HOW TO
SOUND PROOF YOUR ROOM
YOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DIY ACOUSTICS BY LINA F BOOTHBY & LUANA SALLES
Physics are boring. Period. I mean we are musicians for a reason, right? We are creative souls in touch with our emotions, not calculating velocity and mass. Music is freedom and selfexpression for us, not sound waves bouncing off walls. Wait. Actually, 60 per cent of that loud music you’re listening to are those very sound waves reflecting back from the walls, ceiling, floor and your wardrobe. As a matter of fact, all the angles, corners and materials in your room are a major contributing factor to the quality of sound you hear, record and mix.
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T
his is terrifying territory. Most of us would just leave it to the professionals, if we didn’t need to save some cash to pay the rent. But we do, so our bedrooms are transformed into recording booths and we frantically read specialist forums asking questions about tonal balance and excess sound when the production process reaches the dreadful mixing stage. Secretly, we still hope that we can get away with no soundproofing in our bedroom studio, but no. We really can’t. So let’s talk about physics, shall we? When it comes to music production, bedroom acoustics can be our biggest enemy or our most reliable ally. A room that has undergone some acoustic treatment adds good sound to a final mix, whereas a badly treated space amplifies the irritating low and mid-range sounds, often called bass and subbass. These distort the music you hear and give you an unrealistic picture of what the music actually sounds like. Beginner sound producers often make the mistake of trimming down the lower-bass range of a track, because they think it sounds too heavy in their room. Listening to the same track in the car, it won’t have bass at all. They didn’t realise that the excess bass wasn’t coming from the speakers. It came from the room. The purpose of the acoustic treatment of floors, windows, doors and walls is firstly to silence and soften
background sounds leaking in from outside, such as traffic noise, or a washing machine spin cycle in the flat below. Secondly, it creates acoustic surfaces which reflect the sound in the right direction, while silencing the bass frequencies. For the actual geeks amongst us, the sound range we are dealing with is between 40Hz and 150Hz. The 150Hz range is often used in trance music, whereas the lowest 40Hz range creates the humming noise under rap songs. These are the deepest range of sounds in tonality, therefore the hardest to silence. Getting rid of these frequencies is the most challenging but also the most rewarding territory of sound recording. One more thing you should know: the louder you listen to music, the more extra noise your room adds to it. With the loudness, grows the number of invisible frequencies bouncing around. The more tangled the sound palette gets, the duller everything sounds. This is why it isn’t recommended to listen to music above a certain level in a small room. Turning the speakers down will also make you a hit with the next door neighbours. Soundproofing doesn’t need to be something complicated and expensive. You don`t have to be a lumberjack or a DIY queen to sort those bass frequencies out. With these crafty solutions you can turn your bedroom into a micro-studio in no time. Let us know how it goes on www.amplifymag.com
If you’re just as interested in recording music as you are in playing it, you might want to take the next available step in home recording: making a profession out of it and then basing your whole life around it. Right, maybe not as much of a step as it is a giant leap, but what’s holding you back? You’ve got the equipment, you have the room, and you live in
“Like all engineers and producers, I started out as a musician in bands, writing and playing in tiny little pubs, lugging gear in and out of venue for twenty-minute sets, and driving for hours on end to play a show to one or two people,” he says, the nostalgia an evident glimmer in his eyes. “Through writing in bands, I’d always record songs on a little handheld recorder
“I started out as a musician in bands, writing and playing in tiny little pubs, lugging gear in and out of venue.” the birthplace of musical counterculture. There’s nothing holding you back. In fact, some years ago, studio magnate David Leighton was in the exact place you are now. All he had were a few cheap in-
so I could take it to practice. Eventually, I saved up enough money to buy an 8-track recorder to demo some band material. That was really my first proper experience with multi-track recording, albeit
DAVID LEIGHTON WITH HIS GUITAR
struments and a thirst to record. Today, he owns RiverRun Studios, a highend recording facility in Bedfordshire where bands from all over the country flock to when they’re ready to record.
