Blog, Electronics, Recording Studio
Soundproofing your home studio – In an affordable way
Soundproofing is any means of reducing the sound pressure with respect to a specified sound source and receptor. There are several basic approaches to reducing sound: increasing the distance between source and receiver, using noise barriers to reflect or absorb the energy of the sound waves, using damping structures such as sound baffles, or using active antinoise sound generators. Two distinct soundproofing problems may need to be considered when designing acoustic treatments – to improve the sound within a room and reduce sound leakage to/from adjacent rooms or outdoors. