I've been slowly developing my home studio space to make it a good place for quietly recording fingerstyle guitar. The space is a former office in a finished basement; it has the usual array of acoustic challenges, including right-angle walls, a low ceiling, street noise and even train noise from a commuter train embankment not far away.
I've dug around a lot trying to decide whether to build an isolation booth etc. and have opted for the 80% solution at probably 20% of the cost of a full makeover. So far I am very pleased with the results, given a total outlay of less than $400. Since all I do is solo fingerstyle guitar, a lot of the online advice about studio design is just overkill - my needs are really simple and my setup rarely changes from session to session. The room is hardly perfect, but I am amazed at the improvement in sound, so I thought I should share some pics in case others are looking for ideas.
The key thing was dealing with the hard, reverberant walls, which were creating standing waves and either deadening my good mikes or else creating unwanted high-frequency noise. This was frustrating, since I'd just upgraded both my preamp and my mikes significantly; they just weren't giving me the sound I expected for the money. Modest steps to correct the walls just fixed it. The problem was the room, pure and simple.
My main tool was a simple, home-built sound baffle suggested by Eltjo Haselhoff's excellent page on recording acoustic guitar, http://www.eltjohaselhoff.com/recording_acoustic_guitar.htm. My version of the baffle is a shoji-style affair costing about $60 and 30 minutes to build; it's just Auralex wedge foam ($25 for a 2'x4' sheet) glued to a masonite-type backing ($4 at Home Depot) and then hinged to another identical panel (another couple dollars in hardware and glue). Here's a picture of them in action:
I made four of them and like the fact that they can be deployed easily in any number of ways. Besides removing the 90-degree corners from the room, they absorb a tremendous amount of sound waves and prevent unwanted echoes that could create standing waves.
A caveat: They only go up 4', so in principal there is some bleed above that height, but as I sit on a low chair it hasn't seemed like a problem.
The next image, taken more from my eye level as I sit in the hot seat, shows that the baffles provide good coverage directly in front of the playing position. The deadening of sound as you sit down is really noticeable if you speak or sing in a constant tone as you dip below the top of the baffles.
Equally important is the baffle behind the player, which catches any stray reflections that somehow escaped the front baffles or popped off the untreated walls above. The next shot shows the view back over my right shoulder toward my rack; you can see the rear baffle to the right.
Another challenge involved insulating the recording area from the fan noise of the computer I use for tracking. What I opted to do here was place the noisy PC outside the room and control it remotely via a very quiet laptop PC that I keep next to me while recording. Check the laptop on the chair in this pic:
For this I just built a simple LAN: the main PC is networked to a router in the studio, as is the quiet laptop. The laptop and the main PC run UltraVNC so that the laptop can see everything the main PC does, and control it. Works like a charm. I did try wireless networking initially but found that the operation of the wireless card in the main PC caused glitches in the audio during recording, so I bagged that. There are products like the Tranzport that accomplish much the same thing, but I prefer to have the full display of the recording software at my fingertips rather than just transport controls and a few punch operations.
This shows the view out the studio toward the main workstation (you can just see the laptop screen in front of the chair):
And now just a picture of my favorite guitars...a Goodall jumbo koa/spruce and a Goodall concert rosewood/spruce.
My next steps:
- I want to build a "cloud" suspended from the ceiling - probably just a sheet of Owens-Corning 703 insulation clad in cloth. The ceiling is the most critical untreated area at this point.
- I will probably hang fabric (probably some nice rugs) on the front walls. The painting visible in some of the pics actually covers a deep-set, ground-level window which I packed with foam and bags of road salt (for sheer mass) in order to shut out street noise. It's pretty effective, but there is still a reflectivity issue (though minor, I suspect) with those bare walls. I may also treat the exposed corners (above the baffle half-walls) with foam bass traps.
And I think that's it -- anything more is probably overkill. The room certainly isn't perfect, but it's dramatically better, good enough to get me 80% of the way to where I want to be. And all for not much money or effort at all, beyond the many hours spent figuring out what to do!
