My Home "Studio" Build: Part 1 - The Room

This is the first in an occasional series about my efforts to create myself a little home studio for composing recording and mixing in a not particularly suitable room. This first part is about that troublesome room.

You can either read about it here, or if you prefer, watch the video below.

Series Overview

This series is aimed at people like me, seeking to carve out a little studio space in a family home where both space and cash are limited and extraneous noise is potentially a problem.

You should note I'm a strictly amateur musician / composer and this is certainly not claiming to be a professional quality build. If that's what you're looking for, you're in the wrong place!

I'm trying to document my progress and the problems I'm facing. There's nothing theoretical about this series - it's a real world example of how an unknowledgeable amateur goes about building a technically complicated project. What could possibly go wrong!

About The Room

I'm building my "studio" in a very small, approx. 2.5m square metre, room at the back of our bungalow.

It was made by an earlier owner who knocked through a corridor into an old coal house. Needless to say the estate agent over-egged it a bit by calling it a breakfast room - not that I've ever had breakfast in it! It was my office for a while when I worked from home.

The room has a few problems as a music studio space though:

  1. Its size and shape. An almost square room is not ideal for listening to music. Acoustic reflections can be problematic. The small size makes it hard to get the speakers sufficiently close to the wall, again giving acoustic reflection problems.

  2. One of the three doors into this little room leads to the utility room, which contains various noisy pieces of equipment: freezers, a tumble drier, a washing machine and a central heating boiler.

  3. Another door leads to the conservatory. This is subject to rain noise on the roof. There's also the obvious problem of extremes of heat and cold, with only a single glazed glass door and window separating the conservatory from the room.

  4. We've got a leak in the roof. A roofer failed to fix that last summer, so I need to wait for spring and the end of the Covid lockdown before I can get another roofer to fix it. I won't be able to put acoustic treatment near the leak until it's fixed.

  5. The old coal house roof is angled. Now I'm not sure if this is a problem or whether it will help with deflecting some acoustic reflections. Can anyone enlighten me?

Which leads to the question of why I'm using it, and even why I'm bothering.

Let's take the second of those questions first. I'm bothering because I've had nowhere to leave my gear set up and so I had to set up and take down everything each time I used it. As a consequence I never bothered to get any monitor speakers and have had to mix on headphones for the last five years. It's not satisfactory at all. Finding a home for my gear and adding speakers is something I've wanted to do for a while.

Well, if I'm going to find a permanent space, it has to be this one. That's simply because it's the only space available in our bijou bungalow. I know it'll never be ideal, but it's a case of take it or leave it. So I'm going to make the best of it I can. And, because this is simply a hobby I won't be throwing masses of cash at the problem either.

Ideally, I'd like to use the room for:

  • Composing electronic music "in the box"
  • Recording acoustic guitar and vocals
  • Mixing

Given the potential noise problems, I have doubts about how useful the room will be for recording with microphones, so realistically I think the room will mainly be used for composing and mixing.

Coming up

In forthcoming episodes I'm planning to discuss my audio equipment and tackle the thorny and baffling topic of acoustic treatment - that'll be interesting!

But coming up next is likely to be a EDIT: The next instalment is a review of how I got on building and using this flat-pack studio desk that I imported from Thomann in Germany:

EDIT: Following that, there's a post about my audio gear

If you've got any advice other than "it'll never work" I'd be more than happy if you'd scribble something in the comments.

Video Credits

Thanks to Amin Asbaghipour, Dmitry Demidov & Eva Elijas for some free-to-use photos I downloaded from Pexels.com.

BTW, the music in the video is mine - so no copyright strikes from YouTube to worry about :-)

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