An internal paint job to avoid monotony and quality equipment completes the package.
With the anticipation of spending many hours in the studio, I took a creative approach to painting the walls. A darker base 
color with splashes of bright colors helped lighten the small space.
The Electro-Voice Cardinal microphone is the key to quality in the recordings. I started out with a USB headset microphone and found that it created a thin and often echoing sound quality. Changing to a cardioid condenser microphone eliminated many of the audio artifacts that I was struggling to process out of previous recordings.
A tube pre-amp from Behringer provides a warm, smooth sound that rounds out the dull sound of purely digital recordings. The amp also provides the phantom power required by the 
Cardinal microphone.
The Behringer MX602A low-noise mixer provides live control over basic EQ and gain settings. It also provides a headphone jack. Using the mixer’s headphone jack instead of the computer’s jack eliminated the distracting delay that sound cards are notorious for.
I also added a Vistablet digitizing tablet for more precise control over mouse and cursor 
movement while recording the video portion of projects. Using a mouse works fine. However, the mouse would not always register when I moved it. Not to mention that the mouse pad is rarely able to cover the entire space on the monitor resulting in a jerky recording from picking the mouse up and moving back to the other side of the pad so it would roll clear across the screen. The digitizing tablet represents the entire area of the monitor providing instant movement of the cursor without the typical trials of a mouse.
All of this is used with the new Camtasia version 7 for both audio and video recording. If any additional processing of audio is required, I can easily do that with Audacity 3.0.
The final touch was the strategic placement of baffling materials on the walls and ceiling. My first recordings were much too “live” with reverberation, even in this small space. Baffling hung from the ceiling and on the walls dampened that to a reasonable bright sound. Some additional wall hangings also cancelled out an annoying high frequency ring. I had no idea when I started that it would get that detailed and nitpicky to make everything work smoothly.
I have now spent nearly a week and a half recording both video and audio in the new studio. The difference it has made is indescribable in both the quality of the recordings and my ability to block out the daily distractions.
Posted Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 8:50 am by peterl
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