Building Your Home Studio - Part 2 - Construction

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Part 2 in a 3 part series - cover the different techniqies and strategies to building a good sounding and comfortable studio.

In considering which room of your house (or trailer, or apartment) to use as a home studio, consider these factors: The best suited rooms are NOT square in shape, and ultimately, you would want one where the walls aren't even parallel. Unless you are building the room yourself, this is not very likely to happen, unless you live in a very unique home. Obviously, the best place is a basement room speaking strictly from a sound-proofing vantage point, but, if you use a lot of direct recording and MIDI, the sound-proofing may not matter so much.

If you are standing in your basement, looking at bare walls, and a wide open space, you are in the best situation...you can build your room...

Sound Proofing

The biggest problem most people face with a home studio is neighbors that just don't get your music. Sound proofing is hard, there is no cheap easy way to do it. The best way is to build your room with 2x4 walls and double drywall the surface and fully insulate the frame, then space out about 4 inches and build another wall with double drywall and full insulation as well, then, finish that wall with taping and painting. The double wall provides a 'bass trap' to catch as much of the sound as possible before it leaves your room and goes floating over to the crabby neighbors house. And don't forget to do the same to your ceiling, and to insulate both of those layers as well. On the upside of the expense, anybody I know that has taken this route to build their studio has had the advantage of their heat and cooling bills being cut in half from all the extra insulation.

One final issue I want to cover is sound-proofing from other areas of the house, this pertains to those of us that have small babies or crabby spouses. The main culprit of this is heating and cooling ducts. Ultimately, like many professional studios, they don't have any (hey, the insulation is great, so who needs ducts right?) or, they have two totally separate heating/cooling systems for the studio and control room. So you are up to your own creativity on how to deal with this, some people just stuff towels in the ducts when the studio is really noisy, or just don't have any at all and use a couple fans...

Tuning a Room

Granted, the above solution is the best answer for keeping sound from getting out side of you new studio, and the most time-consuming and expensive, but what about the quality of the sound INSIDE the room. There are methods to improve the sound quality inside the room, but bear in mind this has no effect on the sound-proof properties of the room. The following ideas and methods are strictly to "tune the room" to improve the sound quality, and therefore improve the sound you get from your microphones to get you better recording, and make your studio a more pleasant room to listen in and jam in.

Heavy quilts and blankets hanging on the walls is a cheap method of helping the sound reflection problems that persist in small rooms with high volumes, also, if you are building from scratch, build the walls at different angles, and use different surfaces such as drywall from the top to half-way down and some heavy cedar paneling from there to the floor. Also placing bookshelves full of books and magazines in the room would help deflect sound in different directions, and for more help consider putting the bookshelf at an angle in the corner. Remember those obnoxious pictures of cats and dogs playing cards that are put on that heavy material...hang those back up, they work great, and make a fashion statement too:-)

Two HRC visitors have written in with the following tips, Scott wrote me with the following advice: "I would like to comment on your 'room tuning' section. to deflect sound I have found styrofoam egg containers glued to styrofoam insulation sheets works well for sound defusiers. thay can be sized as needed and are cheap. as far as looks go a little paint(water based of course)will dress them up nicely." Good advice from someone who has been building his studio for 3 years plus. Then Kevin had this to add: "My office is in an industrial park. When building my basement studio, I saw a large dumptster at an office in our park. As they were re-doing an office for the next tenant they were throwing out the cubicle walls from the previous tenant. I grabbed as much as I could and they are now my ceiling, walls, and drum cage. They work GREAT! and FREE !! I didn't get quite enough to double-wall my studio, but I'm always on the lookout for the next dumptster. A few comments - Don't take them if there wet, get the poles and hardware to attach them to each other, ask the construction guys nicely and you shouldn't have a problem." If you are lucky enough to happen upon that situation, get 'em if you can, also, there are many office furniture outlets around, maybe office cubicle walls are there, obviously not for free, but it is worth checking, they may be cheap.

One of the more important parts of the rooms' sound is where your 'sweet spot' is. The 'sweet spot' is what we call the optimal listening point. Make sure where you sit at your board has your speakers located equal distances from your ears, and the tweeter is about level with your ear. The best is also having the speakers the same distance apart as they are from your ears. The speakers should form a perfect triangle with your head being the third corner.

Sure, you can also buy the super-expensive sound foam to put on your walls, and buy all the bass traps and studio sound boards as well, but most of these products are made from the same, or, close to the same materials as common heavy quilts, and other common-sense, and commonly owned products, so why spend the money if you don't have too...

There are of course, many things to do to change the sound of a room, to many to list here, the purpose of this page is really only to open your mind and get you thinking, anything that you may try that works well, let me know, I will be adding to this page regularly, I would love to add your suggestions.

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User-submitted comments

growlinclarence
May 11, 2003 12:57 am
floating floor
it is important ,when using the room within a room method,that you build you inner walls on top of a floating floor.the keys to sound isolation are mass, and inner rooms being completely disconected from the outer shell.

Dale Bryan
Dec 28, 2003 12:50 pm
carpet
I live close a lot of carpet factories and I have found that you can ask them for their leftovers. Most of the time you can get pretty good size peices for free or next to nothing. I put a 2" strip pf carpet between each stud and the drywall. another piece on the front of the drywall and also on the other side ofthe studs. The loudest my space gets is a few horns so I am not sure that it helps the exterior sound much but it really helped dampen the room for snare and high hat kinda stuff. Extremly cheap if you don't mind a buch of differant colered and textured carpet everywhere. Great site guys let me know if there is anything I can do to help support.


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