Home Recording Basics Ep. 05

One of the most important elements of your home studio is acoustics! This is because making music in a room with well-controlled acoustics allows you to hear what you are doing much more accurately than in a standard, uncontrolled room.

If you’re interested in learning more about the basics of DIY home studio acoustics, we’ve got a few other articles out on this subject here and here. If you click on the pink “Acoustics” tag at the bottom of this article, you’ll see even more.

Commercial studios can do fancy things to control their room acoustics, things like building rooms within rooms, non-parallel walls/ceilings, adding large structural bass traps, and more. There are also many different types of acoustic design concepts to choose from in a setting with a large commercial budget; check out this primer article on control room design from Sound on Sound magazine for details.

However, most DIY home studio owners are working within a room that already exists, so we need to make the most out of what we already have. Expensive new construction is not usually an option in the DIY home studio setting.

A great acoustic design concept to consider in the home studio context is called “live-end/dead-end”:

Live-End/Dead-End Acoustic Design

One end of a rectangle is the dead end, filled with lots of acoustic absorption. This is where we place the mix position. The opposite end of the rectangle is the live end, with less absorption and usually some acoustic diffusion added in.

For reference, acoustic absorption is any type of acoustic control that absorbs sound and prevents it from reflecting. Acoustic diffusion is a type of acoustic control that adjusts how sound waves reflect (usually by scattering them). Diffusion does not absorb sound, it just changes the sound reflection characteristics.

In addition to absorption and diffusion, bass traps are placed in at least all four corners of the room. The ceiling soffit is another good place for these, if you need more of them.

So, to summarize, there are three main methods of acoustic control we’re applying here: absorption, diffusion, and bass traps. All three of these are necessary items that should be used in combination. Using just one or two of these techniques won’t get it done.

Pros and Cons of the Live-End/Dead-End acoustic design

Pros: Easy to set up, affordable, and provides effective results. Can be applied to existing construction-no new construction necessary.

Cons: This design gives you a pretty small acoustic sweet spot to work within.

Here’s a diagram of how this design might look when setting up your room:

General recommendations for DIY acoustic design

Try to consider the purpose of each piece of acoustic control within your acoustic design. Throwing up acoustic panels randomly will lead to random results.

Use data and testing to help inform and confirm your choices, instead of only tuning your room by ear. Both subjective feelings and objective data are required, not just one or the other.

When designing acoustics, we’re aiming for the greatest amount of acoustic control for least amount of panel square footage placed on the wall. Too many wall panels will over-deaden your room, and cause additional acoustic problems. The aim here is to control our acoustics, but while still maintaining a natural sound in the room.

For an even deeper dive on this subject, I’ve also got several sections dedicated to music studio acoustics in my full length publication, DIY Music: A Practical Field Guide.

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