WALL TO WALL
These days, many recordings are being made in small spaces – people’s homes, garages, sheds – pretty much wherever they can get away with it. The standards of home recording have of course grown exponentially over the last twenty years, largely due to the digital revolution, and high quality audio interfaces and super-fast computers are now available on a modest budget.
With a decent, well-chosen mic or two, some good speakers and headphones, and a healthy mix of talent and enthusiasm, it’s possible to get some amazing results with a pretty basic setup. Eventually, though, you’ll either want to expand your setup or overcome limitations that present themselves over time.
Without a doubt, the biggest limitation of recording at home is the room itself. Home studios are unfortunately fraught with sonic challenges due to the behavior of sound waves in small and untreated spaces, combined with environmental sounds that impact on the recording. Parallel walls combined, low ceilings and lots of hard surfaces make for a cocktail of audio disaster. The cost of dealing with room issues often far outweighs the cost of buying the recording gear. Ask anyone who’s ever ventured into building a pro or semipro studio and they’ll tell you, the rooms are by far the most expensive part!
As well as this, there are several common mistakes that people make when setting up their recording spaces. The first error is confusing ‘acoustic treatment’ with soundproofing. While related, they are two different beasts. Soundproofing deals with isolating the studio from the outside world. This is a major undertaking requiring specialised building techniques and lots of cash, unless you live in the middle of nowhere. Acoustic treatment deals with sound reflections and frequency balance within the room. This is more manageable, though it still takes a lot of research and experimentation.
Another misnomer is setting up the space so that it “looks cool” with little regards to the acoustics. The kneejerk reaction to this is installing lots of acoustic treatment that only treats mid to high frequencies (i.e. above 250hz). The result is an unnaturally dead-sounding space that still exhibits the same ‘boom’ and uneven frequency response as a totally untreated room – if not worse. Virtually nothing will sound good in a room like this.
Acoustic design at its highest level requires university training and years of experience. A true study is obviously way beyond the scope of any short article, but let’s get an overview and look at some basic conventions and methods to improve a simple setup without totally breaking the budget. The dream, of course, is a spacious room with high ceilings, timber