Hey, y’all, and welcome to Wulfbrand’s State of the Site for January. This month has been hectic and punctuated by a lot going on in both my and Seba’s mundane worlds; I’ve started an insanely hectic full-time class schedule while working later at night, which has resulted in a bit of a headache with finding off days; Seba’s been going through a chicken crisis and the start of the semester at her day job; and both of us needed some time off when her son (one of my best friends) got engaged (yay!).

So, content production has been slightly slower than normal here lately, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; we’ve needed a little time to focus on us, and I think we’re through the thick of it now. Seba’s working on a new podcast episode as I write this, and it should be live either tomorrow or Monday— probably closer to noon than the usual 9 AM post time (though 9am was originally selected to ensure the podcast would make it to all our platforms by noon).

Work on my studio side project has been going, if slowly. I now have a better (yay for pre-owned) microphone over here, and got the borrowed mixer working acceptably, and taught myself acoustic analysis software only to find out that my office is badly in need of treatment (and I haven’t measured Seba’s home studio yet but I’m betting it could benefit from some). For those of you who like pretty graphs, here’s a waterfall of the low-end in here:

For those who aren’t sound engineers, I’ll break it down; what you’re looking at is a visual representation of sound bouncing around the room. It leaves the speakers, bounces off the side walls, back wall, and wall behind the speakers, then goes into a microphone at the listening point. The frequencies that do weird shit are governed by the physical size of the room; they either double or cancel sound at certain spots based on where you are in the room. For example, the drop at 20Hz corresponds to 56 feet, which is the distance from the speakers to the back wall of the room and back to the listening point. The spike at 80hz corresponds to 14.5 feet, the distance from the speakers to the wall behind them and back, etc.

This set of problems is strictly musical; the human voice ranges from about 500Hz to maybe 4000Hz, depending on the singer. However, the points in that range where we see weird shit on the next graph are actually harmonics of the spots where weird shit was happening down below:

So, not much treatment is actually needed in the mid to high end; diffusors at the back wall might help the really high stuff linger a little more and be more even, but these numbers are proof that (at least in this room) egg crates or foam (which absorb high frequencies) would do little and would actually make the real problem (bass lingers too long) worse!

I’ve found a local company in the Atlanta area (close to my work) that makes the bass traps that would actually solve the problem, and kits to make them myself for cheaper. Before I do any of that, though, I need to go take the same measurements at Seba’s studio and find out if her issues mirror mine (they’re probably quite different; hers is around 1/3rd as big and a totally different shape, with lots of exciting angles. I’m excited to get pretty graphs over there soon (I mean, c’mon, they’re rainbows!) and will share my findings here!

Finally, for those of you who read through this whole thing, a special announcement:

I’m launching my personal site on Febuary 1. I just finished the design phase and will be taking the next week to get the appropriate licenses and forms filled out to lauch. It’s going to be called Canis Aves and located at canisaves.com, but since the site isn’t live yet I’ll just leave you with this teaser pic: