How To Build A Professional Home Recording Studio

Have you wanted to improve the quality of your home recording studio, but haven't been sure how? 

Most beginners will throw up some foam and maybe some bass traps and call it a day. But a whole lot more goes into building a professional-quality recording studio than that. 

Yeah, that's a mouthful. Let's break it down...

What Is Needed For a Home Studio?

What is needed for a home studio really depends on your budget, and how serious you are about making professional-quality productions. 

I wanted to learn what it took to make a professional-quality studio, so I decided to visit my friend, Anthony Iannucci, a master when it comes to audio engineering and production, and also the owner of a commercial recording studio, Unity Gain in Fort Myers, Florida. 

But before I dive into what it takes to make a professional studio, let me quickly cover the bare bones of what is needed to get started recording and producing music from home.  

What Is Needed For A Beginner Studio? 

The beginner studio really isn't a studio at all, but just the necessary tools to record music. 

I cover how to build a beginner studio for under $350 in my article below. 

But in a nutshell, the beginner studio needs:

What Is Needed For A Professional Home Studio?

Like I said above, I wanted to learn from an expert, so I stopped by Unity Gain Recording Studio to ask Anthony about how one should go about building a home recording studio. 

He pointed out to me 5 key steps, which I'll cover below: 

1. Soundproof your room as necessary

You don't need a completely soundproof room, but you do need to consider this as your first step. 

If you're in an apartment or an area where there are sound ordinances, or neighbors who could complain about the sound level, then you need to make sure you do some soundproofing. 

Basic Soundproofing Strategies

If soundproofing isn't a major concern for you, then you can just take some basic measures by strengthening the weakest points in your room (windows and door ways). 

Windows and door ways are going to be the areas that allow the most sound leakage.

Doors

Doors are weak points because of the gaps they leave between the bottom of the door and the floor, and all around the sides of the door. 

You can seal these gaps up with some adhesive foam strips. 

Windows

Windows are are weak points because glass allows sound to both pass through and bounce off quite easily. 

Lower frequencies are going to pass through, and high frequencies are going to bounce off back into the room. 

You can temporarily seal windows by cutting out a block of foam and fitting over the window. 

2. Acquire The Necessary Equipment

3. Cover Your Basic Electrical Needs

Anthony suggests having all of your studio equipment run on it's own separate electrical circuit from the rest of the house. 

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty advanced, and difficult to achieve.

But what you can, and definitely SHOULD do, is get a surge protector and backup battery for your computer and equipment. 

This is vital, not only for ensuring you don't lose your progress if you lose power in the middle of production, but also to prevent your equipment or computer from getting damaged or destroyed. 

I use a CyberPower 450va, and it's saved me numerous times. 

4. Acoustically Treat Your Room to make it as "balanced" as possible

Second, you want your room to generate as even a response at all frequency ranges as possible.

You don't want your room to be losing bass so that you over compensate and add too much bass to your mix. 

Or, you don't want your room to be adding too much treble so that you cut too much, leaving your mix dull and life-less. 

Your room impacts what you hear, and therefore, your mixing decisions.

If you have a poorly treated room, then you're going to run into the problem Anthony ruefully describes above...your mixes will sound like trash outside of your room. 

This is where acoustic treatment comes in.

What Is Acoustic Treatment?

You want to acoustically treat your room so that "what you hear is what you get". In other words, when you make mixing decisions, you want them to be accurate ones. 

There are three elements to acoustic treatment: Reflection, Absorption, and Transmission.

Reflection

Reflections are sounds that bounce off of surfaces in your room and are sent back into the room. 

These are going to be your higher frequency sounds. You can think of them like a bouncy ball. When you throw it against the wall, it immediately starts bouncing all over the place. 

You don't want a lot of sounds bouncing around, so you'll want to use absorptive materials to eliminate reflections. 

Absorption

This is when sound waves are actually absorbed by a surface. Mid range sounds will absorb more easily.

