Problem: Your Home is Designed for Living

So where is your home recording studio?

If you are like most home recordists it'll be somewhere like…

• spare room
• extra bedroom
• basement
• garage

Often small, usually boxy, designed to be lived in, but not for producing great music.

Typically, "small, boxy" rooms have acoustic…

• hot spots
• dead zones
• flutter echo

…making live recording a challenge.

The good news is - there are methods of taming your room to make it a far more effective studio for music recording.

Studio Acoustics 101

Your room acoustics will make or break your sound.

Take your typical "bathroom singer" - a legend in their own eyes, rivaling the masters - just as long as they are singing within the bathroom.

Why?

Standing waves, echo, and reverberation flourish within the diminutive dimensions and hard, reflective surfaces of the typical toilet.

So the singer hears his (or her!) voice having gained a fullness and depth not heard outside, or even in a concert hall.

The room is an integral part of your overall sound system. Think of you Hi Fi - it sounds very different in the sitting room than in the kitchen. What about your car - where apparently more music is enjoyed than any other single location type. Your favorite CD probably sounds better in your car than at home - because the sound engineer produced it with car audio systems in mind.

How does this work?

Maybe an example would help… Consider the harmonic series on a guitar string. Working from the 12th fret - the octave - back towards the bridge, the spacing between harmonics become less and less. The intervals change from octave to fifth, fourth, third, etc and finally they're only microtones from each other.

Rooms show a similar response pattern…

• air takes the place of the string
• opposing walls acting much like the nut and bridge
• the room length determines the fundamental frequency
• the first harmonic is the lowest-frequency standing wave that develops

(Ignore the next paragraph if you've not got a technical background.)

Formula

Frequency is f1=565/L, with L being the length of the room in feet. To find the frequency of successive standing waves, multiply f1 times 2, 3, 4, etc.

Of course, you'll have spotted that unlike guitar strings, which vibrate between two points - nut and bridge - rooms have four walls, a floor and a ceiling.

The result is highly complex sound wave interactions that require some serious acoustic engineering knowledge in order to regain control of the sound.

Or do you?

Reflections on a sheet of drywall

• Bathrooms are acoustically bright and reverberant
• Bedrooms are more often than not, acoustically warm and quiet

What's made the difference?

Soft furnishings in the bedroom, such as

• beds with thick covers
• curtains
• wall-to-wall carpeting
• dressers, and other furniture

So the sound is absorbed, reflections broken up, diffused, and standing waves greatly reduced.

To tame your music room, take the same approach - break up and absorb the sound waves, and you'll be well on your way to a decent sounding space - all without an engineering degree!

Diffusion - Breaking up the Sound

One proven way to reduce standing waves is diffusion.

Another analogy may help again…

Think of your walls as parallel mirrors. Then sound waves are like the seemingly endless reflection of light between them.

By substituting one of the mirrors with, say, a disco ball, the reflection of a reflection of a reflection - ad infinitum (called recursion) is eliminated. Instead, light is scattered in all directions.

Sound works just the same way. Interrupt the flat surface on one wall with a bookshelf, for example, and sound waves are reflected in many directions. This removes flutter echo and higher frequency standing waves. Just this step goes far towards improving your room acoustics.

A more elegant solution can be found with products such as the Auralex Studiofoam T Fusor that are professionally designed to diffuse the sound across a broad range of frequencies.

Absorption - Sucking up the Sound

The second part of your room acoustics taming strategy is absorption.

So how do you:

• absorb flutter echoes and standing waves,
• reduce reverberation
• gain a more refined sound from your room

Here are some easy things to do straight away:

• hang blankets on the walls
• hang curtains
• use upholstered furniture
• lay a carpet

You don't need to cover every surface with absorbers. In fact, studies show that alternating areas which absorb with others which are more reflective can be even more effective.

Where to put it

The hard truth is that no matter how much you decorate your walls with absorbers and diffusers, the art of small-room acoustic treatment is making the best of a sub-optimal situation.

Here's my choice of treatments to keep my listening area relatively reflection-free, but with sufficient hard surfaces to stop the room from sounding dead.

• mix position has Auralex LENRDs and 2" Auralex 2" Studiofoam panels on three sides
• one sidewall has
• • patches of Studiofoam
  • an over stuffed couch
• another sidewall is curtained - in part to alter the acoustics, and in part to let the light in!
• the back wall has shelving and instruments breaking up the sound
• bass traps fill all corners
• the concrete floor has a firm carpet over a thick carpet pad

Final result? - [tag]Music Recording[/tag]s sound great, in particular, for vocals and acoustic guitar.

Tags: Home Recording Studio, Music Recording