Need layout advice for home studio

Hello all. I am new to home recording and I am seeking advice on how to setup in the space that I have. I intend to record small local bands and hip hop artists. I am currently unemployed so my budget is tight. The equipment I have is: Studiolive 16.4.2 mixer, Mackie MR-8 monitors on stands, Akia APC40, HP elitebook laptop, Roland A-70 Keyboard on stand, and mics (1x Rode NT2-A, 2x Audix OM5, MLX 990, MLX 991). I have two rooms available to me. Right now I am set up in the larger room using the smaller for storage. Right now my desk is just shy of the center of the room on the carpet side with my back to the smaller room and the artists in front of me on the hardwood side. I am center side to side with my monitors 44" apart with an equal sided triangle to my head. I have a moving blanket hanging on the wall behind me and one over the glass french doors. I haven't done any real acoustic treatment to the room yet as I am unsure what to do and can't afford to get it wrong. The larger room's floor is half carpet and half hardwood. There is three doors total, one into the main house, french doors to the outside, and one to the smaller room. The ceilings are 8' and have a popcorn texture, the walls are gypsum with a heavy orange peel texture and a ceiling fan in the larger room. I have a 2'6" tall bookshelf 6' long on the long wall opposite the french doors and three metal filling cabinets in the corner. Where should I have my desk set up? Should I have my desk against the small wall in the large room with the band behind me and use the small room for recording vocals? Or maybe I should be tracking in the small room and let the band have the larger room? Or something else? How should I treat the room acoustically on a very limited budget? Bass traps in the corners and use a mirror to place panels? Carpet the hardwood side? My sound levels and neighbors are not a problem as the house is in a low income area and loud music is a daily drive by occurrence. The studio is located on the backside of the house which is brick so road noise from the outside has not been a problem. Thank you very much for any advice you can give me.

How much is a "limited" budget? $100? $500? $2k? Are you able to do woodwork and general DIY stuff? Do you need isolation from sounds outside getting in? Do you intend to record bands live, or one member at a time? R.

First off, thank you for the response Reed.

How much is a "limited" budget? $100? $500? $2k? Are you able to do woodwork and general DIY stuff?

Short term, for now around $800 to be safe. And yes, I am capable of doing any amount of DIY stuff. I have the tools to build a house from the slab up.

Do you need isolation from sounds outside getting in?

As of now I've had no problems with exterior sounds coming into the mix, so I was thinking just a treatment for now. Although one problem I have been having is the need to turn the central air off during sessions to avoid it kicking on during tracking. It's not insurmountable, as I just turn the temperature lower than normal to chill the house before recording, but it is annoying.

Do you intend to record bands live, or one member at a time?

So far I have been overdubbing everything but I would like the ability to record bands live.

Seems to me to be a no-brainer to put the control room in the smaller room to the left of the drawing. You've got some good length for doing deep bass trapping on the front wall, and then hit the first reflection points on the sidewalls. If you can install a window between, that would be swell -- but not for $800. Then that big room is your live room. I don't know what to say about the carpeting, so I'll defer to others. Rip it out? Leave it in? Not sure. The big thing you need to do is get away from those high-frequency absorbers like moving blankets and carpet to real broadband absorbers, based on rigid fiberglass with an air gap. Look up designs elsewhere on this site -- they're everywhere. High-frequency absorption may help with flutter echoes, but other than that, it works to UNbalance the room in a way that sounds creepy. Look towards superchunk traps for the corners. R.

Hi Jix, and welcome! :) Agree with Reed: That room on the left is probably your best bet. You could stay in the big room, but personally I find it very hard to track well if I have loud instruments and musicians blaring into my ears: I like to hear how each mic sounds by itself, on the monitors, without too much bleed from the instrument itself, and you just can't to that if you have the monitors in the same room as the musicians and instruments. So, assuming you set up in the "small" room, the only real option for layout is to have your room facing "down", with the speakers on the wall labeled 7'6". However, and this is a big "however": the dimensions of that room are not good. In fact, in one of the best acoustic calculators out there, the ratio comes up as "A worst case scenario calculated by RPG"! That's not good news. The height and width are practically the same (less than 5% difference), and the length is almost exactly double the width (1.96 times, to be precise). So the room will have modal issues that will be hard to solve on your budget. To fix that, you'd really need to make the room a bit smaller, something like 12 feet long by 7 wide, which would smooth out your modal issues greatly, but on the other hand making the room smaller, does make it smaller (duh!), and "smaller" is usually not "better" for typical home studios. However, having said all that, it is probably still your best option. As people often say around here, if that's what you've got to work with, then that's what you've got! If your choices are "not optimal" and "nothing at all", then you should always go for "not optimal"! :) OK, so how to set up things inside the room? What I'd suggest is to get your speakers set up on their stands right up tight against the front wall of that room, with a panel of 4" 703 running horizontally across that wall immediately behind the speakers (between wall and speaker), extending maybe 6" to a foot below the speaker base, upwards. Start with a full 4' x 8' panel, and cut one end off, so it is 4' x 5'2"), then turn it so that the 5'2" dimension goes across the room, horizontally, and centered on the front all. So you'll have a 17" gap on each end. You'll see why later. The height of the speakers should be such that the acoustic axis of the speaker is 1.2m (47") above the floor. Note: Acoustic axis, not top or bottom of cabinet, not center of cones, etc. It's the acoustic axis that you want at the right height. The room is not wide enough to get correct geometry for your speakers, so we'll have to compromise here. Set them up so that they each one is about 21" from the side wall nest to it, which puts them about 48" apart (I'm talking about the vertical center-lines of the speakers, not the edges of the cabinet). Now set up your chair about 5 feet from the front wall. Or rather, set it up so that your ears are about 5 feet from the front wall. Now carefully aim the speakers so the acoustic axes are pointing exactly at your ears. In other words, those imaginary axes will meet at a point a few inches behind your head. Now set up your desk so you can work comfortably with the chair (and your ears) in that position. You are a bit too close to the front wall in that location, but there's no other option, since the room isn't wide enough for you to be able to get far enough back and still have the speakers at good locations. So when you have all that set up, try tweaking things a bit: move the chair backwards and forwards a few inches, and move the speakers closer together / further apart by a couple of inches, re-aiming at your ears each time, and see if you find a better spot. OK, treatment: Cut another panel of 703 in half vertically, so you end up with two pieces 4' wide and 8' long. Set those up vertically (floor to ceiling), placed diagonally across the front corners of the room. If you did everything right (and if I do my math right! ) then they should fit neatly into the 17" gaps on each side of that first piece that you laid horizontally behind the speakers. So now you have your front bass traps and absorption in place. Time for first reflection points... Cut up another panel of 703 vertically in hale, into two 2' x 4' pieces, and set those up on your side walls, vertically, at the first reflection points ("mirror trick"). You still have a piece measuring 4' x 34" left over from the panel behind the speakers: put that on the ceiling, centered on the first reflection point up there. Of course, you should build some type of wooden frame for each of these panels, and stretch cloth across the front! Now for the rear wall: Two more full panels of 703, one diagonally across the right rear corner, and the other one flat against the rear wall next to it, but spaced away about 6". You'll probably need some more treatment on the side walls, and more bass trapping in some of the other corners, but that should at least get you started. And I'd test the room before doing that: When you are all set up as above, and have found the best location for your ears and the speakers, then use REW to analyze the room, and figure out what still needs doing. Oh, and one more thing: if you can, then get rid of that carpet on the floor: it probably is not doing you any favors, and in fact is most likely fighting against you! Carpet is notoriously wrong for most studio situations. It does the exact opposite of what you need in a small room. So either take it out, or cover it with plywood before you do anything else, if at all possible. That would be my approach. Others might have different ideas.. - Stuart -

garcarstive wrote:

If you want to make studio at your home than you have to change your home background. You have to also purchase some best instrument for creating the best music. It is very important to making your studio and try to manage some best sound music for the video.

Why do you think the poster has to change his "home background"? What does that even mean? What is your point? What makes you think he needs to buy new instruments? Do you have a question about this studio build, or a relevant comment? Or are you just trying to spam the forum with multiple irrelevant, pointless comments? - Stuart -