Think of them like a deflated volley ball. When you throw it at the wall, most of the energy is absorbed by the wall, and the ball just flops to the ground. 

Therefore, you don't want TOO much absorption. You still want there to be some "life" in the room. 

Transmission

This is when sound waves actually travel all the way through a surface. 

This is going to be your bass sounds. You've heard this frequently if you've ever heard music playing when walking by a building, or when someone pulls up to you at a stop light. 

You hear the music, but really only the bass section. 

This is because low frequency sounds are like a bowling ball. You throw that at the wall, and it's just going to punch right through. 

Like Anthony says, bass is going to one of the hardest things to manage. 

So you're going to want to put serious consideration toward how you can absorb bass, and prevent transmission loss. 

But just how do you do that?

The key is creating a "room within a room". 

Sound needs a "medium" to exist. Sound has to travel through something in order for us to hear it. It's why there is no sound in space, because space is a vacuum. 

Vibration is what conducts sound. So when sound hits the walls of your room, it's going to cause vibrations which then travel through the wall to the room. 

It's why if you want to hear what someone is saying in the other room, you'll put your ear up to the wall. You may even use a cup to help collect more of those vibrations in order to funnel them to your ear. 

So by building a room within a room, and placing some air between your interior walls and the exterior, you are going to help to absorb a lot of that sound energy.

Air is less dense than any other type of substance you would use, and that's why it's actually the best insulator for sound.

How To Create A "Room Within A Room"

This is a very complex process, and one I'll have to cover more in depth after I go through the process myself. 

However, it involves building your own floor, walls, and ceiling inside the room. A key to this is also making sure no two surfaces in the room are parallel to each other to prevent standing waves which cause sounds to cancel each other out. 

What Are the best materials for absorbing sound? 

You can determine which are the best materials for absorbing sound by looking at their NRC. 

The higher the number, the better the material is at absorption. 

So what are the absorption coefficients for various materials? 

Anthony Iannucci did some research and came up with the following table of coefficient ratings at various frequency ranges.

Absorption Coefficients for Various Materials:

Keep In Mind How Sound Will Travel In Your Room

How sound will travel in your room will determine where you put your acoustic treatment. 

Draw an imaginary line, or use a laser pointer, from your speakers to where the sound will hit on the walls of your room in order to determine where you should put some absorption. 

5. Evaluate Your Room With Pink Noise

Finally, you can evaluate your room with a pink noise generator.

IKMultimedia has a great program called the ARC System 3 that can help you do this. 

It gives you an ultra-accurate measurement microphone, analysis software, and a correction plug-in to improve the accuracy of your monitoring in any room. 

With this system, you can actually measure the frequency response of your room, and see how your room is impacting what you hear. You can see if you are losing bass, or have too much high end, and then correct it. 

Conclusion: 

Obviously, creating a professional recording studio is a GIANT undertaking. 

But I think Anthony gives some great advice in that you should try and build your studio progressively. 

Make wise investments, and don't buy things that you'll just have replace later.

Start out with some basic soundproofing, get the necessary equipment you need, and then protect it with a surge protector. 

From there, start to do some acoustic treatment, keeping in mind how sound will be traveling in your space. 

Finish More Songs, Faster

Once you get your studio how you like it given your current funds/resources, it's time to make some music!

If you want to finish more radio-ready songs, and complete them faster without having to spend months or even weeks on end working on the same songs over and over, not even knowing if you're making them any better...

Then grab my free Rapid Song-Finishing Checklist below.

You'll discover a proven step-by-step system for completing professional-sounding songs. 

This will be especially beneficial if you find yourself working on songs for hours on end only to look back and wonder if you actually made your track any better. 

I hope you got value from this post on, How To Build A Professional Home Recording Studio, helpful!

If so, feel free to share it, and let me know in the comments below...

What Questions Do You Have About Building A Home Studio?