my limited knowledge led to it sounding pretty awful!” David was your typical music aficionado working towards a University degree in that area out (continued on page xx)
HOW TO
1. SHUT THE WORLD OUT
First of all, you need to deal with the outside noise coming through your windows and doors. Professional studios either don’t have any glass windows or they pay a fortune for custom made, angled glass windows. Parallel surfaces, such as double glazed windows, act as a membrane, so when they vibrate, sound endlessly ricochets between the panels. If the windows are slightly angled, the sound dissipates instead. For us, the less fortunate renter generation, there are thankfully temporary and budget solutions. Measure your window frame and use a thin (2-3cm) wooden panel cut to the same size. Cover it with the thickest fiberglass material you can find. Fiberglass is an inexpensive building material, widely used for attic insulation so you can find it in any hardware store. Because of its density fibreglass absorbs a lot of sound, making it ideal for soundproofing. F i b e r-
glass is extremely dusty so make sure to cover it with thick textile, to protect that expensive gear you saved up for. This wooden panel cushions the window, blocking out as much noise as possible. The only downside is that you are also blocking out the light with it. If you feel like DIY is a no-go zone for you, invest in some very heavy, thick curtains to muffle some of the unwanted sound. Second of all, cover the cracks and holes of the door, by sticking a rubber strip around it. The more airtight the door is, the better it keeps noise out, plus your flatmates won`t complain about loud music at night anymore. If you have enough fibreglass material, attach it to your door’s full length too. The same finish goes here as for the window panel, cover it with a thick textile or a piece of carpet to keep the dust at bay.
2. SLAYING THE CORNER DRAGONS Now you have dealt with two potential noise sources, it is time to fight the dragon of soundproofing. The dragon being the four corners of your bedroom. The silencing of corners is essential for a good mix, because they basically act as bass sound collectors. The smaller the room is, the more significant the corner problem gets, because the sound waves don’t have to go far to bounce back again. It creates a disturbing, deep droning noise on your recording and completely falsifies the music you listen to when mixing. Most professional recording studios simply don’t have corners. They are blocked off with diagonal dry walls and filled up behind with sound absorbing material. If you aren’t at the stage of building your own home-studio, you can also block off the corners with paper boxes. You will need strong boxes, used for shipping parcels, so unfortunately cereal boxes won’t do. You will need to create 2ft tall pillars by stacking them, and then place the pillars in the corners of the room. The boxes will need to be densely filled with textiles and rags to absorb sound. This is where your old T-shirts might come
handy. Once the pillars are ready, you can customise them with spray paint or cover them with some funky textile. As a cheaper option, books can also be used as corner pillars pieces, so just head out to a car boot sale and buy some heavy dictionaries for 20p each and you might even impress your next date with your intellectual looking room. You don’t have to do this for every corner of your room if you can barely move in it to start with, but the more corners you can silence the better sound quality you will get. However, the most important two corners are the ones next to your speakers, the so called ‘monitors’. The smaller your room is, the more important it is to block as many of the corners off as possible because, as mentioned earlier, sound adds up. If you have some extra cash, spend it on the corners. For a little more money, you can get professional, foam sound absorbing elements, called ‘sound traps’ for your room. These are a lot more aesthetic and specially made in a triangular shape to perfectly fit in your corners.
3. FROM TOP TO BOTTOM
The floor is probably the easiest to deal with. Professional studios usually have custom made floors lifted off the ground with a wooden structure, filled up with a glue-like, runny rubber material that is specially moulded to the shape of the room to keep noises outside. However, for most of us who don’t want to buy endless supplies of PVA glue, it is down to our budget, as to how well we can keep noises from creeping through the floorboards. Invest in a thick rubber mat and throw it on the floor, then cover it with a trendy rug. Another option is to just stick with a very thick rug on top of a carpeted or wooden floor. Grandma’s Persian would be an excellent choice, but laminate flooring will do as well. When dealing with the ceiling, we run into physics
again. It is the parallel surfaces that cruelly tangle sound waves, making them crash into the floor opposite them and then alternate travelling from floor to ceiling. Ceilings also have the same corner bass-collector effect mentioned before. If the surface opposite isn’t completely parallel, then most of the bass-sounds are absorbed. If you have the choice of picking where to set up your home-studio, choose an attic room, where the ceilings aren’t straight. Professional studios have custom made false ceilings and sound traps hanging from the top corners of the room to stop deep frequencies from collecting. Dictionaries can’t be used here, so you might have no other choice but to buy the foam sound traps and hang them from the ceiling.
