DIY Archives -

Are you tired of unwanted echoes and a less-than-ideal sound quality in your home recording studio? You don’t need a massive budget to improve the acoustics of your space. In this article, we’ll explore DIY acoustic treatment solutions that are not only effective but also easy on your wallet. Whether you’re a musician, podcaster, or voice-over artist, creating a better acoustic environment can significantly elevate the quality of your recordings. Let’s dive into the world of affordable acoustic treatment for home studio and transform your home studio into a sound haven.

Why Acoustic Treatment Matters

Before we get into the DIY solutions, let’s understand why acoustic treatment is essential for your home studio. When sound waves bounce off walls, floors, and ceilings, they create reflections that can muddy your audio recordings. These reflections lead to problems like echo, reverb, and standing waves, all of which can negatively impact the clarity and precision of your recordings.

Proper acoustic treatment helps you:

Reduce Echo: Echo can make your recordings sound unprofessional. Acoustic treatment absorbs sound waves, minimizing echo and creating a cleaner sound.
Enhance Clarity: Clear audio is essential, whether you’re recording vocals, instruments, or podcasts. Acoustic treatment helps reduce unwanted background noise, ensuring your recordings are crisp and articulate.
Achieve Professional Sound: With the right acoustic treatment, your home studio can rival professional recording spaces in terms of sound quality. This can be especially valuable if you’re producing music or content for clients.

Acoustic Treatment itself is a huge topic and often controversial discussed. There are good reasons for acoustic treatment and sometimes even good reasons against. At least for a recording situation acoustic treatment is very helpful to get clean recordings. The better the recordings are the easier it is to mix later on. It’s all about getting good sources. When it’s about mixing, acoustic treatment is often overrated. For sure at least some treatment at the first reflection points in your room helps but at his point it’s even more important to actually know your room. Listening to professional mastered and released music in your studio helps to learn and understand your room acoustics. You also should reference to other songs while mixing. To dive deeper: measuring software like “Sonarworks ID Reference” helps to understand your room even better what will finally lead to better mix decisions. Hit the following link that fits your location to learn more about Sonarworks:

Sonarworks US

Sonarworks EUR

Ask Audio Engineer Toby Schuetgens from Simple Life Studio to mix & master our song!

If you need your own tracks to be mixed or mastered, hit the button above and feel free to reach out.

DIY Acoustic Treatment Solutions

Now that you understand the importance of acoustic treatment, let’s explore some affordable and effective DIY solutions:

1. Acoustic Panels

Affordable acoustic panels for home studio

Acoustic panels are one of the most popular solutions for treating sound in home studios. You can create your own acoustic panels using materials like dense foam, mineral wool, or even old mattresses. These panels absorb sound waves, reducing reflections and echo in your room.

To create DIY acoustic panels:

Purchase the necessary materials from a local home improvement store.
Cut the material to the desired size and shape.
Wrap the material with acoustically transparent fabric, securing it tightly.
Mount the panels on your walls using brackets or adhesive.

2. Bass Traps

Budget-friendly bass traps for home studio

Bass traps specifically target low-frequency sound waves that can be challenging to control. To make DIY bass traps:

Use mineral wool or fiberglass insulation.
Shape it into triangular or cylindrical forms.
Wrap the traps with fabric and place them in corners where bass buildup is most significant.

3. Diffusers

DIY sound diffusers for home studio

Diffusers scatter sound waves, creating a more balanced acoustic environment. To create your own diffusers:

Build wooden frames with slats or irregular shapes.
Paint the frames to match your studio decor.
Mount them on your walls at different angles.

4. Bookshelves and Furniture

Using bookshelves for acoustic treatment

Don’t underestimate the impact of everyday objects on your studio’s acoustics. Bookshelves filled with books or other items can help break up sound reflections. Position them strategically in your room to reduce echo.

Conclusion

Improving the acoustics of your home recording studio doesn’t have to drain your bank account. With these affordable DIY acoustic treatment solutions, you can enhance your sound quality and create professional-grade recordings. Start by selecting the method that best suits your space and budget, and watch as your home studio transforms into a sound haven.

Remember, proper acoustic treatment is an investment in the quality of your audio productions. So, roll up your sleeves, get creative, and enjoy the improved sound in your home studio. Your listeners and clients will undoubtedly notice the difference.

By the way while talking about acoustic treatment, it can also be a part of your unique signature sound. You can also use room reflections in a creative way for example to create your own reverbs. Just place a crappy speaker in your bathroom and place a microphone in another corner of your bathroom. Then run your vocals through that speaker and pick up the room reflections with your mic. After that you can blend your own reverb to your mix in your DAW.

