PRESENTS

Volume 2: Creating a Home Project Studio

How to get optimal results from your space and budget
B y A n d r e C a l i l h a n n a & K e i t h Ha t s c h e k

If you decide to convert space in your home to function as a project studio, its easy to spend a lot of money before you plug in your first microphone. While quality recording gear is less and less expensive, acquiring everything you need to start recording adds up. And that doesnt even begin to address the costs of properly outfitting your space. For many home recording enthusiasts, doing any sort of major construction is simply not an option but that doesnt mean your dream of a quality recording space in your home needs to end before it begins. The degree to how professional your studio needs to be and therefore how expensive the endeavor is relative to your goals for your finished product. At the same time, your budget will ultimately determine how ambitious you can be in the scope of the project.

You can start by answering these four basic questions:

1. What is the purpose of your home studio?
Are you recording new ideas to demo to your band or producer? Recording, mixing, and mastering finished tracks to submit to a music supervisor? Is this your bands DIY album for distribution and sale? Are you planning to record other peoples material? Deciding on the reason you are getting into home recording is the first step toward setting realistic goals. As a general rule, the more musicians and acoustic instruments you plan to record, the more like a professional studio your setup will need to be. Of course, you can create the sound of an entire rock band or orchestra in a tiny apartment using samples and virtual instruments, but the more live instruments you plan to track, the more that will be required of your spaces acoustic environment. ample room to perform comfortably? What if youre tracking two musicians at once? Or three? The physical dimensions of your available space is another contributing factor to your ambitions for your project studio.

4. Are you using your space for overdubs and mixing, or are you planning to track everything in your studio?
This will ultimately be the biggest decision you make before you start down the road to researching, purchasing, and installing your home recording setup. The truth is, to get a pro sound out of something like a drum kit, youll need space and youll need to manage the acoustics in your room, and youll need lots of mics and stands. These purchases add up and will eat up a modest budget really quickly.

2. What space do you have available?

You need to find the best available, distraction-free environment. Your garage may be the biggest space available and seem like a natural location to set up your home studio, but if its always damp and it houses a boiler, washer, and dryer, or you live on a street with busses rumbling back and forth throughout the day, its probably not your ideal space. Very often, a spare bedroom or home office makes for a good home studio environment though bear in mind that distractions abound at home. Normal sounds like the doorbell, phone, bathroom fan, or heating/AC system can be the death of a perfect take. Do your best to isolate yourself from household sounds wherever you decide to record.

Youre working on a limited budget, after all

One modality I often recommend to home recording enthusiasts is, dont outfit your home to do the big work, says producer/engineer/studio owner Drew Raison. If you have a limited budget to build a studio, why invest in all the necessary microphones, microphone stands, and cables? You start there and you could be well into thousands of dollars. You might be better off spending less on your place and taking your stuff to a studio thats already outfitted with all the accoutrements. Let somebody else spend that money. Go in there, cut the drums, have the engineer transfer the tracks or a stereo mix to your file format so you can overdub guitars, bass and vocals at home. If you have a limited amount of money, I say put it into a vocal recording system. Get the correct microphone for an acoustic, get the best microphone for an electric, and cut all of those at home. You can leave the big, multi-channel recording to a professional studio.

3. Are you planning to record a full band or one or two musicians at a time?
The spare bedroom might be perfectly isolated, but can you house your gear, monitors, amp, and microphones, and still have

C re a t i n g a h o m e pr o j ect st u d i o

PAGE 2

Acoustics Matter
Whatever your expectations, a major component to your creating quality finished recordings in a home environment is to control the acoustics. To really do things right, it starts with the construction of the room. The proper angles of the walls and ceiling, the proper dimensions, state-of-the-art acoustical room treatments placed in the appropriate places these are but a few of the things that set a professional studio apart from your rehearsal space and bedroom. The first step toward achieving an acoustic environment that will produce great results at home is to understand some of the basic principles of how sound waves work and how to control they way they inhabit and interact in a room. When a sound wave meets a surface a wall, a couch, a desk some of the wave is absorbed, some of it is reflected, and some of it gets transmitted through the surface. Most dense surfaces do a good job isolating sound, but will reflect sound back into the room. Porous surfaces typically absorb sound well, but transmit sound. The best way to stop sound transmission sound leaking in or out of a room is to isolate sound from the structure before it has a chance to vibrate. In other words, walls need to be isolated from ceilings and floors, achieved by decoupling referred to as floating a room. But floating a room is precisely the type of construction effort that isnt an option for most people. So what can you do?

