5 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up Your Home Recording Studio

For many professional and budding musicians, having a recording studio in their home is a project worth investing in and working on. When you have a properly set-up room, you won’t have to spend a fortune renting one from whenever you need to record your rehearsals or actual tracks.

Additionally, it is the perfect area to store your musical instruments and other pieces of equipment you use for practicing and creating your pieces.

Setting Up Your Home Recording Studio

Having the right studio and recording equipment is a good start when taking on this project. When you have all the essentials at hand, you will always create and record excellent music. All the tracks you capture will sound great as well; they may come out having the same quality as the ones you get when you rent a professionally set-up room.

However, to create the ideal home recording studio, you need to avoid making certain mistakes in equipping and setting it up. If you don’t plan this room well, all the time and money you put into this project will go to waste.

Below are the top five mistakes you may make when setting up your home recording studio and tips for avoiding them:

Not considering your home recording studio as a workspace

Although you are setting up a recording station in your house, it doesn’t mean you should furnish it lightly or equip it insufficiently. Additionally, it doesn’t mean you should turn it into an extra entertainment area in your home.

To have a recording station that you can use anytime, you have to think of this space as your future personal workplace. By doing so, you will go about the process of designing it methodically. As a result, you will be sure you will have the perfect room that meets the goals you have for this area.

Additionally, with the right mindset, you will be sure you won’t skip out on any important planning steps and have all the equipment and fixtures ideal for your recording needs.

Moreover, envisioning your personal recording station as your official workspace at home has a psychological effect; whenever you are in this room, you will always be more productive. You will also have an easier time letting your creative juices flow.

Insufficient acoustic treatment

Recording studio rentals have high ceilings, elevated floors, and other features that were designed and incorporated into the room to ensure they are the perfect acoustic rooms for musicians and record producers.

If you are transforming a spare bedroom or adding partitions in your living room to create your personal recording studio, you will have a hard time getting the same design and features. However, this doesn’t mean you won’t be able to create and record professional-sounding tracks in this area once it is completed.

The key is to use the right acoustic treatments in your personal recording room. These include rock wool, mineral wool, and fiberglass.

To install them correctly, place bass traps in the upper corners of your room behind the area where you will place your desk. Continue adding them in all eight edges of the ceiling and the floor so that the brass frequencies won’t be trapped in these spots, which will affect the quality of the sound being recorded.

Additionally, identify and cover the reflection points in the room with acoustic treatment. These areas usually cause acoustical issues such as flutter echo and comb filtering.

Lastly, for best results, make sure the wall behind you and the monitors are covered with acoustic treatment. Place a studio rug to cover reflections on the floor as well.

Incorrect placement of monitors

Placing the monitors in the wrong areas of the room can lead to poorer quality of sound. Because of this, you need to know where to set them up.

Avoid putting the monitors against the wall and in the corners of your room. These areas are reflective surfaces that can cause sounds to bounce back. This results in smeared, poor quality acoustics.

To get the best sounds, place the speakers a few feet from the back wall, with a distance of at least a third of the total length of the room.

If you are placing monitors on a desk, put isolation pads underneath them. By doing so, you will prevent the table from vibrating when the speakers emit sound. You will minimize unwanted noise, too.

For better sounds, it would be best to use separate speaker stands for monitors instead of placing them on your desks.

Using TS instead of TRS Cables

TS or tip/stem cables are used for mono and unbalanced signals. They are the usual provisions that connect an electric guitar or keyboard to an amplifier, mixer, or DI box.

TRS or tip, ring, and sleeve cables are designed for balanced, mono, and stereo signals. They are used to connect stereo and mono balanced line input to their corresponding output sockets.

TS cables are less expensive than TRS ones. Because of this, you may be tempted to use them in your home recording studio.

However, if you use TS cables to connect your monitors since they are designed for unbalanced signals, they could cause interference that will make your monitors emit hissing and humming sounds. This is an issue that you won’t likely encounter when you use TSR cables.

Inadequate furnishings

Lastly, although you may want to spend more on the equipment and other features to help you create great music in your personal recording studio, you also need to set a budget for furnishing it.

If your studio lacks furnishing, you will hear more vibration, something that won’t do anything good to your tracks.

To find out if the room needs more furnishing, clap your hands. If you hear an echo right after clapping, you need to add a few more soft features such as curtains, pillows, or even carpets that can help saturate their reverberations and reduce these sounds.

When you take note of these mistakes and avoid making them, there won’t be any reason for you not to have a home recording studio that you can use for producing great music.