Help setting up a (basic) home studio, that can still create great results?
My workspace up until now has been putting my laptop on my dresser drawer, an SM57 w/ boom arm, and a MCA SP1 condenser mic balanced within one of the dressers.
My aim is to set something up something cheap and basic, yet that can provide professional results.
I only really need to record voice, acoustic guitar, and plugged guitars (bass, electric guitar).
Looking for tips on how to best utilize my space to create professional recordings.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started? - like what might be the best way to arrange my room for recording music? Where to put sound deadening panels? Best way to setup a vocal booth in my closet?
My plan currently is to:
Build a desk, to go right next to the closet. There's about 73 inches (185cm) from the closet to the bed, so I was thinking of using most of that space for a desk (~70 inch desk).
Rig up some sort of vocal booth in the closet. Use hanging clothes as sound insulation, and perhaps put egg cartons on the walls all around the hanging clothes. Open to suggestions if there is a better solution.
Not sure what else to do in the room to ensure good results. Any suggestions?
Here are pics of the space:
Alternate bed positioning: https://imgur.com/a/K06h8T1
Comments
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Hi,
A mix of helpful hints, sort them for your purposes as you will:
Use the closet for vocals, but get free-standing panels around the front to at least keep some frequencies from carrying into the room.
Your room is a standard bedroom with hard acoustics. I can almost guarantee that you will want to get rid of a lot of (most) frequencies below 150-200hz for guitar/voice, both for the better rerproduction and for all the "hash" of background noise the room will transmit.
Any acoustic recording demands good/balanced acoustics to be decent.
Sometimes you get lucky with a space that has "that corner", but most of the time you don't.
Contain a corner of the room for guitar playing; it needs to be "walled in" in some form.
For HIGH frequencies, you can place acoustic foam panels to knock down fast flutter echoes.
For the "real thing" that screws with most rooms, the LOW-MIDS, you need panels of several inches thickness with either FiberGlas or similar less-irritating materials. THAT is what tames a space and takes out the ugly boominess from mids and bass freqencies bouncing.. Shipping blankets can stop reverb from travelling, but, again, they won't control the low-mids.
Forget egg crates, that old tale has been around since the 70s.
What you should aim for is a relatively small, acoustically dry, controllable space/corner that reproduces your guitar and voice in as balanced a fashion as possible. You can always add reverb and other things after, but a clean neutral recording is a good starting point for your setup.
Keep your laptop as far away from the mics as possible; good signal-to-noise is one of the buildng blocks of good sound. You may not notice the "little noises" on the individual tracks, but as soon as you hear a recording without them, you suddenly realize how much deeper the silence on the recording is.
Don't buy gimmicks. A few good-quality tools win the day. Use your ears. Test, test and test again. Be critical and yet relaxed about this; it's a journey towards better, not an overnight solution (short of a lottery win.)
Good Luck, and let us know of your progress.
C.
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I don't understand when someone, in a seemingly sincere fashion, posts requests for help and then is never heard from again.
In case something has come up for the OP, fine, let's wait and see, but this has become a bit of a trend...
C,
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