Guitar pick percussiveness and speakers

Hi, all. I hope this is the proper location for this post. Couple of questions here. First, we were recording a nice, simple song last night that's just "acoustic" guitar parts. I put that in quotes because the guitar used was a Parker with stereo pickups, and the acoustic pickup was the one we recorded. It sounds quite nice. One of the guitar tracks is a couple of chords being slowly picked during the verses (I think the term for this is arpeggio?). It sounds really good, but there's a lot of percussiveness being recorded along with the arpeggio notes from the pick striking the strings. Is there any clever eq I might apply to quell these picks bursts? It's not killing the song, really...I'm just finding it a bit distracting from the arpeggio.

Second, can anyone suggest a pair of moderately priced speakers that I might use for mix monitors? I hate the near-fields I'm using. They do a horrible job reproducing the low-end due to their proximity. All of my mixes sound overly bassy by the time I burn a CD and play it in the car 

Thanks!

Hi, all. I hope this is the proper location for this post.

It is now!

It sounds really good, but there's a lot of percussiveness being recorded along with the arpeggio notes from the pick striking the strings. Is there any clever eq I might apply to quell these picks bursts?

Probably not EQ, but you might well find that very carefully applied limiting will just affect the peaks, and bring them down in level. But it's hard to tell, because we don't have a sample to try it on...

Second, can anyone suggest a pair of moderately priced speakers that I might use for mix monitors?

Have a look at Alesis Monitor One Mk2 passives. Or if you're feeling a bit richer, the active version.

Oops, thanks for getting me to the right place, Steve. I'll gladly post a sample of the part I'm talking about later to see if anything can be done to help it. Also, thanks for the monitor tip. I was going to ask about simply adding a subwoofer to my near-fields to try filling in the low-end gap, if maybe you think that would also be an acceptable solution. If so, might you suggest a decent sub?

If you have monitors that are lacking audible bass, then a sub won't help in the slightest, I'm afraid.

I can hear more bass when I stand a few feet away from the near-fields, but that's hardly a way to mix. I figured a sub placed in a corner a few feet away might allow me to more accurately hear what's actually there.

[absolutely]

If you hear more bass when you move away, then that's absolutely a room problem you've got with standing waves - and there's about a 100% chance that all a sub would do was make this effect worse, not better. The first thing you need to spend money on is a load of bass traps for the corners of your room. Then, and only then, can you start to sort out the other response anomalies.

Either that or mix at lower volumes before the standing waves get too obnoxious 

But the modes aren't level dependant in the slightest, so that wouldn't work at all.

Steve, this may seem the cheap way out, but I found a couple of videos on Youtube about making your own bass traps. The concept and methods seem simple enough, but my question is about quantity. Sure, I can certainly build these things, but should I coat all of my vertical walls with them? Should I try to gobble up all of the reflections? My studio is pretty small (maybe 12'x15', with an A-frame ceiling).

Steve, this may seem the cheap way out, but I found a couple of videos on Youtube about making your own bass traps. The concept and methods seem simple enough, but my question is about quantity. Sure, I can certainly build these things, but should I coat all of my vertical walls with them? Should I try to gobble up all of the reflections? My studio is pretty small (maybe 12'x15', with an A-frame ceiling).

The quality is pretty much dependant on the depth of material if they are absorptive traps, and certainly  the easiest way to make those is to buy bales of roof insulation, leave them baled and make piles of these in the corners of the room. Hang a drape in front of them if you want - that won't make any difference at all. And it's only the corners of the room you'd need to trap - that's where the bass builds up and that's where you need something that will intercept at least a quarter of the wavelength of it to stop this happening. It's impossible to over-trap the corners of a room, incidentally - ideally you need something from the ground to the ceiling, the same depth all the way up, which is why I suggested a stack of them.

