So, what about Acoustic Treatment? | #studio

Let’s be honest: if you have a small studio, or a home studio, chances are that you don’t have a proper acoustic treatment. You may think you have, but it’s probably not true. Why? Because the majority of us doesn’t know what we’re doing.

And that’s a huge problem! It doesn’t matter if you have a great audio interface (with state of art DA converters), and amazing flat sounding monitors. If this is all in a room that colors your sound, what you’re hearing is not what you’re doing. So, in the end, many of our mixing and designing problems are not related to our capacity of doing a good work, but mainly to our crapy sounding room and its capacity of tricking us into thinking that we need to change something that already sounds good.

That’s why I’m here today to share some stuff that will help you make your room sound much, much better.

First, a book that can help you build / redesign your studio. Called How to Build a Small Budget Recording Studio From Scratch (written by F. Alton Everest and Mike Shea – I have the third edition), it presents 12 tested studio designs (classified by their different uses), and all the examples an theory you need to build a good workplace: acoustic equations and materials, sound lock acoustical treatments, wall constructions, reverberation time, etc etc etc. It’s a really complete book, that has a lot a practical tips without leaving some theory behind.

But, if you don’t wanna getting so deep into the subject (although I think you should), or doesn’t have the budget or place to do a complete build / redesign, you still can improve your studio with some more “simple” acoustical adjustments.

And, for this, here are some links where you can find some really useful tips:

• Acoustic Treatment – What Are We All Doing? – article by ProTools Expert blog (written by Dan Cooper). It’s very straight forward, and talks about acoustic treatment kits that you can buy, and room correction softwares.
• The Studio SOS Guide To Monitoring & Acoustic Treatment – article by SOS (Sound on Sound) Magazine. Although a little old (written in 2006), really helpful because talks about monitoring and equipment placement, room modes, what is an effective or ineffective absorber, etc.
• Acoustic Treatment 101: Getting Your Room to Sound Great – a series of articles by E-Home Recording Studio blog, where there’s a bit of information about it all: bass traps, acoustic panels, reflections filters, diffusers, monitor stands, monitor placements, etc.

Well, that’s it! Hope this all can help! Now, it’s up to you 😀

Mauricio Ruiz – www.mauricioruiz.me