Transform Your BEDROOM Into a STUDIO (On a BUDGET) | ADAM Audio & Westlake Pro

hey guys I meters without audio and today we're going to show you how to transform your bedroom into a functioning studio so we're here today joined by Mark Ellis of West Lake pro here at Nashville learned if you wanna get a little rundown of what you do it what's the problem what's the produce yeah so West Lake pros started by Tom Hitler in 1969 and on the west coast built some of the foremost and well-known studios in the country including here in Nashville we've been doing it ever since then non-stop and we were still doing full studio design build outs implementation all the way down to just selling just a cable if you need it and obviously this is not an ideal room yeah a low ceiling this new windows basically a square so I mean what is one of the first thing they look for when you come into a space like this that's far from ideal and how can you kind of combat some of the issues well obviously ideally you'd want much bigger room than this you'd want multiple different surfaces you know this room is about 13 1/2 feet so you know low-end will obviously be a problem in here so one of the things that we can help you know help with that is obviously acoustic treatment play the speaker placement desk placement as well as you know just trying to find where you can find the sweet spot that's gonna you know have your mixes translate well outside of just your room like I said this is basically a square room and if you could tell it kind of why is that an issue in a studio space from the get-go well with squares they're obviously four parallel surfaces actually six and what happens then is you have waveforms of bounce off of the surfaces and just continue to go until you know they either collide with each other or they just keep bouncing depending on how well the frequency is ideally you'd want to be able to have a room could complete the waveform now you don't want like 100 by a hundred foot room you know that's not going to create the ideal sound what you'd want is something that would control the sound so ideally you'd want something that can be more of closer to like a rectangle but with no parallel services whatsoever across the board so a little bit longer so those waveforms can actually complete their cycle and so when you're looking for where to place the desk is there a rule of thumb now there's the rule of thirds there's a 38% rule what do you go by with our you know design that we generally do the third 38% into the room is ideally what we would want you know some rooms you don't have that luxury if it's a square you're basically in the middle of the room and you know that's not necessarily optimal but you want to play with getting enough off of the wall so that your speaker's aren't creating you know bass build-up but also being able to be as far away from the back wall so that the waveforms specifically the low frequencies can actually complete their cycle or don't create you know any comb filtering you know right where you're sitting you want to find that optimal spot where it's a nice balance of each from our very intense measurements we calculated the sweet spot would be about a four and a third feet into the room so that's where we're going to set it up all right so we'll go around the desk and I'll bring it up here and yeah sounds good put in the right spot kind of this nice echo chamber down here [Music] all right so now we are measuring the listening position to four and a third feet off of the front wall this looks like the desk oh go that way it touch so we've got a desk centered width wise and four and a third roughly off the back wall and now I guess for two acoustic treatment in a space like this where would you start as far as acoustically treating it in an apartment space where you're renting you can't believe it on the walls so how can you come back though obviously the window presents a little bit of an issue there it's the most reflective surface you can get obviously low end buildup in your corners it's common and and something you need to combat for the biggest thing with that is mass fortunately you know in an apartment room like this there's only so much you can do so you want to make sure that you have something in the quarters behind your speakers and your listening rooms that there's mass there's that you don't create you know low-end build up from your speakers as well as the back corners for the for the same situation so here we have these panels we're gonna hang in the corners to kind of help with base management yeah so these are orlick's they're a standard base treatment you know these will help with the low in frequency as much as I can ideally even want to have significantly more mass than this but for a budget situation this will you know combat you know minor you know instances of low in frequency build Oh [Music] so we have the bass traps in the corners up and so the second step is to get absorption behind the speaker's right correct so now we've got the front absorption up it's already starting to make a difference in the room as we can both tell and now before we do the mirror test we're going to kind of decide on what speakers to put in the room you know for this size of a room you start to get into trouble probably more than like a six and a half inch driver anything bigger than that the room can't produce the frequency you know properly anyways it can't complete its cycle so why hurt yourself more by having a bigger speaker it's like you know maybe you can afford a bigger speaker you want a bigger speakers but that might not be the smartest idea for you and so we have the 5 inch T 5 V here do you think that's a good fit for this size of room I