Mentor Francesco Benvenuto is a Recording Connection superstar. Working out of the largest studio in the south, this Grammy-Winning records industry heavyweight has worked with some of the biggest names in the game! Here he shares his tips and tricks to maximizing the sound of your home studio!
For an engineer, beginner or pro, working from home, nothing is more important than the acoustics of your home studio.
The first thing I explain to my new students is that an aspiring engineer is only able to progress if they have the proper setup and equipment. As an audio professional, you should, at the very least, have the ability to hear exactly what’s going on in the audio files that you’re working on.
Luckily, modifying the setup of your home studio to achieve professional-grade sound doesn’t have to cost you a million bucks. With some ingenuity, hard work, and a little math, you can turn that extra bedroom into a studio capable of producing beautifully mastered music.
1. Choose The Right Room
The first problem people run into when setting up their home studio is finding a room that has the right dimensions and shape. In residential architecture, people tend to build square rooms within most houses, which is not the ideal shape. You need to use a room that is rectangular, ideally with a width that is at least 9 feet and a length doubling that. If that isn’t available in your home or apartment, choose the least square room you have available.
2. Assess Your Space
Imagine in your head a rectangular room, with the two longer walls being the “side walls,” one of the shorter walls being the “head wall,” and the other shorter wall (the one closer to the door) being the “back wall.” Now apply these terms to the room you have chosen, as we move forward.
3. Positioning Yourself And Your Equipment
First, place your chair and monitor anywhere between 25% to 38% of the distance of the entire room back from the front head wall. So, if the room is 20 feet long, you’ll want to situate your chair and monitor about 6 feet back from the headwall. Also, make sure that you are not seated directly in the center of the room. You should also be seated right in the center of your left and your right wall. If the room is 10 feet wide, make sure you are seated 5 feet from the left wall and 5 feet from the right wall. You want the distance that those soundwaves travel from the monitors in front of you all the way to the back wall to be as far as possible. Frequencies need time to develop so that you can fully hear all of their complexities, especially the bass. Positioned in this specific point in the room, you will have enough room behind you for the bass to pass through you.
Next, you will position your speakers. Your speakers should be elevated off the ground. Your speakers need to be positioned towards the headwall, in front of your chair and monitor, facing the back wall. They need to be equal distance from each other and your chair, in a perfect triangle. Here is where things get tricky, as we are fighting physics a bit here, trying to keep our sound waves from bouncing back and forth between two parallel walls. We need to maintain this perfect triangle, while also positioning our speakers the correct distances from the walls and ceiling. To minimize frequencies from canceling their phase, make sure the distance of your speaker is not an equal (or a multiple of) distance from the side wall, front wall, ceiling and floor. For example, if either speaker is two feet from the side wall and two feet from the front wall, or 4 feet from the side wall and two feet from the front wall, this will cause frequencies to either cut very deep or boost in certain frequencies, especially in the low mids or bass area. Ideally, you want to place them, for example, 1.7 feet from the front wall and 3.9 from the side wall. The goal is to not have the same distance or a multiple amount from the side wall, front wall, floor and ceiling, when placing your monitor speakers. You will also need either speaker mounts that can move up or down and/or a chair that can go up or down so that your ear level will be right on the speaker’s axis points (refer to your speakers manual on where that axis point is). This way you will be positioned right on the sweet spot of where the distribution of the high frequencies and the low frequencies of your speakers connect.
4. Locate Your Room’s Reflection Points
After calculating the correct distances of where to place your monitors and your seating position, you can properly soundproof your room. You’ll need to begin by locating your reflection points. Sitting in your chair, with your speakers in their correct positions, and looking straight ahead, have a friend hold a small mirror against the right side wall at ear level. A makeup compact mirror works especially well, do not use an iphone camera. Your friend then needs to, holding that mirror flat against the wall and keeping it at eye level, slide it slowly towards the front wall and speakers. They will keep sliding the mirror forward until you see the first speaker’s tweeter in its reflection. Then mark this spot on the wall with a permanent marker. Then keep sliding the mirror forward until you see the second speaker’s tweeter in its reflection. Again, mark this point on the wall. Repeat this process with the left side wall. Now you have found the four reflection points on your sidewalls. Do this process on the ceiling with a mirror attached to a selfie stick.
5. Soundproofing Your Home Studio
In order to properly soundproof your room, you’ll need to treat these reflection points acoustically. You have two options: buy premade soundproofing panels or build your own. If you’d like to build your own you’ll need to buy 2×4 feet sheets of Owens Corning 703 fiberglass panels, construct a wooden frame for each, then stretch a breathable non-synthetic fabric over the structure like a canvas over a mount. Not too complicated, and very affordable, but of course a bit time consuming. Once your panels are ready, either bought or built, place them over your reflection points. To control the bass reflections in your room, you can also cover every corner of your room (between the walls from floor to ceiling) with more of these panels.
For the back wall (and even the front two corners of your room), eventually, I would suggest buying professional-grade bass traps, but they can be pretty expensive. In the meantime, you can prop a mattress up against the back wall and get a decent amount of the same benefit.
Once all of this is set in place, take time to learn the sound of your room. Listen to great quality mixes from top mixing engineers and calibrate your ears before beginning your own mixing or production session. There will never be a perfect sounding room but once you dial it in, you’ll get very good results. Patience is key!