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How to Build a Quiet Studio Environment
There is a lot of knowledge about how to build a home
recording studio. Underneath most of this is an implicit assumption
that a recording studio is something you build to keep sounds from going
in or out of a room. After all, the recording enterprise is an inherently
noisy enterprise. Or is it? In the past, when most home studios were
designed for recording a "band", you know, a 4-5 member group
that has a drummer with a full kit of cans, a couple guitarists with
big-haired amps. A Bass player with his or her stack, and the keyboard
player with their amps.
Wait a minute! Is this how everyone works today? Of course some of us
do, and have active bands that gig and record. But what about everyone
else? How many of us are essentially a one person operation, using a
computer, keyboards and samplers, and a mixing board? How many of us
are only using a computer? Don't be shy now. My bet is most of you.
The rules for what a recording studio should or can be have changed
as a result of the wonders of modern technology. If you are a part of
this revolution, this article is for you.
The number one consideration of a home-based project studio is not soundproofing,
but the making of a quiet room. I find it kind of funny that some people
will spend thousands to treat their room yet never quiet the stuff inside
the room itself! You walk in and hear a noise coming from computer fans,
whines coming from hard drives, zip drives, SCSI drives for samplers,
fans in samplers, fans in amps. This is no way to work on music or produce
audio. What one finds is that this racket masks other problems in the
studio, like 60 Hz hum at the console outs, poorly set up gain on mics,
synths and other instruments. It's rather ironic. People who have a
noisy studio create their stuff, mix and master it and never really
notice that the entire production is imbued with noise problems. When
the piece is done, they still don't notice it because, yep, they listen
to it in their noise-infected studio. So let us post rule number one.
Ready? Here it is.
To create music you must be able to hear your sounds. Doh! OK, I can
see you dudes rolling your eyes. Some of you have bought the hype that
you need $2,000 studio monitors to do this. Yes. Studio monitors are
important, but even if you have the best monitors in the world you are
still going to have major problems if you cannot clearly and totally
hear what is coming out of them! So let us be clear. The number one
enemy to good sound is the noise in your room, coming from the very
devices you make music with. The louder your room is, the louder you
have to monitor your music, the faster your ears will fatigue in a session
and the greater the likelihood you may damage your hearing after years
of constant, relentless exposure to high sound pressure levels. On the
other hand, with low ambient noise in a room, you can find a lower comfortable
volume level at which to work. This saves the ears a lot of wear and
tear and you can work longer, and do those major projects that require
successive all night sessions.
How to quiet your music creation room
Lets take a brief look at how professional studios do this to get a
clue. Pro studios are multi-room operations. At minimum, there are 3
rooms. The "studio" where the performers play and are singing,
playing instruments and drums, etc. The "control room" where
the mixing board and patch bays and quiet outboard gear resides. Finally
is the "machine room" where, you guessed it, all the noisy
stuff goes. The problem for the home studio is that, usually, one room
has to fulfill all these functions.
If you were able to quiet the room significantly, you could have a control
room and studio room be the same room. You can record sensitive vocals
and acoustic instruments with those sources gone, just don't swivel
that chair too much. So, the goal has to be to develop some kind of
machine area where all the noisy equipment can go. As usual, there are
expensive ways to go about this, with sound isolation racks, buying
only the quietest hard drives and fans. A better solution is to use
the room's closet to store the noisy machines. The best solution is
the simplest, and the cheapest. Cut a small hole in the wall and run
some long cables into the next room.
Sound Isolation enclosures
There are companies making these now. They are expensive and may not
totally eliminate the noise, but they will significantly reduce it to
the point where you can work more comfortably. One of our members, Houston
H, at studio-central forums has designed his own isolation enclosure.
Really nice job. Here's a link to some pics
and a discussion of the process. There's a cool tip there about
using
under the PCs in the enclosure. Check it out.
The Closet Approach
The closet approach is probably more problematic than
the other approaches because putting your gear in a closed tiny room
will actually make it resonate louder unless you take great pains to
totally insulate the closet so sounds cannot leak out. You can cut down
on the internal resonance in the closet by adding generous layers of
sound absorbing materials, and installing a heavy door with weather
stripping. Sound travels through air so it is important to seal the
door as much as possible. Cable access becomes a problem here. if you
think you can run the cables under the door, you will have too much
leakage and you will still hear noise. The solution here is to drill
a hole from the wall to the closet so you can run your cables through
there. Once you have the closet sealed and tight then another problem
arises: Heat. In a sealed tiny room the computer will eventually become
like a furnace. It will not be able to dissipate heat very well if it
is 100 degrees in the closet. You may be shortening your computer's
life and worse, may be creating a fire hazard. So you need ventilation,
which is much easier said than done. Assuming you do not want to re-route
air conditioning ducts for this, you will at minimum need to install
two fans where the back of the closet goes into the next room. One fan
exhausts the air out while the other brings cool air in.
The Put it in the Next Room Approach
This, for me, was the best way to go. I've had success
at the Tweak Lab. Drill a 4 inch hole above the baseboard going into
the adjoining room. Make sure there is space in the next room for your
computer and a rack unit. Then make an inventory of the cables you are
going to need to pull this off. If you have a fire wire or USB audio
interface, its easier. Get a few USB hubs for stuff like the mouse and
computer keyboard. Perhaps the hardest are cables for the video monitors.
VGA extension cables are easy to use, but avoid the cheap ones as they
may cause ghosting on the screen. Digital video extenders are available
too, but if you carefully map things out before you drill you might
find a way to get the stock 6 foot cables on most LCD monitors to make
it into the next room into the back of the computers. Here's the list
of things I had to buy to complete this project.
2 15' VGA cables (the thick kind with ballasts at each end)
2 6' SCSI cables for the samplers, using a zip drive as an intermediary.
1 12' serial cable extender for the cable that goes from the audio interface
to it's PCI card in the computer
1 25' serial cable extender for the MIDI interface to the serial port
on the computer.
1 20' USB extender with 2 ports
1 20' keyboard extension cable
2 20' stereo extension cables for my secondary soundcard (an SBlive)
1 Ebtech hum eliminator to kill 60hz hum from the sblive's long audio
lines.
Amazingly, for me, this worked. If I open the door to the room, I can
hear the computer whirring away out there. When I close the door, it
is totally silent. There are a few things to observe here. First, get
good quality vga cables. The cheap ones may cause ghosting on your monitors,
or may blur the image. With SCSI, you have to be careful about long
cable lengths. Put your sampler as close as you can to the wall the
cable will exit if you can. I could not, so I enlisted the help of an
old zip drive. Have the scsi signal buffered in the zip drive made a
12 foot run possible. I have had success with 25 foot scsi runs this
way, but that is really pushing it. A 25 foot serial cable, surprisingly,
is not a problem at all with my MIDI interface (a Unitor 8 and AMT8
combo) And believe me, I have LOTS of data going down this cable. My
USB mouse and PS2 keyboard had no problems with long cables. The only
serious problem was my sblive soundcard with it's 1/8inch stereo mini-jacks.
I use it for system sounds and for monitoring and sometimes recording.
Its a 30 foot unbalanced path. I was not surprised to hear a loud 60hz
hum coming from it to my computer speakers that I use as surround nearfields.
The Ebtech hum-eliminator totally cleared that up.
This was, without a doubt, the best upgrade I have made in my studio
since I started using hard drives. I can once again hear and pinpoint
troublesome noise at my mixer and take steps to get rid of it. When
I am doing sound development work I don't have to crank the gain or
wear headphones to hear subtle nuance. Thanks to the lower levels of
monitoring I can compose and mix all night long without disturbing neighbors
or roommates. Silence and music have a mutually beneficial, almost magical
relationship. Silence is the perfect backdrop for bringing sound from
the world of our minds to the real world.