HTH -
e
I've dug around a lot trying to decide whether to build an isolation booth etc. and have opted for the 80% solution at probably 20% of the cost of a full makeover. So far I am very pleased with the results, given a total outlay of less than $400. Since all I do is solo fingerstyle guitar, a lot of the online advice about studio design is just overkill - my needs are really simple and my setup rarely changes from session to session. The room is hardly perfect, but I am amazed at the improvement in sound, so I thought I should share some pics in case others are looking for ideas.
The key thing was dealing with the hard, reverberant walls, which were creating standing waves and either deadening my good mikes or else creating unwanted high-frequency noise. This was frustrating, since I'd just upgraded both my preamp and my mikes significantly; they just weren't giving me the sound I expected for the money. Modest steps to correct the walls just fixed it. The problem was the room, pure and simple.
My main tool was a simple, home-built sound baffle suggested by Eltjo Haselhoff's excellent page on recording acoustic guitar, http://www.eltjohaselhoff.com/recording_acoustic_guitar.htm. My version of the baffle is a shoji-style affair costing about $60 and 30 minutes to build; it's just Auralex wedge foam ($25 for a 2'x4' sheet) glued to a masonite-type backing ($4 at Home Depot) and then hinged to another identical panel (another couple dollars in hardware and glue). Here's a picture of them in action:
I made four of them and like the fact that they can be deployed easily in any number of ways. Besides removing the 90-degree corners from the room, they absorb a tremendous amount of sound waves and prevent unwanted echoes that could create standing waves.
A caveat: They only go up 4', so in principal there is some bleed above that height, but as I sit on a low chair it hasn't seemed like a problem.
The next image, taken more from my eye level as I sit in the hot seat, shows that the baffles provide good coverage directly in front of the playing position. The deadening of sound as you sit down is really noticeable if you speak or sing in a constant tone as you dip below the top of the baffles.
Equally important is the baffle behind the player, which catches any stray reflections that somehow escaped the front baffles or popped off the untreated walls above. The next shot shows the view back over my right shoulder toward my rack; you can see the rear baffle to the right.
Another challenge involved insulating the recording area from the fan noise of the computer I use for tracking. What I opted to do here was place the noisy PC outside the room and control it remotely via a very quiet laptop PC that I keep next to me while recording. Check the laptop on the chair in this pic:
For this I just built a simple LAN: the main PC is networked to a router in the studio, as is the quiet laptop. The laptop and the main PC run UltraVNC so that the laptop can see everything the main PC does, and control it. Works like a charm. I did try wireless networking initially but found that the operation of the wireless card in the main PC caused glitches in the audio during recording, so I bagged that. There are products like the Tranzport that accomplish much the same thing, but I prefer to have the full display of the recording software at my fingertips rather than just transport controls and a few punch operations.
This shows the view out the studio toward the main workstation (you can just see the laptop screen in front of the chair):
And now just a picture of my favorite guitars...a Goodall jumbo koa/spruce and a Goodall concert rosewood/spruce.
My next steps:
- I want to build a "cloud" suspended from the ceiling - probably just a sheet of Owens-Corning 703 insulation clad in cloth. The ceiling is the most critical untreated area at this point.
- I will probably hang fabric (probably some nice rugs) on the front walls. The painting visible in some of the pics actually covers a deep-set, ground-level window which I packed with foam and bags of road salt (for sheer mass) in order to shut out street noise. It's pretty effective, but there is still a reflectivity issue (though minor, I suspect) with those bare walls. I may also treat the exposed corners (above the baffle half-walls) with foam bass traps.
And I think that's it -- anything more is probably overkill. The room certainly isn't perfect, but it's dramatically better, good enough to get me 80% of the way to where I want to be. And all for not much money or effort at all, beyond the many hours spent figuring out what to do!
HTH -
e