Room Arrangement
Assuming youre not building out a separate control room, youll be configuring all your equipment in your designated studio space. So your first task is to envision where youll be housing your monitoring station and board. Its a good idea to consult a professional at the outset, complete with diagrams and dimensions of the space you have to work with. You may find that your initial ideas are not optimal for your space. Songwriter/guitarist Spence Burton converted part of the basement of his family home into a functional project studio by having a clear vision of what he hoped to accomplish and seeking expert advice as to how he might make the most of his space. As he was laying out the studio floor plan in his mind, Spence favored putting the mixing position along the longest open wall adjacent to the water pump closet to get the widest spread between the speakers. Based on my own experience in professional studios and training as an engineer, this seemed to make the most sense, explains Burton. But I got in touch with Nick Colleran and Joe Horner at Acoustics First, and after looking over the floor plan for my basement, Nick and Joe made the suggestion to put the mix position toward the corner, so the monitors would be firing diagonally across the basement at the opposite corner of the furnace room. They pointed out that this would help to diffuse the sound in every direction except straight back at the mix position. Any other position would result in the sound traveling 15 or 20 feet and hitting a parallel wall. At first, I thought they were crazy, as that was something I would have never considered. But the more we talked about it, the more I believed it could work. And it did, brilliantly, in large part because of the low end bass trapping and diffusion provided by the closets. Where your mixing/recording station will be is something that needs to be envisioned specifically for the space youre in, but there are certain rules to follow in regard to monitor placement. You want to come as close to an isosceles triangle as you can, says Raison. Thats the proportion of the distance between the speakers to where the engineering sweet spot is. Its a comfortable listening angle, but its also a time thing. Sound and time go hand in hand, so you want to make sure that theyre evenly balanced. If the speakers are ten feet apart, you should be sitting ten feet back. In a couple of listening environments that I have, the sweet spot is actually a couple of feet back from the mixing board so if Im editing, I know that. When it comes time to really listen, I pull my chair back and cross my legs and Im in the sweet spot. Another thing is dont place one monitor in the corner. In most rooms, if youre in the center of the wall, youre in great shape. But if you take the table and move it to the corner, then you have one monitor that will sound boomy and the sound gets mushy and ugly and imbalanced.

Burtons home studio maximizes his space by firing diagonally across the room.

www.discmakers.com | 1-800-468-9353

PAGE 3

Early Reflection Points

Sound bouncing off the walls, floors, and surfaces in your room need to be addressed as the reflections will cause problems. One fix is to address the reflected sound waves in your environment by adding sound absorbing wall treatments. But rather than hang carpet on every wall or nail egg cartons or carpet padding all over the place, a controlled and deliberate approach will yield the best results. Chances are the room youre considering has 90 angled corners, so the walls are parallel, as are the floor and the ceiling. The first place to start is with the early reflection points. Once the direct sound from the monitors has passed by you, you want something behind you to either soak it up or shatter it all over the place, says Raison. In either case, you dont want a direct early reflection to hit your ears too soon. If it does, it will completely smear what you are hearing and it will give you problems. Its those early reflective points you want to knock out. One trick is to use a pocket mirror. If you have a pair of speakers on a desk in the middle of a wall and the speakers are sitting on that desk, you can look around the room and see what reflective points youre going to have. Points on the walls, and also the ceiling and the floor, those initial reflection points are my first go-to spots for sound absorption. Ill sit in the engineers seat and have someone move a pocket mirror along the wall until I can see the speaker reflected in the mirror. Thats where you want to put up some sort of an acoustical absorbtion product. Using professional sound absorption and diffusion products by Auralex, Sound Channels, Sonnex, or Sonora (to name only a few) can help you target the appropriate frequencies and help the sound you hear be as true to the source as possible. They also boast safety and fire ratings that surpass non-regulated materials. Its the early reflection points on the ceilings and floor or desk that most people overlook, warns Raison. Even apply-

ing just a thin absorptive membrane on the ceiling can help knock down those highs and mids that can cause the early reflection smearage. Theres this studio I co-designed in a beautiful stone house, and we were very limited on ceiling height, and we had to soak up the juice on that ceiling. We could hear clear as day that reflection off the ceiling, so we built a big square wood frame out of 1x2s, and we got batting, which is a cottony material designed to fill out upholstery, and we just stapled it up and stretched fabric over it and it worked like a champ. Im not trying to keep low frequencies from bouncing off that ceiling, we dont have the time or space to do that, so to speak. Just dont overlook the ceiling. People typically dont do things to ceilings in the regular world, but in a recording environment it makes a substantial difference.

50% Rule
When it comes to optimizing the acoustics in a room, you dont want to deaden down everything you want a room that has ambience to it, otherwise what you record and what you hear wont be accurate, and your finished recordings will suffer. Every room is different, but one rule of thumb to follow is the 50% rule. In a square or rectangular room, Id recommend covering 50% of the surface area, Raison advises. For example, do 1x1 pyramid foam squares in a checkerboard pattern on every wall cover your 50% that way. And it counts on the ceiling, too. 50% would be great, but if you cant do that, make sure you get that early reflection spot. It doesnt mean the rooms going to sound sexy, mind you. But it will knock down the reflections to a degree that they wont get in your way and cause monitoring issues.

Bass Traps
Sound bounces back and forth between hard, parallel surfaces, and lower frequency sound waves are longer than high frequencies. (A bass guitar playing a low E at 41Hz produces a wave roughly 27.5 feet in length, a piccolo playing at 3500Hz produces a wave thats less than four inches long). Acoustic foam effectively absorbs reflected sound, and thicker acoustic foam is better at absorbing low frequency sounds. So the panels and wall hangings used to absorb the early reflection points are going to help with the mid and high-mid frequencies, but when it comes to preventing lower frequencies from reflecting and causing cancellations and boominess in your recording/ listening environment, using bass traps and denser sound absorbers behind your monitoring point is recommended. Since low frequency resonances have their points of maximum (or minimum) pressure in a rooms corners, bass traps are often triangular in shape to fit into corners, though studio gobos are also common for lower frequency absorption as well. Remember, once the sound has passed by your ears, soaking up the sound behind you is critical so you wont be coping with sound reflecting from behind you.

A home studio Raison helped design and build.

C re a t i n g a h o m e pr o j ect st u d i o

PAGE 4

Short wavelength: high frequency, high sound, many wave cycles.

Long wavelength: low frequency, low sound, fewer wave cycles.

SOund Waves

GOBO PANELS

Testing 1, 2, 3
A measured approach to the placement and choice of acoustical treatments in your room is recommended, but there are creative methods you can use to analyze your results. Once he completed the work on his room, Burton checked the accuracy of the environment by enlisting the help of two friends: one owns a top-flight recording studio, the other is an audiophile with a high-end home stereo system. The three hit on the idea of a sort of progressive listening party to compare the three listening environments. We each picked two cuts we knew very well, and made a six-song compilation disc, explains Burton. We started at the pro studio, with their high-end Blue Sky monitoring system, then went to my audiophile friends home, and ended up at my house. I was surprised by how similar all six tracks were sounding in my basement studio compared to the other very expensive rooms and gear. There was a difference in the amount of detail audible on the high-end systems compared to my sub-$1,000 speakers, but I knew that my modest home studio was working when what all three of us heard in their rooms sounded pretty much the same in mine. Based on the amount of time and money I was willing to invest, Im very happy with the results and I continue to double check my mixes at my friends studio, and they keep sounding accurate to what I intended, which is important. Ive since added a Tannoy TS-8 subwoofer and PreSonus Central Station master speaker control so Ive got a fuller-range speaker system.

room. Con versely, if you have speakers that are small, get an active sub-woofer to paint a better picture of whats happening with the low frequencies.

Random Advice & Additional Info Dont get speakers that are too big for your

Burton

hired an electrician to wire a master On/Off switch (with status lights) for an oil furnace and water pump in the basement adjacent to his studio space. It would have been expensive to try to sonically isolate these appliances, so I just added cut-off switches and I can turn them off when I am tracking.

Try to keep your listening position somewhere close to the middle third of the room it is very difficult to hear accurately with a wall directly behind you. Foam
and absorbers will help with reflected sound in your studio environment, but they dont do much for sound proofing, or stopping sounds exiting your space to the outside or controlling sounds coming in from the outside. Thats where decoupling and adding mass (as well as trapped air) to the walls, ceiling, and floor come in.

Every object and every construction material has a specific resonant frequency kind of like a tuning fork that sings at its particular resonant frequency. The range of human hearing (for a healthy normal adult) is 20 to 20,000 hertz. One hertz = one vibration per second.

www.discmakers.com | 1-800-468-9353

PAGE 5

Terms
Absorption. To receive an impulse without echo or recoil. The absorption of sound is the process by which sound energy is diminished when passing through a medium or when striking a surface, i.e., sound is attenuated (lessened, reduced) by absorption. The physical mechanism is usually the conversion of sound into heat, i.e. sound molecules lose energy upon striking the materials atoms, which become agitated, which we characterized as warmth; thus, absorption is literally the changing of sound energy to heat.* Acoustics. The study of sound. Of or relating to sound, the sense of hearing, or the science of sound.* Ambience. A perceptual sense of space. The acoustic qualities of a listening space.* Bass Trap. An acoustic energy absorber designed to damp low frequency sound energy. There are generally two types of bass traps: resonating absorbers and porous absorbers. By their nature resonating absorbers tend toward narrow band action (absorb only a narrow range of sound frequencies) and porous absorbers tend toward broadband action. Most commercially manufactured bass traps are of the porous absorber type. Decoupling. As most vibration/sound transfer from a room to the outside occurs through mechanical means, i.e., the vibration passes directly through the brick, woodwork, and other solid structural elements, breaking the connection between the room that contains the noise source and the outside is the most effective way to prevent the transmission of sound. This is called acoustic decoupling, and ideally involves detaching partitions from each other, or physically detaching layers in a partition in order to improve sound isolation. The most common methods of decoupling are: 1) Inserting air gaps or air spaces between two partitions, 2) Using resilient channels between layers and structural framing members for walls and ceilings, 3) Floating a floor using springs, rubber isolators, or other decoupling layers. Diffusor. A device that diffuses, or scatters, sound.* Incident sound. Sound heard directly from the source, i.e., first arriving sound without reflections.* Isolation Acoustics. The isolation of sound is the process by which sound energy is contained or blocked (as opposed to being

converted into heat, see absorption). Typically what someone would mean when they refer to soundproofing a room: preventing sound from leaving or entering a space.* Modes (AKA eigentones or standing waves). A low frequency standing wave in a room. A mode is basically a bump or dip in a rooms frequency response that is facilitated by the rooms dimensions and the way those dimensions cause sound waves to interact with each other. There are three types of room modes: 1) Axial modes, standing waves between two parallel surfaces; 2) Tangential modes, standing waves between four surfaces; 3) Oblique modes, standing waves between six surfaces. (Oblique modes are more complex, higher in frequency and decay faster. Therefore, they are not typically a big problem.) For more on modes see Acoustics Crash Course 1 - Modes and Room Modes. Reflection. The reflection of sound follows the law, the angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, AKA the law of reflection. The same behavior is observed with light, and by the bounce of a billiard ball off the bank of a table. The reflected waves can interfere with incident waves, producing patterns of constructive and destructive interference. This can lead to resonances called standing waves in rooms.* Transmit. In acoustics, transmition involves vibration/sound transfer from one room to the outside, typically occuring via mechanical means. The vibration passes directly through brick, woodwork, and other solid structural elements. When it meets with an element such as a wall, ceiling, floor or window, which acts as a sounding board, the vibration is amplified and heard in the second space. A mechanical transmission is much faster, more efficient, and may be more readily amplified than an airborne transmission of the same initial strength.
* Adapted from Ranes Pro Audio Reference Adapted from Wikipedia Adapted from Acoustics 101, published by Auralex Acoustics, Inc.

Resources
Instrument Frequency Chart Wavelength Calculator

Keith Hatschek is Director of the Music Management Program at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA. He is the author of two books: The Golden Moment: Recording Secrets of the Pros (Backbeat Books, 2006), and How To Get a Job in the Music Industry (Berklee Press, 2007). He regularly contributes to Disc Makers blog, and has recently published an article about the impact of the Cold War jazz ambassador tours of pianist Dave Brubeck. For more, visit hatschek.com.

Andre Calihanna is Disc Makers editorial manager and a musician whose band, Hijack, has just recorded and released a new EP using many of the techniques addressed in this guide. Drew Raison is a producer, studio owner, and expert in studio management and development. He operates Philly Sound Studios and the Modern Music Academy. Learn more at DrewRaison.com.

C re a t i n g a h o m e pr o j ect st u d i o

PAGE 6