think that you know based on its wattage and the size of the speaker and everything would be maybe a good size speaker for this room I would recommend is some headphones for some of those lower end frequencies that you're trying to hear if you're if you think you're having trouble with you know the bass and the kick meshing together or just low end in general for the entire track I'd recommend some headphones to to supplement your speakers so before we put up the monitors we have a couple of different types of stands here and I think this is something that's looked over quite a bit how important they are in the studio so could you kind of talk about the importance of having a solid stand with good isolation versus having something with very little isolation ideally you would want to have as much mass in the stand itself as possible to avoid any sort of vibrations or rumbling that the that the speaker being on it as on its own can create you want to have as much decoupling from the floor as possible that way that nothing you know vibrations from there can transfer through and just create as little distortion as possible with your stand there's even apps that measure vibration if you wanted to get crazy with it to actually figure out you know is it's making a difference is it not and I promise you from the tests that we've done more mass and decoupling and and all that on your stand itself does matter it does make a difference and for a setup like this when it comes to stands versus essentially desk isolation what do you suggest in this scenario ideally you want it off of your off your desk off your meter bridge because that's just creating more surfaces for it to reflect off of number one as well as creating coupling effects of the base all of a sudden it's it's creating a low end that is not actually there it's fabricated and it's making up here like it's there get the cup when you get a tighter base sound all of a sudden you can hear the proper decay you can hear you know proper attack of the low end and it just helps just immensely overall so now that we have the monitors on the stance how do you go about kind of positioning them you have the stereo triangle but how exactly you measure that and what is the benefit of putting them in a perfect triangle with the listening position ideally you want to have a perfect you know everything equal distance from each other in most studios you would be a little bit higher up in terms of the stand that way you're getting less reflection off of the desk ideally we want a little bit of an angle so they are pointing at us as opposed to shooting behind us and for these you know you want about a 65 inch separation between each Twitter tweeter and then from tweeter to mix position in this room we don't have that luxury because that would basically be like you know up to the bass traps so we're gonna try to bring that in a little bit and make that a little bit more compact but maintain stereo imaging you don't want them too close because then it just sounds like one picture in front of you just a mono sound you don't want them to why because then it sounds like there's nothing in the middle so it's just finding that finding that balance so now we're going to do the mirror trick which is a simple way of finding out where to put absorption in your room basically you run the mirror from the front to the back and you have a friend sitting in the sweet spot and whenever they see a speaker in the mirror you put absorption right there so as we go around the room sort of treating all the quarters and all the walls one of the biggest things that's an issue in this room is the window glass is the most reflective surface that you can have in a studio it presents itself with the most problems most reflections so the you know the ideal situation would be to not have them but we don't own this building so we have to make do with what we got so today we're using the aura lights panels but what's another option that might work for treating a window in a space like this you'd want to get as dense in a thick of curtains as you could get you know most studios will get theater curtains it would minimize some of those reflections that you were getting from the windows behind them so we've installed the base straps and we've put up the paneling on the front and side walls but one thing we haven't gotten to yet is the ceilings and so we've installed a single cloud right now but if you can kind of give a little bit of light on to why clouds are important in the studio and how they relate to the other absorption in the room so generally in any either professional situation home studio you're gonna have some sort of desk surface in front of the speakers it's gonna inherently cause reflections off of that which then bounce off the ceiling generally creating a null point in the low mid section very important and prominent section when mixing and listing a sound you know to combat that what you would do is you would put in our situation absorption on the ceiling since we have such a tight space and what that would do is that would just help to stop some of the waves that are bouncing and reflecting off of that so now that we have the base traps in the corners the other absorption on the ceiling in the walls we have this back wall left how do you see us you know combating some of the issues that a closet might cause in the back you know the ideal situation would be having a longer room something that can actually complete the cycle of the low frequencies generally they're not so deep so you would have a few which would then break up the sound and disperse it into its a you know the appropriate areas that would make it sound like a complete sound and your mixed