a whole lot of good when you don't apply the

results. I've always been so busy recording that I've never been able to stop and say "Wait! I'm

going to work on room acoustics".

Well, I wish I would have done this years ago. Why? Because it turns out that my room has serious

problems!

I tested using Sound Forge's built in "synthesis" feature which allows you to create sweeps and

such. It turns out that 100Hz is almost non-existent on my system. This would explain why my mastering engineer is telling me my bass guitar is too loud even though I intentionally mixed it too low on purpose.

So my brother came over to help and we began doing all sorts of tests to find the ideal place to position my studio monitors. I must say that the frequency response differences are enormous when moving the studio monitor just a couple of feet. Sometimes the difference can be 10 or 15dB at any given frequency. It's easy to see how I wasn't hearing enough bass guitar in my monitors (and therefor leaving them too loud).

It's clear that my room needs some work.

After seeing the frequency response of the room I've been mixing in for years, it's no wonder I've never really been happy with my mixes. Instead of buying $2,000 microphones, I should have been taking a month to make sure my acoustics were right on.

Brandon