So onto planning that acoustic space. The quietest spot at home is not necessarily the furthest from the main door. Don’t make the mistake of just looking at the sound sources within your home. Often, sounds from outside your home are louder and harder to control than those inside. That deserted corner of your apartment or garage might just be the most vulnerable to overflying planes or the honk of the garbage truck along the road. Instead, what you want to isolate are the loudest sounds that could reach your mike. One simple way to do that is to use an air buffer and build on a room-in-a-room concept.

Now, assuming you have control of the internal environment (i.e. you can arrange to have your kids out with family when you’re recording) here’s how to deal with the external. The walls of your home in contact with the outside will resonate with the sounds from the outside. So look at your internal walls and find a nice junction or section that isn’t in contact with the outside. Think about building a physical structure around that (with a door of course). It can be large, or in the example below, as small as a 1m x 1m vocal booth. What that creates is an air buffer or dead space between the ‘external’ walls of your home and the ‘internal’ walls of your recording room. 

This was an amazing shot to discover. Couldn’t quite figure how to capture the DIY vocal booth but finally got this from a bottom up angle. The vocal space was designed into the intial room restructuring with a double wall filled with rockwool. Unfortunately that left one slight problem on the sound isolation front: the fully solid single-layer glass door with gaps all around. The solution was to sheetblok the entire room and door surface in such a way as to create an ‘airlock’ when closing the door fully. Mounted on this layer were the sound absorbers that very successfully eliminate all reflected sounds.

Facing the light would be the RodeNTK, an awesome condenser microphone. Behind that is the wall-mounted Samsung monitor that allows me to trigger recording and playback directly from this booth. How that works is simply through a wireless keyboard that’s sitting on a ledge below the screen.

Seems like setting up a personal studio’s all the rage now. If you’re trying this from scratch you might want to check out this DIY version that is designed around the concept of a single-operator vocal booth. You don’t need a garage for this, just a small room in an apartment.

First question to ask is simply what are you going to be recording: Vocals or Instruments? If the latter, Acoustic (e.g. Folk Guitar) or Electronic (e.g. Keyboard)?

If you’re doing Vocals and Acoustic instruments, you need to seriously look at the acoustic space and budget some money to treat the room. Sound dampening and isolation are the key problems in getting a nice clean recording. For midi work and electronic stuff that can be piped directly to your onboard sound processor/virtual studio, the requirements are relatively simpler. However it’s not to say that all you need is a table and keyboard. Chances are you’d want to do some mixing so that means you’d need to consider acoustic issues too. So the first tip really is to head here to get a good sense of what acoustic spaces demand. 

http://www.acoustics101.com/

Taylor 614 CE. Unmistakably Folk.