Friday, July 6th, 2007
Recording & Producing Music at Home, Part 1: Fighting the Noise
Most of the independent musicians that try to earn a living and gain recognition by publishing their music on iSound do not (yet) have the luxury of being able to record and produce their music in a professional music studio. If any work on the music is done in a professional studio this is usually at the mastering stage, after most of the work has already been completed and only minor improvements can still be made. The most important work on your music happens right at home in the room in which you record and produce your music. This series of articles tries to help you with achieving a professional sound by making optimum use of the means available in the average home music studio.
This first parts of the series help you with optimizing the foundation on which your music recording and production rest: your studio. The first property of music studios I will discuss is the ability to isolate sound and prevent your recordings (or your neighbors) from being disrupted. Most artists who do not live in a free-standing house will appreciate the need for a properly isolated music studio, for noisy neighbors can disrupt your recordings and complaining neighbors can limit your music production sound levels. And even if you have the luxury of having a free standing house (or studio), external noises can still disrupt your recordings (nothing like having a great vocal take being disrupted by a loud car passing through your street) or fellow house members might not be all that pleased when you try out that great idea for a song in the middle of the night.
A high level is sound isolation (especially for low frequencies) is very difficult to achieve and is something even professional studios specifically developed for this purpose struggle with. The ability of a room to isolate sound is most commonly measured with the STC (Sound Transmission Class) value. A higher STC value usually indicates an improved ability to isolate sound, although this might not always be the case for low frequency sounds, as STC only measures sound attenuation down to 125 Hz (that thumping bass sound you hear in hiphop or drum ‘n bass goes all the way down to 25-30 Hz). Professional studios usually have an STC of around 60, but the average room in a regular home only achieves an STC of around 30-35, low enough to let even relatively weak sounds pass easily.
If you’re lucky enough to be able to build your own studio from the ground up, a professional grade STC of near 60 is quite achievable using relatively cheap components. However, as very few artists have this option available, I’ll just discuss the things that can be done to isolate a preexisting studio (if there’s demand I’ll do a full series on how to build a professional music studio on a limited budget in the future).
I’ll start off with saying that the common myth that adhering egg boxes to your studio walls will improve sound isolation is not true: sound isolation is primarily a function of mass and space, something which egg boxes do not offer (the same goes for acoustic foam or similar products). Lower frequency sounds will simply pass through the carton without any noticeable loss of energy. If you really want to spend an absolute minimum of effort (and money) on isolating your studio, the best results are achieved by focusing on the weakest link(s). This is because sound isolation of a room is only as good as its weakest link: you might have a studio with thick, sound isolating walls, but if you have a thin single layer window in there, the sound is simply going to go around the walls and through this window (this is what is commonly referred to as a “flanking” path).
The weak points in sound isolation of a studio are usually the doors and windows, but be sure to check your walls, ceiling and floor for holes first. Even the tiniest hole can reduce the isolation of your studio very significantly, so be sure to properly seal off holes and reinforce weak spots. Just to make sure, simply moving a large piece of furniture in front of any existing holes will not do much for sound isolation. Instead, try filling up as much of the hole as possible with something like silicone or acrylic sealant (the stuff used for bathrooms and sorts) from both sides of the wall.
The door of a studio is usually very weak at blocking sound because it’s often both light (due to it being hollow) and has big gaps surrounding it that allow sound to pass. The very minimum you can do to improve the sound isolation of your studio door is to add heavy duty weather strips to your door. If (financially) possible, try to use a more advance sealing mechanism such as provided by e.g. Zero International. Further improvements can be achieved by replacing the existing door with a solid core door (the heavier the door, the better). If this is not possible, try adding MDF sheets to both sides of the door to increase its mass. It’s also possible to purchase readymade specialized sound isolating doors with advanced sealing systems (e.g. compression latches), but from a cost perspective these generally only make sense when you’re going to completely overhaul your existing studio to improve sound isolation and not when you’re just taking care of the weakest links. There’s not much sense in having an expensive soundproof door with an STC of 60 when the wall surrounding it has an STC of 30.
Please keep in mind that, once you completely seal off your studio for sound, this also means that fresh air won’t be able to circulate into your studio. You should therefore leave your studio door open whenever possible and ensure you open it often enough during music recording and production to let in some fresh air.
If your home studio has a window in it, this usually is usually another weak link. Even standard double glazed windows tend to be very bad at attenuating sound. If you can go without sunlight during your production and recording sessions, simply add a thick MDF shutter covered with rockwool (or a similar material) on the inside. Alternatively (and more expensively), you can add a second layer of glass to your existing window. For maximum sound isolation, use thick glass and try to have as much space between your existing window and the newly added window as possible.
Two additional measures are available to improve the sound isolation of your studio that do not require a lot of effort and money. First, to improve the isolation of your studio floor, add a thick carpet on top of thick hair (not foam!) underfelt covering the entire surface of your studio floor (make sure you don’t leave any gaps or the sound will simply travel around the carpet). To improve isolation of your ceiling, give the room above your studio the same treatment. Secondly, try to decouple your speakers from the floor to combat structure born sound and vibrations. This is especially important if you have a sound setup which includes one of those big fat subwoofers which your neighbors undoubtedly love. The easiest solution here is to simply purchase readymade speaker stands. Make sure you purchase stands that combine dampening (rubber or if possible neoprene), mass (MDF or steel stands that can be filled with sand) and a minimum of floor contact surface area (usually steel or plastic pins). If you want to save a bit of money and build the stands yourself, I recommend taking the design of for instance the Stereocilia isolation stand simply recreating it yourself. This might not result in cosmetically pleasing stands, but the end result should be the same.
The measures I’ve discussed so far are not going to help a whole lot in improving the sound isolation of your studio, but they should help shave off a few decibels of the sound that reaches adjacent rooms with a minimum of effort and cost. If you truly want to improve the sound isolation of your studio, you’re going to have to invest a little more of your time and money. More on this in the next installment of this series on optimizing your home studio. In the meantime, feel free to add your low cost tips and tricks for isolating your home studio to the comments!
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Posted By Alex @ 12:00 AM
Author's site: http://www.isound.com
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moneyshot_ca's comment posted July 9th @ 3:40 PM:
Hey Alex, Really enjoyed reading this article. Question for you...
I live in a small apartment in a concrete/steel condo building and I want to be able to track loud vocals and maybe electric guitar amps. I tried tracking vocals once with no sound proofing and received complaints from one neighbor below me, so I decided the thing to do is to build an isolation booth.
Soon after that, as I was in the process of sketching out a plan to construct my own booth from scratch, I stumbled across someone in my area selling a partially built booth which I purchased fairly cheaply.
I've been reading lots of websites about acoustic soundproofing (for instance, http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/) which has been very helpful but I'm hoping you might be able to steer me further in the right direction.
This is what I have so far..
Base Floor (from the bottom up)...
-underlay/carpet on top of my laminate floor (mostly to just protect my floor)
-3/4 inch neoprene rubber layer
-concrete slab
-3/4 inch neoprene rubber layer
-booth floor
Booth...
-1 inch thick medite (High density fiber board)
-floor is 5 feet x 5 feet
-walls are just under 7 feet tall
-door is also solid 1 inch thick medite
Originally I was hoping that this would be enough soundproofing isolation to keep my neighbors happy and that I would only need to do sound treatment to the inside of the booth to dampen the reflections (my tentative plan is covering the walls/ceiling with 3 inch acoustic wedge foam and putting underlay and heavy carpet on the floor); but after testing with someone inside the booth it's not as quiet as I want it to be yet. If I had to guess I would say the STC for the booth is around 30.
My original plan before getting this partially finished booth was to have a double walled system, but I do need to keep in mind that I don't want to make to booth so small it feels like a coffin! So my thought is to add a thin 2x2 framing to the inside of the booth, fill the airspace with fiberglass insulation or rockwool, attach a "flexible channel" (ie. http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/pages/STC%20Chart.htm) to the framing and attach some drywall or mdf or plywood to form the inside wall, then cover those walls with the wedge foam for acoustic treatment.
Cost is obviously a factor, but I'm curious what you think of that idea and if you might have any suggestions.
Thanks!
Tyson
Commentors site: /moneyshot_ca |
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corey_amsterdamsoul's comment posted July 10th @ 3:19 AM:
Thanks for all the tips. As far as the egg carton myths: I used to have a quite some up on the walls and some more above the main vocal mic. It does nothing for isolation, but it did help to dampen the reflections in the room.
jay
Commentors site: http://itwontstop.com |
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rot_gut_glory's comment posted October 30th @ 8:36 AM:
Useful tips, thanks for sharing!
Here is another tip for those of you building a sound booth or otherwise constructing a sound isolation wall on a tight budget:
Some friends of mine built a nice studio on the cheap and one technique that seemed to work well for them was to build the walls with several layers of drywall. Drywall is really heavy and with three or four layers their control room is amazingly quiet, even when it's painfully loud on the other side of the wall.
Best of luck, may your studios be vewwy vewwy quiet!
Monkey
---Rot Gut Glory
Commentors site: http://www.rotgutglory.com |
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james_l_snelgrove_jimmy_sixstringtm's comment posted January 6th @ 10:41 PM:
Really enjoyed the article, I was fighting this monster for years and years and.... well you get the point. The noise thing is real and does create a problem....but, if you use an audio input capture card (like Dazzle video creator 80,ect. there are many) and a mixer program (Magix audio 7(which I Love) you can record a such a low volume you don't have to worry about disturbing the neighbors. Pick a time during the rush hour or when it won't bother anyone to do the mixing and adding effects so you can check the high vol. version for the power db junkies.
You don't have to record that guitar part at 110 db to get the effect, using a modeling guitar processor like Digitech RP200A you can program it to get any sound you want. Edit the wav file add effect compression (they are all built in to the audio studio 7 you don't even have to haul them around or plug them in. Using heasphones you can record that late night idea for a song. Hope this helps God Bless! JimmYSixStrinGtm
Commentors site: http://cdbaby.com/all/jimmysixstring |
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