Steemit! Long time no see! My last post has been already five months ago. Somehow I got distracted by buying a house and moving and so on… But now we’re all good and I want to share the process of setting up my small recording homestudio in our basement. In our old apartment, my studio had to give way to our daughter’s room, so the next logical step was to look for a house with a basement to build my mancave 😉
The philosophy I was following for the room is basically the concept of live end vs dead end: I wanted a room where I can track instruments (mostly acoustic and electric guitars) and vocals but also do some mixing and mastering. So on the one hand for the recording, you need a room that is not completely muffled (“dead”) but retains some “acoustic support” and sounds alive. Whereas on the other hand, for mixing and mastering, the room should be pretty dead! Sounds schizophrenic, doesn’t it?
I found this pretty good article that explains the whole live end - dead end strategy:
https://www.neumann.com/homestudio/en/how-to-improve-the-room-acoustics-in-your-home-studio
So I decided to simply split the room into two areas: one for producing (dead end) and one for recording (live end)
But first: new paint and new floor:
For the acoustic treatment of the dead end, I decided to build broadband absorbers myself instead of buying them. There are tons of how-to’s on the web and I was basically following these instructions:
https://www.bonedo.de/artikel/einzelansicht/raumakustik-workshop-no3-breitbandabsorber-aus-ikea-regal.html
So I bought two IKEA Billy shelves on Ebay for 20 Euros, went to several DIY superstores for the other materials and started. After some evenings of constructing and cursing (my wife recommended to do clips of the construction fails itself – I would be a Youtube click-millionaire by now), the two absorbers where ready:
IKEA Billy Absorber – fun (?) for the whole family
Being a very impatient guy, I decided to simply buy bass traps for the corners and not build them myself:
https://hofa-akustik.de/module/basstrap/
As these guys are quite expensive, I only bought three and filled up the other corners with stuff that also does the trick (like old speakers etc.).
Now the cool part started: setting up the desk and the monitors, putting the guitars on the walls and doing some decoration (I found my old Masters of the Universe toys at my parents place and I guess step by step they will find their way into the studio…)
Skeletor approves!
Of course this is not a high-end professional recording studio but it absolutely fits my needs: being a place to find inspiration, channeling my creativity and recording and producing my music in an awesome sounding quality. And that is what the idea of a homestudio is all about. Now the only thing that is missing is a name...
Thanks for reading!
http://michaeldietrich.org/
http://www.deadmansboogie.com/