Noise in the recording space
With the control room sorted, it’s time to consider the recording room. All the treatments discussed for the control room apply equally to the rooms we want to actually make noise in. Let’s be honest: you’re never going to achieve a large, neutral, ambient space in the average home, so unless you have a hall with a minstrel gallery, you need to aim for dry.
The issue that usually first springs to mind when thinking about making a studio space at home is soundproofing. Unfortunately, unless you’re purpose-building a control room or live room and you want to spend a fortune and render the space pretty much unusable as a part of your house, there’s very little you can do about this.
Double and triple glazing will do a good job of keeping out general noise, but it’s almost impossible to keep 100% of noise out (or in) unless you’re physically isolated from your surroundings. Low frequencies will arrive in your room by physical transmission from outside, and nothing you can stick on your walls is going to make any difference – you just have to work around it.
If you live in a flat or a terraced house, you might want to think twice about attempting to set up anything more than a small control room with some high-quality headphones for your musicians. Sometimes even the physical sound of someone playing a keyboard can be a nuisance to neighbours living on the floor below. We know that from experience…
Windows are often cited as a weak point, and all you can really do is shut them tightly, use thicker glass, or seal them (with mastic, say) if it’s safe to do so. If the window is in a recess, you could try cutting a 100mm-thick MelaTech shape (we don’t have shares in MelaTech) to fit snugly in it, but this will only earn you 1-2dB of reduction at most. Using tightly fitting fire-doors with acoustic seals can also help a bit.
Whatever you do, avoid the following totally useless sound isolation treatments – not only because they don’t work, but also because most are fire and/or health hazards.
Egg boxes
Carpet on the walls
Furniture foam on the walls
Cavity wall insulation
Fibreglass insulation panels on the walls Plywood or MDF on the walls
Rubber matting on the floor
Any kind of ‘soundproofing’ paint!
Noise reduction software and hardware
Alongside the proliferation of computer-based home studios, we’ve thankfully also seen a vast improvement in the quality of noise reduction software. Waves X-Noise and Z-Noise are great for tackling broadband noise like computer cooling fans, while iZotope RX and Accussonus Era are very useful for dealing with everything else including planes, trains, birds, creaking chairs and kicked mic stands. Used with care, these tools really can help solve noise pollution.
If your studio is a one-room affair (that is, just a control room), you’re obviously going to find it very difficult to record soft vocals or acoustic instruments in there – especially picked acoustic guitar – without also capturing the sounds of your computer’s fans. It’s well worth, therefore, getting your computer into a different room if you possibly can, or just out into the hall. USB and other extenders are affordable, and make it easy to ferret that noisy gear away.
You can also do a fair bit to quieten your computer. Macs are pretty quiet, by and large, but if you find yours is spinning too much, it’s generally because you have too many apps running. PCs are much easier to modify, and if yours is making a racket, it might not be too difficult to replace your stock CPU cooling fans with another cooling systems. You’ll often find gaming PCs fitted with liquid cooling systems, for example, and kits can be bought like the Corsair one (left). And many make your PCs look cool (OK colourful) too!