Using the opinions of others to help make faster and better decisions.
Part 6 —Designing and building a DIY home recording studio
It Takes a Village
Building a studio from the ground up requires a lot of critical structural design decisions which I haven’t personally had to make before. Because these choices will affect both the sound quality and aesthetics of my new room I’m wanting to avoid making any newbie mistakes, so I’ve spent the past several weeks reaching out to friends who have already been down this road before. I know I can’t avoid all issues, but if making a few phone calls can help me avoid most of them then I need to be spending time contacting individuals who now posses 20/20 hindsight from their own build. After finishing a project like this, most people have a list of key things they wish they would have done differently if they could do it all over again. This is very valuable information and exactly what I’m looking for.
Several years ago as my wife and I were preparing to finish our basement, some good friends — who had just finished their basement — invited us over to see what they had done. They were in the business of flipping homes and it was cool to see some of the neat things they had decided to do to their basement. We were really excited about a couple specific things we saw and were even more excited when we found out just how little it would cost to include those ideas now as we built versus trying to add them later — which would be very difficult and cost prohibitive.
Because I’m building a surround sound room and will soon be expanding my 5.1 system to an 11.1 Dolby Atmos and Auro-3D system, there are several speaker placement and acoustic treatment considerations I need to address which go beyond a traditional stereo and even traditional 5.1 and 7.1 surround systems. Both Dolby ATMOS and Auro3D both have ceiling speakers that point down and provide height channel information. It’s pretty cool to hear a plane passing over head that actually passes over head, or hearing a helicopter hovering above. Beyond effects, they can also be used to help create a more immersive/spherical sound experience. I’m excited but I’ve already had several things come up in conversation that will help me avoid a few easily preventable mistakes now that I know what to watch out for. I’ll address the specifics of those along the way.
I really enjoy going to the Parade of Homes discovering the simple but really cool things that people have done to their homes that we could do in our own. Similarly, I love taking tours of recording studios for the same reasons. A lot of really smart people have spent a lot of time finding solutions that help make their workflow easier. If it is something that can help me and it’s something I can reasonably include, now is the time for me to be discovering those things! A very fast way of seeing a lot of ideas in a very short period of time is taking a few moments to image search variations of words. For me, combinations like recording studios or composer or composer studio etc produced great results that started kept me exploring for quite some time. Definitely faster than driving beyond the studios I’ve already taken time to tour locally.
Talking to the Right People
So, to begin the information collection process, my first conversations were with acousticians. I’ve already covered this so I won’t repeat that information here, other than to say speaking to acousticians was a critical first step, because if the studio structure isn’t designed in a way to allow the room to sound right, then really, why go through the expense and time building my own room?
Tim Leishman and Aaron Merrill both gave great ‘next steps’ advice and direction. Having spent many hours completing their assigned homework, I feel like I’m starting to have a pretty solid idea of what the shape and dimensions of the room need to be. Time to widen my view of things and make some phone calls.
My first call was to one of my all-time favorite recording engineers, Dan Carlisle. Dan has spent many years working on film, television, radio and album projects and having built his own beautiful surround studio from the ground up, he has a lot of experience for me to draw upon. It was really great to talk to Dan and he answered several questions which helped solidify several of my thoughts.
My second call was to Owen Peterson — who is actually in immediate the process of building a Dolby ATMOS room for himself. He is an Assistant Professor of Audio at our largest state university and has extensive experience in sound design and audio having worked for NBC, Nickelodeon, HGTV and more including composition for the video game industry working with the likes of EA Mobile. Because we will both be using our rooms in very similar ways I was excited to speak with him. I had not met Owen yet so I seized the opportunity to take him to lunch to figure out who he is and what he’s doing. Owen was very generous with his information which included a tour of the room he is building. He is doing some really cool things and it will be fun to compare notes with him from time to time along the way. Selfishly it’s great adding Owen as a tremendous resource in my network who lives just a short drive away.
For the past several years I’ve had an ongoing conversation with Josh Aker about pretty much every topic of sound you can imagine. Josh is an award winning composer who gained a lot of acclaim for his original scores for Infinity Blade among others. Josh’s studio represents an evolution of creating a space that allows for some fantastic creativity. Josh is one of the most ingenious creatives I’ve met and has a way of extracting sound from objects that he uses on his scores that kind of blows my mind. Most recently our conversations have hovered around studio desks and the need to have a workspace that allows equal use for both composing and mixing. Generally desks are designed to favor the composer or the engineer. That won’t work for me and it has become clear my only real solution is to once again build a custom desk. The desk I have now is great for a lot of things but has several shortfalls and was specifically built for the capabilities of my last room. Time for a new build. (I’ve already got several concept sketches in the works but more on that when I actually start working on building it).
Finally, I am also lucky to know Miles Fulwider. He chairs the music department and is the assistant professor of music technology at St Francis University in Indiana. Miles received his Masters in Music in music technology at New York University and has extensive post graduate studies and experience in all things surround sound and in ambisonic technologies. Miles has been a tremendous resource over the past several years in being able to offer opinion and advice in how to approach various aspects of putting a surround room together from a where-the-rubber-hits-the-road engineer’s perspective. Miles actually put a new studio together as well so this is all still fresh in his mind. As of late we are also talking about the ever elusive unicorn of that perfect studio desk that equally accommodates both music creation and sound recording/mixing. Miles is also a few steps ahead of me on researching monitoring systems for Dolby Atmos and Auro-3D. This is great because for the moment, I get to draft on his research. As soon as I finish my room I can pick up a little more weight on the research.
Bringing it all together
The advice from all these individuals as been fantastic and I’ve been able to boil it down to some common threads.
#1 Making the room sound right
No two rooms are the same, so no two rooms will behave the same. This means that making my room sound “good”/neutral will requires a lot of trial and error tuning after the room is built. But the more homework and planning I do now, the better chance I have of preventing the error side of the equation along the way.
#2 Good translation
Ultimately it becomes a question of whether my mixes will translate well to other real-world playback systems (or not), and how quickly I can get projects to the point where they do.
#3 Design the room around my specific needs
Why am I building this room? Am I building this for everyone else or am I making a room for me? The nature of the projects I’m involved in will dictate how I need to put this room together. Rather than building a traditional studio with the flexibility for me to accommodate a large variety of groups and individuals, 90% of the time it’s just going to be me in the room composing, and recording single instruments and voice effects, doing sound design and then mixing in surround. If I find I need larger space for something like tracking drums or larger ensembles like choir etc, I’ll simply go book a couple hours at Dan’s studio and then bring the recordings back to my room. As much as I would love to go full tilt on a “let’s be everything to everyone” studio, I’m am actually quite excited about creating a purpose specific room. this will definitely help improve my workflow and I’m sure in a pinch I could stretch the room to do larger things, but again, why, when I have such nice studios close by that specialize on those larger things.
In summary, speaking to a lot of people who have experience working in rooms like what I am building was a VERY good idea. I’ve quickly realized what the room ISN’T needing to be, which ultimately helps me define and more quickly set the parameters what the room IS needing to be. These conversations have directly impacted my studio design and I have a pretty clear idea now of what I want the room to be. This means I can guard against feature-creep by making sure every decision I make for the room stays inline with my core objectives. If anything falls outside of that it will get cut from the list.
