3 Acoustic Changes You Need to Make To Your Home Studio Right Now

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There are three common mistake I see when people set up a home studio in their house.

This is something I've seen over and over again and I have been guilty of. And today I want to talk exactly about that because these three things you can correct right away, and it'll make a huge improvement on the quality of the sound that you're monitoring from your speakers or your headphones. So that's what this video is going to be about.

But first, my name is Zion and I am the founder of the Triple Threat Artists online production course, where we teach singer songwriters how to be a home producer as well, so that you are a triple threat; your singer songwriter, producer, you can get music out of your head and into the airwaves quickly. And when you have an idea, you can get it out in that can help with your collaborations.

Or you can take it as far as producing your own music like myself and Josh.  Josh Doyle and I are both home producers that produce our own music and have had success in selling our music into ads, TV shows, movies, and we share our knowledge through an online production course called the Triple Threat Artist, and the link is below.

We have an amazing community of like-minded, triple threats we call them, which are just incredible artists that are learning to do the same things we are. If any of that interests you, please check out the links below. We would love to share our knowledge with you, and we'd love to have you as part of our tribe.

So let's talk about these three things that you can do right now to improve your acoustic treatment space. But I'm assuming in this video, you've already put some kind of acoustic treatment up.

So what are the three things that you could do right now? Number one, move your desk away from the wall. If your desk is right up against the wall and your speakers are on your desk, you're getting a slap back against the wall that's going to be perceived as a lot more base, and it's going to be your EQ curve of your room was going to be really messed up. And I strongly suggest getting away from the wall, even if it's two or three feet.

Now, they say you don't really want to be absolutely in the middle of the room, but you don't want to be against the wall. I'm going to put a link below to a couple of articles that will help you set that up. But that is so important. When I first did that, I could not believe the difference in the sound out of my speakers.

It sounded so much more accurate than it did against the wall and the against the wall was a lot more bass heavy and you get a lot more slap back delay. So that's number one, just move away from the wall. I know that might look weird in your room. You're going to have a lot of cables and stuff behind your desk. It might look a little odd, but trust me, it's worth it. It's worth the odd look.

Number two. And I can't believe I have to say this, but it seems so obvious to me, but for a lot of people, it isn't. If you're a guitarist or you have guitars, do not hang your guitars in the room in which you are listening and monitoring music, or if you do place pads in things under the strings so that they're not reverberating. Those guitar strings and ukulele strings are all reverberating. Every time you have music coming out of your speakers and you're getting false signals to your brain, that you're getting certain kinds of harmonics in the air that aren't actually in the music.

So this is something you could do right now in two minutes. Just stop this video, go get some cloth or tissue paper and put it under each string or all the strings and make it so that there's no reverberation off of those strings, or just put the guitars away. If your studio is a space where you're trying to show off a look, you're probably not focusing on the right thing. Your studio is that workspace. This is a place for you to focus on your music. Put those guitars and hang them out in the living room so that people can see them. That's a lot cooler than being in your studio anyway. Those things, any kind of rattling things, if you have a microphone stand like the stand I have here, it has springs in it.

I had to mute those by putting cloth around each spring. Because even in my recordings, I could hear a weird frequency going on. You got to be tuned into those frequencies that are reverberating, and it's not just guitars. It's anything in your room that's reverberating. If you have rattles when the bass in your subwoofer moves, if you've got rattles, moving on somewhere, get rid of those immediately. Sometimes you want to rattle in your song, but you want to be intentional about it.

All right. And lastly, number three, this is one I see all the time. People put up acoustic treatment all over the sides of the room, but they don't put any above their speakers. Imagine your speakers to be putting out sound, even though they're forward facing speakers. They're directional speakers. So studio monitors, if you have a nice set of studio monitors, they're made to be directional, meaning you're supposed to be right in front of the speaker. They're not omni-directional or bi-directional.

So, but even though they are directional, there is going to be frequencies coming out of the speakers in all directions. And one of those directions is straight up. Now, most of the time, people have a desk that the speakers are on or carpet even under the floor. And it absorbs a lot of sound going down. And the sound going against the walls are being ref, are being absorbed by the different acoustic treatment on the walls. But one of the areas that most people don't think about is the slap back from the ceiling. And it's a quick slap back and it's an easy thing to solve. I strongly suggest just getting some little t-pins.

You can buy them at CVS or Walgreens, taking some of your acoustic treatment and putting it right above your speaker. You don't need acoustic treatment all over your ceiling, but directly over your speakers and above your head actually is a really, really good place to start. This is going to save you a lot of false information from slap backs and weird delays that you don't even know you're hearing. I strongly suggest doing that. It's not hard. It takes you maybe an hour with a stepstool and you won't have to worry about it anymore. Does it look weird? Yes. By using those t-pins, though, you can pop them out when you have to get rid of the room or you're moving or whatever. And doesn't, the hole is so small that it usually doesn't even leave any kind of mark. And so you don't even have to spackle and repaint it.

If you use tape or any kind of adheasive, I don't recommend it, but some people do it is stronger. There's less likely for those pads to be falling off. However, it's going to probably ruin your ceiling. So just keep that in mind. So those are the three things I would strongly recommend you get started changing right now. If you need to do all three or just one of them, go do it, go do it right now before the week is up, you will find a huge difference in changing those three things. I hope that helped.

My name is Zion. Again, we'd love to see you in our class at the Triple Threat Artists. The registration is now open. Come join us.

Talk to you next week.

Zion

https://hyperbitsmusic.com/home-studio-design/

https://www.gikacoustics.com/monitor-positioning

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/studio-sos-guide-monitoring-acoustic-treatment

https://acousticgeometry.com/bedroom-music-studio/

https://youtu.be/-EFl6OsOSaM

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