Building Your Own Home Studio
One of the most overlooked aspects of the recording setup is the recording environment. Along with having the best converters, preamps and microphones to bring your recordings to a level that can compare to compete with top notch facilities, some don't even think about the room. Every room has a quality of it's own, and makes up part of the sound you are trying to capture. In other words the sound doesn't begin at that $4000 Neuman mic, it is comprised of the sound source and the environment it was recorded in. The same thing goes for your mixing and mastering environments the room is part of the equation. A good recording is recorded in a good room with good acoustical qualities. So when it comes to your space think of it as an instrument in need of tuning.
Elements of the recording studio.
1. Control Room
This is the business end
of the studio where all the recording and processing equipment is.
This room can be just about any size not too small not too big, and should not
be square. Rooms with equal dimensions can cause certain frequencies to be more
abundant than others, also parallel walls and Asymmetrical rooms are a big NO.
Other considerations in
designing a control room are the placement of the mix desk/listening position,
equipment racks and near field monitors. Bad
placement of your monitors relative to the mix position can have a negative
result in your mix. Also in a room with parallel walls and
floor/ceiling your listening environment can suffer from early and late
reflections. All this can Result in bad or out of phase stereo placement, muddy,
harsh, and less or non-portable sounding mixes. When you adjust your mix you mainly rely on your
ears and it might sound real good in your studio but then you bring it outside
of the studio only to find out that what you did in the studio doesn’t translate
to any system outside of your studio.
How do you avoid this?
a. By correct placement of your speakers in regards to your room dimensions, mix desk and
your mix position where you sit. By designing a room using the so Called "Golden Ratios" for
Height, Width and Length and using appropriate attenuation devices such as Bass traps,
Hemholtz absorbers and slat resonators.
b. By
correctly calibrating your meters & monitors to reflect the K-System (K-20, K-14
and K-12)
at 85db SPL by measuring the corresponding calibrated dB in pink noise
with a sound
pressure
meter with a C-weighted slow response.
c. By
tuning your ears to correctly hear your monitors using a commercially mastered
CD in or close
to the same genre you are to mix down and or master.
i.
As a side note; Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of The Moon Album/CD is one of the
most perfectly mastered CD of all
times. And falls with-in the K-System for
overall precise decibel levels. No
CD should be mastered louder than this.
ii. The
Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when re-mastered
to CD was mastered perfectly flat.
iii.
Look for a CD called Chesky
Jazz Vol. 1/Audiophile Test CD. This is a great
tool, the only one of it’s
kind, to help set up your monitors with.
d.
By burning a reference CD and
playing it on multiple audio devices like:
home stereo systems, boom boxes, your car, etc...
Finding a place to set your monitors you need to keep this in mind;
For mixing using near field reference monitors the minimum distance between the back of the monitors and wall should be at least 18”, for mastering you should use full range monitors as close to 20hz to 20khz as possible at about 3' away from the back wall. The distance from the far outside ends of the monitors and side walls should be no closer than 3’. Closer than this on either measurement and the bass response will be boosted resulting in poorly adjusted low end bass frequencies and overly adjusted high ends which will make your material sound tinny and harsh on other systems. Your mix position should be that of an isosceles triangle and will differ on room size. Also if you are designing from the ground up look into soffitt mounting your monitors!
Using the so called “equal
dimensions law “, certain harmonic frequencies will be introduced into the room
and be more abundant than desirable, this is why a square room or rooms
with the same dimensions are not a good idea, also try to avoid parallel surfaces
to keep reflections to a minimum. To see what frequencies are abundant in your
room you can fill the room with pink
noise and take measurements around the room,
or just take the dimensions of your room along with the fact that sound travels
at 1130 fps and use this handy
Room Mode Calculator to
find what frequencies are abundant in your space.
Then you can treat the problem areas accordingly. One of the biggest problems are standing waves created from an over abundance of low end bass frequencies. One method to help lessen this effect is to build some bass traps and place them in the corners of the room. If there is a door next to any of the corners you can place them on the door itself. Depending on the room and your findings you might need to place a trap on the corner between the wall and ceiling over the mix desk or other area. Some times on the floor level as well but not common. After you placed your traps take another reading.
Another area of concern is transient high end frequencies. These can reflect off the side and back walls and even the ceiling, this is real evident in rooms with parallel surfaces. You will need to build some absorbers for the back wall and maybe some angled slat resonator panels for the side walls as well as making a cloud absorber for over the mix position. All this should help reduce some of the transient high end frequencies.
The ideal room should not be square and the ideal position to setup the mix desk would be facing the short wall.
You can record in this area if you want with no problem, and even do some mic work if you are quiet. If you have a big budget you can build another room or a Vocal Booth to do your mic work.
Some other areas of the studio;
2. Recording Area/Room
Here you can record a band or track individual parts. You can make some dividers to help to lessen the bleeding of sound from one part to another if doing a live recording through open mics. Though you still will have bleed it will be lessened.
3. Vocal Booth
A treated room to record vocals sometimes known as an isolation booth. These can be a bit tricky to make but can be done. As with the control room square is not always good and the “law of equal dimensions” also comes into play, even the ceiling which can be contoured to avoid unwanted reflections.
4. Drum Room
Much like a vocal booth, but of course bigger. Just more money to spend.
Now we could talk about
construction
and materials
but that’s another thing to talk about for another time.
The important thing in this article I wanted to discuss is the placement of the monitors and mix desk in relation to the room and such. The next thing we need to talk about is adjusting your monitors to the K-System. Why?
Well as Bob Katz says, “so we don’t join the loudness race”.
Calibrating your Monitors
Once you have your space "tuned" and
your mix position set you will need to calibrate your monitors.
There are three "K" meters to choose from, for program material with a wide
dynamic range such as for film or symphony use the "K-20" meter. For Pop music
and general program material use the "K-14" meter and for broadcast program
material use the "K-12" metering system.
To set it up, first choose one of the three meters above based on your program material. and then calibrate the monitor gain where 0dB on the meter yields 83 dB SPL per channel, C-Weighted, slow response at the mix position using pink noise calibrated at the chosen meter's db, i.e. Pink Noise for -20dB RMS. 0dB always represents the same calibrated SPL on all three meters. The K system meters are the RMS output from 0dB, so the K-20 meter will be -20dB RMS from 0dBFS and so on. When played back through both monitors you should have a response of 85dB SPL, this is considered the best highest level to monitor with and your ears will thank you for it.
With calibrating your monitors you will also want this to be reflected in your software. For this you can get the freebie VST Vitage metering plugin from Psp and adjust it to reflect your chosen K metering system. Or you can get the great set of professional metering plugs from Inspector XL.
© Copyright 2005 Christian Pro Audio