position in with this closet as it is you know the low frequencies would go through it and just end up kind of living in there and it would sound really bassy and cool in there but not acoustically correct another situation would be if you were to use the compression theory and just packing as much mass and compression and absorption into the room as possible to just basically just have the low in frequencies just die out into the absorption there's one more piece of furniture that you always see in the back of a room in the studio and it's a couch and what does a couch do for a studio space not only a vibe but sonically what can it do obviously for vibe it just makes clients feel more welcomed at home relaxing obviously for our situation it's ideal because we're going with the compression theory and we want a lot of absorption it's a very dense thick you know absorbent material so that would benefit us for how we're putting this together right now [Music] so now that we've got the room further well treat it for the bedroom that it is we can kind of start talking about a little bit of the gear that we're going to use in the studio so interphase is the central hub of your studio it's the thing that you know produces a sound and replicates the sound it's the instrument that is taking the picture of whatever source you're putting in front of it you want that to be the clearest picture that you can possibly get you know an awesome microphone you know $4,000 microphone is only as good as the interface that's taking the picture of it so those interacting with each other make you know a good sounding source however you also mean to be able to hear it correctly doesn't matter if you know your speakers are lower quality or you know the conversion of the dita a are a little bit blurry once again you know so you want to make sure that those are clear as well so the combination of those make it so that you're recording a good sound source but that you're actually also hearing it correctly as well you need to be able to hear it correctly and that's where the interface becomes the central hub [Music] when talking about a studio space like this it's super small super compact and you're gonna be mainly doing vocals max and mixing what makes a good microphone for that scenario well you want something that's going to be unidirectional that's not going to have to not gonna pick up a lot of the sound around it generally that's going to be a dynamic microphone like the sm7b or if you know you want to go up a little bit and get a large diaphragm that's gonna be cardioid pattern then you know that'll that'll benefit as well you know the the cardioid large diaphragm is going to pick up more detail it's quicker so it's gonna pick up more room noise the sm7b is a great choice for 400 bucks it's it's a unidirectional it's a very tight sound it's very classic sound a lot of people are familiar with it so we're talking a little bit earlier about headphones and how important that is for checking low end especially in room that's not well treated but there are other uses for headphones when you're tracking vocals and things and if you can speak a little bit to the importance of having quality headphones in your studio so yeah obviously you want to be able to check the low-end need something to you know replicate the low-end from what you can't get out of your speaker's in a room of this size if you're tracking and listening back in the same room good set of headphones can make them feel relaxed make them feel at ease and present a good performance potentially so the final thing after gear is the vibe of the studio which is arguably the most important it's really what facilitates the creativity and makes the artist and the engineer feel really comfortable and what are some ways that you can think of that add a little vibe to the studio space I mean obviously a lava lamp you know just like little things that make it feel homely make it feel at ease make it feel like you're not doing work you want to make it so that the client is just relaxed and can take a deep breath and they don't feel like they're you know being watched and being critiqued especially when they're singing and as for you know just listening back and relaxing on the couch you know you just want to have snacks and beverages and just you just hospitality you just want them to feel as relaxed as possible so they can provide the best performance possible all right I think that just about does it for our studio build in a basic bedroom thank you again Mark for assisting us and kind of constructing it and building it out where can we find out more about Westlake Pro yes we have a location in Burbank California right and all around the Hollywood studios and we have a location in Berry Hill right in the heart of Nashville or over 9:00 to 6:00 Monday through Friday come see us we would love to help with any of your studio needs [Music] you know when speakers are maybe their sound coming out and rephrase that that's horrible so obviously for yourself mixing Evan so obviously for yourself mixing and here [Music] big array

Channel: ADAM Audio

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Keywords: home studio, home studio setup, home studio setup for beginners, home studio tour, bedroom studio setup, studio monitors, adam audio, adam audio t7v, home studio build, bedroom home studio, home recording studio, adam audio t5v, adam audio t8v, adam audio a7x, acoustic treatment, studio treatment, studio tour, home recording, mixing, how to, affordable, recording studio, studio build, studio setup, setting up home studio, 2020, focusrite, music production, producer, budget

Id: O4NIA7EHxYk

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020