Building Your Home Studio - Part 3 - Setup and Wiring

Contributed By


Part 3 in a 3 part series - covering how to install, setup and wire your new studio.

After you have you equipment bought, at least you beginning gear, and your room built, it's ready to get filled with you new cool gear.

OK, now stand in your empty room, grab a cold beer, and just look around, what do you see and where. Some of the placement issues have been discussed in Lesson 2 - Construction, but, lets revisit some.

Gear and Speaker Placement

It is best to place your mixing board in the middle of the room with speakers as far away from your head as they are from each other, forming a perfect triangle. In many cases with hobby studios, this just isn't practical. It is usually easiest to put your desk against a wall, so you are sitting facing the wall. This is not bad, real pros will say it's wrong, but this is the point where speaker choice comes into play.

Choosing the right speaker is critical, and where you plan to put them in relation to the walls, and your ears are the factors to consider. If they are going to be closer than 8-10 feet from your ears you want to look into near field monitors. Near fields are designed to be listened to in a close environment, minimizing the effects of the room acoustics. Quality near fields come in self powered and non-powered models, some great self=powered models are Yamaha MSP5 Biamped, Event 20/20, and the Alesis M1's. A great non-powered near field is made by JBL, the 4206 series are great speakers, I use these myself powered by an Alesis RA100 amplifier.

Also, when considering model, the location in relation to the wall plays a roll...if you are facing a wall, with your desk against it, that means your speakers will be against a wall as well. If this is your situation, choose a speaker that is front-ported, a rear ported speaker right up against the wall will decrease bass response, and not give an accurate sound.

Wiring The Room

When setting up your room for use, easy access to your gear is a must. The hardest part many times is when you want to use your reverb patched into bass preamp when your laying down the bass guitar, then, when doing the vocals you want that same processor running through your vocal path.

A way to fix this on a limited basis is to determine your most used effects, usually a reverb unit and probably some sort of compressor or other dynamic effect. Then, when you know that, you can run those through your effect sends on your board. Most boards have 2 or 4 effect sends, this means you can have that many effects running into your board directly, and route then to whatever channel you have the need.

Another cool gizmo for a studio is a "patch bay". These units are central nervous systems for your studio. Every rack unit your have like effects, preamps, and EQ's, all run into them, then the front of the patch bay is just a bunch of 1/4" plugs that you can use to re-route the signals from unit to unit right from the front of the patch bay. This is much easier than reaching behind each unit(which is never easy) every time you need to re-route the signal. Patch bays are alway available for under $100, and for that price, you really shouldn't live without one. Great patch bays are available from Behringer, ACE, and many others.

Many people WAY under-estimate the cost of cables when setting up the studio. Good cables are not cheap, but are needed. So don't skimp on the cables, the cheap ones won't last as long from the constant in-and-out abuse of a project studio, nor will they allow your gear to give the best sound it is capable of. On the up-side, it is very easy to make your own cables with a soldering iron and some high-quality jacks. I have made almost every cable I use, and it has cost me about half what buying them pre-made would have cost, and they have lasted a long time. Another benefit is that when you make your own, you can also make the exact length your need as well, so you don't end up with the very common ball-o-cable laying behind your desk...we ALL know what thats like when you have to get one of the cables out of that mess...right?

Related Forum Topics:



User-submitted comments

No member-submitted comments currently available for this story.

If you would like to leave comments to the articles you read, feel free to register for your free membership.