Pete Townshend – Small Recording spaces with TubeTraps

Video Transcript

“This is where I first used ASC TubeTraps. I had a very awkward room. The guys at ASC will remember this well; it was a triangle. Worst possible shape you can have for a room and they sold me 40 traps and lo and behold, it fixed it. And when I took that room apart, I inherited all of these half traps. They were this kind of round size, but cut in half. And I use them all the time in different circumstances. If I do a lash-up…

“You know, I’ve got a recording studio in my sailing boat. I take a keyboard, you know, it’s a very strange shaped room, and I stick a couple of traps up here, there and everywhere, and I can make almost any space sound like a studio. You can make an old garage sound like a studio if you want to using TubeTraps. And when you’re finished, you can take them out and move them and use them for other things.

“So many musicians now are working in tiny spaces, and tiny spaces are the hardest spaces to get right. These things [TubeTraps] are so great for tiny spaces. If you just buy a couple of these and just stick your speakers on top of them, it will completely transform the sound of your bedroom, I promise you. They are so extraordinary; they do so much more than you would imagine. They do so much more than just bass trapping. Working in a small room is what we all do these days.

“The other thing that’s so interesting is that, for example, you’re playing an acoustic guitar, what you’ll often find is that if you stick a mic in front of it and you don’t get the mic in the right position, or if the room’s a bit echo-y, or something is wrong with the sound in the room. There’ll be a kind of a low-end bass rumble, or it just won’t sound right. You can use these [TubeTraps], you can take the speakers off them, you can use them out in your recording space, and put them around you, and it’s so much easier to work.

“I actually get a lot of inspiration these days from making mobile spaces. You know, go from hotel room to hotel room and set up a little rig with a keyboard and a laptop and have a guitar or two. You know, the inpiration is from being able to take your recording medium to places where you might see things out the window, or out in the street, in somewhere, I don’t know, like Bangkok or Sydney Australia or Goa in India or London or Hamburg or New York or Stratford Ontario, wherever it happens to be, that you wouldn’t see in your home. So traveling with recording gear is something that we can do these days, and being able to adapt to changing circumstances. I like the technical side, I like overcoming acousting problems.

“It’s been all the more important for me to make sure that I get everything else that’s possible to correct technically right. So my inspiration is right across the board from the music creative side, the lyrics, the words, all the way across to acoustic science, and I’m here to talk about the TubeTraps. I love ’em. I absolutely love ’em.”

Pete Townshend

Special thanks to

• Pete Townshend  http://www.thewho.com/
• RSPE Audio Solutions http://www.rspeaudio.com/