How to Turn a Room at Home into a Music Studio
Take the next step towards domestic production professionalism with our guide to creating a studio space in the comfort of your own home.
Professional recording studios may be where the magic happens, but they charge accordingly! Thanks to today’s computer-based setups, it’s easy to make music on a far smaller budget than the artists of the past. Professional mixing consoles, tape machines and racks of electronic devices have been replaced by software – but what about that sought-after sonic environment of the acoustically perfect studio? Can we get that at home too?
The answer is – as ever – not as simple as the question, and depends a lot on your own situation. What’s quite sure is that with some adjustments and a bit of forethought, you can improve the sound of your current setup with the knowledge found in this article.
What’s Wrong With my Room Right Now?
Homes aren’t designed to be used as music studios, and are barely designed with sound in mind to begin with. Your bedroom, living room or spare room could be an ideal place to turn into a studio, but it’s not likely.
More probably, your room is a reflective box that distorts and colors sound. It’s hard to notice this in your normal life, but if you move around a room, clapping a couple of times at different points, you may hear the reflections of the clap sound changing as you go. A room with more soft furnishings may have fewer reflections, as might one with lots of objects breaking up the sound. If you’ve moved house and been in a very empty space, you may have heard how reflective a room can get.
These reflections are the main reason that rooms at home aren’t used as studio spaces. Echoes make sound unreliable and undetailed, bass can build up unevenly, and dimensions make certain frequencies resonant and others not so. For an extreme version of this, listen for the acoustics in showers and stairwells.
So what’s a producer to do?
Speakers Vs Headphones: What’s the Difference?
There are two ways to play back sound in the studio, and it’s more than likely you’ve encountered and used both already. These two ways are headphones and speakers (AKA monitors). A good audio engineer makes use of headphone and speaker monitoring, testing mixes across multiple playback systems to ensure their mixing decisions work well in a variety of situations.
As a rule of thumb, headphones can give you more detail and can be more reliable, since they’re strapped to your head in the same position, without any real acoustic interaction with the room around you. Monitor speakers give you a better impression of the stereo field of your output, but they’re subject to all the less-than-perfect acoustics we’ll learn about soon.
So, why not rely solely on headphones? Whilst headphones offer isolation and detail, they have limitations. Their small speaker size often lacks the power required to reproduce low-end frequencies completely. Consumer headphones compensate for this with a bass boost, distorting the true audio signal and making them an even more unreliable monitoring source. Studio headphone manufacturers aim to make their headphones with an unbiased frequency response, but they often still lack in the low end.
A Compromise Between Headphones and Speakers
A tool like Waves Nx can compensate for the disadvantages of working in a subpar mixing environment or having to rely solely on headphones. This plugin carefully simulates real-world 3D acoustic spaces in your studio headphones with EQ correction curves for over 270 headphone models.
To address this, virtual tools like Waves Nx provide EQ correction presets for common headphone types, helping achieve accurate sound monitoring. This is especially useful for those without a properly equipped studio space. By balancing both headphones and speakers, and utilizing tools like Waves Nx, engineers can achieve a well-rounded, professional mix.
Choosing an Appropriate Studio Room
Believe it or not, most houses aren’t built with the intention of their rooms being used as music studios, so the dimensions and materials already hinder your chances of having a perfect setup. If you have a choice in the matter, there are some specific room characteristics you should keep an eye out for when choosing your home studio room.
Ideally, you’ll have access to a rectangular room. A rectangular room works better as a music studio because it allows us to position our workstation, speakers, and acoustic panels in a format that maximizes our chances of accurate sound perception. Opt for a room with no strange alcoves or obstructions.
Placing Your Workstation
We briefly mentioned workstation and speaker placement earlier in the article. This is an important consideration when setting up a home studio because it determines where sound is projected from and where your ears will pick it up. It also determines where sound will first meet the reflective surfaces. Meaning, if you place your desk and speakers in the right spot, it’ll make acoustically treating your room properly easier.
Try to give your speakers a little breathing room and not cramp them right in the corner. This will prevent huge bass build-up in each corner. You should place both speakers at an equal distance from their adjacent walls and have both speakers equally distanced from yourself. This will stop any phase issues from occurring (more on this shortly). Refer to the diagram above or in the previous section for reference.
Generally, the bigger your room, the better. If you can place your desk with a bit of space between the walls, you’ll also be increasing your odds of creating an optimal setup, by giving the sound more space to breathe. If you’re in a larger room and your desk doesn’t span the full width, you can use a pair of studio monitor stands to ensure you have the right spacing between your monitors regardless.
Getting Started with Acoustic Treatment
Acoustic treatment is one of the most important parts of setting up a home studio. The materials used to build typical walls and ceilings are usually reflective of sound by nature, and too many of those reflections are bad news for accurate acoustics. Placing acoustic panels in appropriate positions will absorb incoming sound waves and reduce those reflections.
A lot of people mistake acoustic treatment for soundproofing. Soundproofing concentrates on stopping sound from escaping or entering your room completely; acoustic treatment is done in order to control the sound within the room, making the environment suitable for the best possible listening experience.
Acoustic panels are placed at reflection hotspots on your walls and ceilings to optimize your monitoring experience. You should place your acoustic panels where sound from your speakers would otherwise reflect off the wall and straight back at you. By absorbing sound here, the sound coming directly from the monitors will take more precedence over the reflections arriving soon after. You can also place one on the ceiling using the same method.
One fun way to know exactly where to place acoustic panels is to use a mirror. While sitting in your intended listening position with your monitors set up, anywhere on the wall where a mirror reflects the image of the monitors back at you – that’s where you should place acoustic absorbers, as that’s exactly where the sound will reflect directly back at you too.
Why Some Studios use Bass Traps
The last thing we need to talk about is bass traps. Bass traps are much thicker than acoustic panels and usually come in triangular shapes, to be placed along the corners of a room. These can be small utilities in the top and bottom-most vertices of your studio, or can span the entire height of your corners.
Bass makes up the most powerful part of any sound’s frequency spectrum, so it takes a thicker mass of material to absorb. That’s why you can often hear only the bass when approaching a nightclub, and feel it resonate through your whole body. Often, even soundproofed rooms still seep out a little bass. But, bass traps are the best attempt we have at controlling them.
Further Reading
And that’s it for our complete home studio setup guide! We hope to have armed you with some top-shelf audiophile knowledge you can carry with you for years to come.
If you’ve found this article helpful, and want to continue learning, you might find our How To Record Vocals at Home series a useful next step. Alternatively, if you want to keep learning about the science of how sound is perceived by the human ear, and what potential pitfalls you might fall into on your music production journey, you might want to check out Eight Ways Your Ears Get Tricked In Every Mix.
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