Having a high-quality studio with a good atmosphere at home is truly a dream for anyone who works in the music production industry. But combining a good vibe with a solid and actually useful studio can sometimes be tricky. Here is how to improve your Home Studio for maxed-out success!
Table of Contents:
1 - Vibrations
When thinking about a proper music studio setup, people usually go to proper sound absorbers first. And they are indeed important. But what's also important is the surface that the monitors stand on. If you just put the speakers on a desk they usually create vibrations that may end in a distorted sound. Furthermore, they may create resonances that don't exist in your mix. These resonances may cause you to make bad mixing choices. To solve this problem you can get some proper monitor stands or isolation pads. If you don't want to spend too much money, you can do some DIY work here with acoustic foam for example. Simply create a little pad on which your monitors can stand. But of course, getting some professional pads or stands is usually the way to go!
2 - Position
The positioning of your monitors is covered in a lot of posts on Instagram. I still often see people having weird angles or even just randomly placed speakers. So let me give you a little checklist! First, make sure your monitors are placed in a triangle. The important thing to mention is that the distance between the speakers should be the same as the listening position. Basically, you create a triangle with the same side lengths. Frequencies are bouncing around your room and the big goal is to absorb them as well as possible. The hardest points and most bounceable areas are the corners. A simple way to avoid those sound wave reflections is to get your speakers away from the corners. You also can get some bass traps for the corners to cover the most problematic areas. Overall just make sure you are not too close to the corners of your room! As mentioned before monitor stands are important to absorb vibrations that may create resonances. But there is another reason why it's always a good idea to get yourself some speaker stands. It's all about the height adjustment! That's the third most important point. Get your speakers at the same height your ears are.
3 - Cross feed plugin
Using a cross-feed plugin, or some cross-feed device where you can connect your headphones, can be helpful if you don't have a good pair of speakers or even no speakers. This plugin or device helps you to emulate the sound of speakers better. The big pro about speakers is the amazing and accurate stereo image. With the help of a cross-feed plugin, which introduces some of the signals from the left transducer into the right and otherwise, you can judge better about the stereo image. Using a good pair of monitors is of course the way to go anyways!
4 - Room correction software
Before I even get started, I want to mention that this is not some kind of magic trick and you don't need any kind of sound absorbers in your room. This software is more of the cherry on top to give you the final tweaks! This software basically analyzes the frequencies at different positions in your room and creates an image of your room's acoustics. This image is used by the software which then creates a "filter" on top of your playback to match your room acoustics. Here is an example. Imagine a certain frequency is very in the foreground because of your room treatment. The software can detect such problems and manipulates this frequency area so you can get a more natural understanding of the sound in your room. A great plugin that does this for you is SoundID Reference. I would recommend using such software to detect problems and later on solve these with better acoustic treatments for example!
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