For more ideas for your own signature sound, hit the following link:

Free Signature Sound Cheat Sheet

Recent Articles:

From Novice to Pro: Navigating the World of Home Recording for Audio Engineers
Embarking on the journey of home recording brings both excitement and a wealth of opportunities. This comprehensive guide takes you from the very basics to mastering advanced techniques. Whether you’re a novice eager to learn or a seasoned engineer seeking to refine your skills, our aim is to empower you with knowledge and tools that propel you toward success in the world of home recording.

An independent or indie artist is an artist who publish his music on his own. An independent artist is so to say self-employed, an entrepreneur, in the music business who is doing, next to the whole music thing, the management and the marketing for example.

Modern music industry

These days it is as easy to publish music as it never was before. Everyone who has a computer with an internet connection can upload music to the common music streaming platforms at almost zero costs.

Also music production became way easier than let’s say 20 years ago. Modern technology makes it possible, that these huge recording studios are not absolutely necessary.

That’s why many artists start to record their music on their own in the rehearsal room for example. That makes record deals almost unnecessary.

These artists who publish their own music on their own are called independent artists or easily indie artists (has nothing necessarily to do with the genre). Because that is what they are: independent.

The complete business

But that also means they have to do everything else what’s around the music as well on their own.

They have to be the songwriters, the Instrumentalists and vocalists, the producers and often also the engineers.

But next to it they have to be managers, booking agents, artwork creatives, marketing experts and so on.

It´s not just writing songs, playing an instrument and to sing along. You have also to record the songs in a quality that is comfortable to listen to and carries the emotion of the song. Also you have to mix and arrange the song in a good structure, that fits the art on the one hand but also makes it possible to sell the song. After that you have to make it fit to streaming platforms or CD formats and to be sure it sounds the best it can on all different devices. Not to forget that old kitchen radio and modern bluetooth speakers.

But after that the job ain´t done. Actually the hard works starts right now. Because all the work isn´t it worth when nobody listens to the songs. So you have to make sure to get it heard. You have to make the artwork for the song, the video(s), you have to provide the platforms with the lyrics and additional informations. You have to send it to curators for playlists and radio stations and so on. You have to manage the library so that the older songs are not forgotten over the newer releases. You have to engage with the fans.

I think you can slowly imagine what´s all connected to it.

A lot of hard work

All together is really a lot of work. It needs a lot of organisation to get it all done and stay creative at the same time.

It can also cost a lot of money. Especially in the beginning. And also especially in the beginning the return on investment is, let’s say, unavailable.

Let’s talk numbers

You know what an artist gets per stream? It’s currently about 0,003 $ per stream, but only when you listen to at least 30 seconds of the song. That has changed the whole structure of modern music and release strategies. It’s necessary to keep the intros short and to enter the first chorus within these first 30 seconds. Also the whole songs are getting shorter as what they used to be before the streaming era. When a song is about 6 minutes long you get also 0.003 $ per stream. So when a song would only be 3 minutes long you could double the amount of return when two streams are counted in the same time.

So let’s say you need about 1,500 $ to make an average living. In streams it would be 500.000 streams. And to reach 500.000 streams on a monthly basis is really a lot of hard work. Especially when you think of that are about 60.000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify daily.

Everything has it’s pros and cons. It has never been easier to be an independent artist but to make a living out of it seems to be more difficult than it has ever been before. That’s why signing a contract on a huge label definitely has it’s right to exist.

What you can do to support your favorite independent artist

Software driven platforms

It’s all about the algorithms. Not only social media but streaming platforms as well are algorithm driven. All these platforms make a living of their users. So they will keep you on their platform as long as possible. To achieve this, it is necessary that you are given the content you are really interested in. And that is where the algorithms comes in. The software analysis you as the customer and the content to find the best next fit.

But the algorithms can not work without proper data. And that is where you come in turn. Because of there is not data available for new artists and new music. But you can help to gain that data without any costs.

What you can do for free

Hit the like buttons on the songs you like, share them with your friends and family and also in your own playlists. Feed the algorithms with proper data so that it can come to work and suggest the new songs to others listener that might like the music to gain streams.

It’s also important to make connections. Add new songs together with other artists that fit together in your playlist. Also cross over to social media, like and comment posts. A huge impact would be when you name artists together. For example in a story “hey I found this great track from artist a. It sounds a little similar to this track from artist b”. You know what I mean?

Follow your artists on their social media accounts and even better join their email lists because it also helps a lot to stay in tune on upcoming releases. It’s important how many streams and songs gets especially in the first hours. If there are enough streams in a short period of time the algorithms notice that and become aware of what is happening with this special song.

So it’s up to you to support your favorite artists and help them out to keep up with making and publishing new music. They don’t have these huge marketing budgets to buy into the proper data for the algorithms or drive huge campaigns on their releases. They are reliant on you, on their fans.

Talking for myself as being an independent artist as well: thank you very much for your support so far. You all make it possible for me to do what I love to do! Can´t say it often enough: Thank you 🙂

Tag: DIY

DIY Acoustic Treatment: Budget-Friendly Solutions for Better Home Studio Sound