Other than that, the other important thing you have to do is to stop early reflections from your monitors. So imagine all the walls and ceiling in the room are covered in mirrors - if you can 'see' a reflection of a monitor in any of them, you almost certainly need a bit of auralex or whatever there. But it's important not to over-treat a room - you really won't want to be in it for long otherwise. So once you've trapped the corners, anything covering more than about 20% of the remaining room is probably excessive. And since some walls will presumably have stuff on them anyway, it will probably be just the monitor reflections you need to treat.

Here's a pic of my studio. Any thoughts on where to put traps, considering the ceiling?

Like I said, you need them in the corners. These are where the ends of the longest dimensions (the diagonals) in the room are, and they are where the bass invariably builds up. Your monitors are too low; they should be at about eye height when you are sitting down, and the fronts should be at least a couple of feet from the rear wall - If you don't do that you will definitely get a less smooth response. This will also have the effect of getting them away from the desk top as well - another thing you should avoid. Unfortunately you will need to treat at least some of those sloping ceiling surfaces - more so at the monitor end, and progressively less back into the room. If you have a wall at the other end of the room, then you'll need to put some treatment on that too, although diffusers might be a better idea there.

The problem with all rooms of this shape is that you never get anything like an even response from them, unless you analyse them very carefully, and even then you either end up having a limited sweet spot, or a room so full of treatment of one sort or another that there simply isn't room left to operate. Before you ask, EQing the monitors doesn't fix this in the slightest either - in fact it makes things a lot worse.

As for the ends of the sloping ceilings - well yes, you might need a diagonal trap running from the tops of the vertical bass traps up to the apex, and yes it will look a bit weird. You probably only need to do that at one end, but if you could lay another line of trap across the floor at the other end, you would have covered some of the bass problem that this roof shape will cause... just remember that with bass traps, it's actually not possible to overdo it, except from perhaps an aesthetic point of view!

All small rooms are a right pain to get anywhere near a good sound in. I'm doing one at the moment with a lower ceiling than yours (there's only just room to stand up straight anywhere), and whatever I do, it simply isn't going to work properly - even with what amounts to an unlimited budget for an acoustic fix. The laws of physics preclude a proper fix completely, and the best anybody can ever do with a really small room is a pretty poor compromise. I was lucky with the one I'm doing in one respect - I managed to persuade the builder that we could at least fix the wall resonances by damping the wall panels, but I still have a massive upper bass problem to deal with.

Why am I feeling like the can of worms is about to be opened here? You mention limited sweet spot. Is it possible to use an RTA (I just downloaded one to my Droid...it actually works pretty well. I tested it with tones for accuracy.) and perhaps hold it where my head would normally be during mixing to see how far off the response is right at that spot? Maybe then I could start experimenting with the amount/placement of traps to try flattening it out?

It's your time - you do as you like. But if I was a gambling person though, I'd bet you you'll get nowhere.

Most of your problems will be bass-related, and that's the stuff that is nearly impossible to measure like that. And the room shape will distort the measurements you make all over the place - you'll have level differences to deal with, and some directional effects too. And you seriously think that with a RTA and an uncalibrated microphone of unknown directional characteristics, you are going to make sensible measurements? Tones prove nothing - it's a microphone you have to use with it. So how do you know it works pretty well? Basically, I'd say you simply can't.

Let me put it like this; I have an expensive, carefully calibrated analyser with a known class-A measurement standard microphone, and I wouldn't even trust that to give me meaningful measurements that I could use in this situation - and I'm an experienced, qualified acoustician. Your only hope in a room like that is to treat the known problems - and I've given you the steps you need to do the best you can. And I deliberately didn't mention attempting to measure anything... because it's a complete red herring.

But as I said, you do as you like...

Ok, I think I've beaten this one into the ground deep enough. No disrespect intended, btw. I sometimes get a little carried away with an idea. I'll certainly take your advice to heart and get to treating this room. One last question and I'll close the book here: Is there a depth I should strive for with my homemade traps? 6-12"? The deeper, the better absorption? Thanks, Steve.