How to build a home studio

Whether you are a recording artist or a producer, or whether you are recording podcasts or how-to YouTube videos, the importance of having a designated workspace is of paramount importance.

Just as much as people who work from home need home offices, you need a space to create. But where would you even begin in optimising your space? Well, Hush Echo is here to only optimise your sound quality but to also help you for the best home studio setup.

The Starting Point

Whether you are just starting out in developing your studio, or whether you are enhancing and optimising your existing space, there are a few considerations that need to be made before you even start. You first need to know where you are in the studio development process. Are you starting from the ground up or are you looking for the ideal placement for the equipment you already own?

This, along with your budget and how much you are planning to spend on this project, will play a big role in how you decide to create your home studio.

Choosing the Space

So now that you have your equipment, you need to find a space in your home that you can use as a studio. Choosing the optimal space is not as easy as having space available and filling that space with your equipment.

You first need to consider the size of your space. Are you going to be a recording artist or producer? Will you need space to accommodate whole bands and their instruments? Or are you currently operating entirely in the digital sphere, mixing music? The former would require greater space than the latter.

You also need to consider the shape of the room you are using. A perfect square is not going to provide you with perfect sound. This is because of the way soundwaves work in a square room which may leave blank sound spots that leave the final product sounding dull or empty.

You would also need to make sure that the room you are choosing doesn’t have a low ceiling. Now while it is not feasible for you to lift the entire ceiling, if your home studio space does have a low ceiling, you would need to consider using acoustic treatment panels on the ceiling as well, and you would need to take that into consideration when planning your budget.

Optimise Your Monitor and Mic Placement

For the optimised sound, your monitors or speakers should be placed in a generally symmetrical location. This means that the left speaker should be the same distance from the wall as the right speaker, and there should be an equal distance between the right and the left speaker.

Speakers should be placed at your ear level, so if you are going to be standing during most of the producing process or sitting, the speakers should be at your ear height. The speaker would also ideally converge at the point where you will be located in relation to the speaker.

If your room is rectangular in shape, it would be best to place your monitors or speakers along the shortest wall. But also, remember that you can always adjust the positioning of your speakers. You can always move things around and change and adjust the placement to enhance the sound as you see fit.

Consider Sound Treatment

To get that ultimate crisp sound, you need to install acoustic foam panels that not only provide enhanced audio, but that are also affordable. That is where Hush Echo comes in.

Whether it is because of a low ceiling, a square room, or persistent echoes coming off from the hard surfaces in your home studio, acoustic foam panels will enhance the final product that you create.

Acoustic foam reduces or eliminates echoes and background noises by controlling the reverberation that sounds make when they bounce off walls. Acoustic treatment is best used in rooms that have large, flat spaces off which noise can bounce. These sound absorbers are used to improve the acoustics of the room, which thereby reduces noise in the room.

Acoustic Foam typically deals more with the mid and high frequencies. To deal with lower frequencies, much thicker pieces of acoustic foam are needed. We recommend using Pyramid, Mushroom, Metro, Convolute and Grid Shape panels. Large pieces of acoustic foam are often placed in the corners of a room and are called acoustic foam corner bass traps. 

Now that you know how to optimize the sound in your home studio, you are ready to start making history. You handle the creativity while we handle the acoustic treatment. If you looking to create a professional looking recording studio, we have created a step-by-step process on ways to go about that.