what studio monitors y'all using?

I use M audio SP8-B monitors downstairs, and the 5" version upstairs. If you're talking about doing this stuff purely for your own listening enjoyment, then go with whatever sounds best to your ears and run with it. If you want to make recordings that sound more professional, that's a steep learning curve, and I'm only at the bottom of that hill.

About the speakers, it's simpler these days to get powered monitors in most cases. Most recording pros will tell you what they use, but then will tell you to go out to a place that sells a lot of different kinds and listen to a couple of reference cuts that you know well through a bunch of different kinds and see what sounds best. It's kind of like bass shopping, actually, except that I found it more intimidating because I didn't know what was supposed to be "good". The SP8's sound pretty good to me, but as always, there are things about them that I have to take into account when I'm mixing if I want the mix to translate. And then there's the whole question of what your room sounds like to consider.



Oy...the whole recording thing is just as deep as the study of music in its own way.

Anyway, I'll post a pic of my little rig, including the speakers. I like them well enough, but there are far better ones out there. Do you have a nice set of headphones? I usually check my recordings on four sources: the monitors in the pic, a pair of Sony V600 and/or 7506 phones, my car stereo (Alpine/Infinity...sort of like an upper end "off the rack" suit), and my wife's POS stereo in her study. When I can get something to sound halfway decent on all of these, it usually translates pretty well to most systems.

(recording junk in pic: Soundcraft M12 board, MOTU 1224 interface, M-Audio Tampa preamp, Mac G4 tower [hidden], Alesis Masterlink, a few little M-Audio preamps whose name escapes me)

 

I'm sorta "functionally dyslexic", which can only be managed in my case by strong OCD tendencies...otherwise, I can't ever find anything. The kid stuff is in other rooms.

The mouse pedestal was a gift, but I like it!

 

Larry's advice is excellent as usual. Soundproofing has two aspects: one kind, involving building a room within a room, is designed to isolate the interior space from external noise; the second kind has to do with taming the acoustics of sounds created within a room to make them more recording friendly.

I doubt you'll be able to do too much with the first type in your current location, but you might be able to mitigate the noise enough to make things a little better than they are now. The second kind of soundproofing (the interior kind) - acoustically treating a room or space - is discussed in This thread from the (BG) Recording Gear forum. I have a few pics up in posts 12 and 13 of the homebrew corner and ceiling treatments I've built for my music room, and would be happy to share construction details if yer interested. They've helped a lot in this room. It still ain't perfect, but it's usable now and it wasn't really before I installed the panels.

 

For a drop ceiling kind of thing, you could try rock wool (also called mineral fiber - same stuff I have in my corner traps, window treatment, and ceiling panels). If you made a bunch of square or recangular panels made of (can't spell it, but it's pronounced, "loo-on") thin plywood, you could attach 2" of rock wool on either side and then hang the panels close together. That would probably quiet the place down a good bit.

My panels are all made this way, only they're all one-sided and framed around the edges. I should probably have put some more rock wool on the backs of the ceiling panels, but life got busy and I never got around to it. At any rate, the panels in the window frames (in one of the pics in the other linked thread) do a nice job of minimizing the noise from the street, so I imagine they'd do the same for sculptors.