4.MAKE THE WALLS FOAM This is the point when you should get your Facebook community to start saving egg cartons f o r y o u r home studio walls. No, seriously. Treating the walls of your bedroom can make or break the quality of your final mix. Unlike the corners, the walls are reflecting higher and mid-range frequencies, which create a clanging-bonging noise on your recording. Geeks, these are the frequencies between 500Hz and 4kHz. The wall opposite your monitor speakers reflects the most sound back into your ears and as you turn up the levels this effect gets stronger and stronger. Before we get into further detail, let me clarify. No, you can’t avoid listening to music without headphones when you
are mixing. It is very important not to plug in, in order to hear the full depth of sound within a room’s acoustics. The more texture your bedroom walls have, the better everything will sound. To create an ideal acoustic background on the back wall, you will need to make a random surface that diffuses sound. Professionals have custom made panels installed behind them. These are wooden cubes, cut into different lengths and glued onto a wooden panel. Some use large foam panels that reflect sound waves from a number of different angles. Thanks to Amazon, it is possible to get specially made acoustic foam mats, for a decent price. They come in a ridged or pyramid patterned form and they can be stuck to the walls behind and in front of you. You can also texturize your wardrobe doors with them Good news for booklovers; using bookshelves for the same purpose does an excellent job. Books are very dense in material and they all come in different width and length. Your Game of Thrones book collection might just come handy for sound recording as well.
of sheer love for composing. “I think this passion for writing music is what really led me into home production at first, along with a bit of an obsession with tones and equipment. When I started out, though, it was all trial and error – something that it still apparently in my recording sessions today, really. Not every microphone will suit a certain sound, and trying new stuff out is when you stumble upon some cool and unconven-
in various places. I was lucky to learn from some renowned and successful producers in the industry, and I’ve always been very grateful for all the help and guidance I’ve received along the way! Though there’s a great deal you can learn by doing it yourself, I stand by the belief that I really wouldn’t be where I am today without this help.” Yet dreamers, beware: landing your first job in a studio doesn’t mean all
“I started out as a musician in bands, writing and playing in tiny little pubs, lugging gear in and out of venue.” tional ways of working.” Since he knows that building a career in a competitive industry takes time and some luck, David recommends that aspiring producers try to find as much work experience in local studios as possible. Fitting that in with a schedule of home recording sessions may be tricky, and menial tea boy work may be off-putting at first – but it’ll be worth it. At
the sacrifices are over just yet. David warns us of a session he worked on in west London that ended up lasting six days rather than just one. “I didn’t have a change of clothes with me and I didn’t live nearby, so I had to buy new clothes and spend four night sleeping on the floor next to the drum kit we were tracking,” he recounts. No pain, no gain. The steep hill up the in-
DAVID LEIGHTON IN HIS STUDIO
least that’s what David tells us while he drinks his coffee in one of the many soundproofed rooms of his countryside studio. “I would happily work seven days a week for free in the hope that I would get the change to learn or assist on a session. Through persistent emailing and a bit of luck, I managed to land a few assistant roles
dustry ladder may not be as glamorous and smooth as it once sounded, but good things do come to those who wait. It will all pay off when you see your name printed on hundreds of different records through the country, and next to it, right there at its side, the pompous title you’ve only ever dreamed of: sound engineer.
THE WALLS The walls are notorious when it comes to reflecting sound. Make sure you stick some self-adhesive foam pads to them to diffuse the frequencies coming from the monitor speakers. We recommend Pro Acoustic Foam 12” Wedge Tiles for £23.
SOUND THE
THE CARPET If your bedroom studio is upstairs, you will need to block noise out from downstairs as much as possible. Have a look around for a vintage carpet at a car boot sale or invest in our favourite Ribbed Rubber Matting from floormat.co.uk starting at £36.
THE CEILING If you are adventurous stick some foam padding on the ceiling. But even if you like to play it safe, we recommend you to get some handy foam sound traps and place them in the corners above you. You can get a couple of Pro Acoustic Foam Bass Traps from Amazon for £40.
THE DOOR Sealing your door with an expanding rubber or foam strip is a cheap, yet effective solution to keep unwanted noises out while you are recording your jam. Our recommended brand is Maplin’s Double Sided 10m Foam Tape for £2.99.
OUT DETAILS
THE MASCOT Ask any professional sound engineer and they will tell you how they have something that they couldn’t do without. It’s a distinctive and treasured part of their studio. Our favourite is this cat, just because we loved it.
THE WINDOW To block as much sound out as possible, we strongly suggest going the DIY fiberglass padding route. However, blackout thermal curtains can do the job in a pinch. Check out Dunhelm Mill’s Thermal Curtain Linings, from £7.99, to add to your existing curtains.
THE CORNERS Buying a few cheap dictionaries will make you look more intelligent. Put the piles in the two corners next to your monitors to silence bass frequencies. If you have space for a bookshelf, stand it behind you to create a random surface that diffuses sound.
THE MONITORS It really matters how you place these babies. For the best quality of sound turn them towards your ears, so they create an equilateral triangle. If you can afford some speaker stands we recommend you to invest in a couple.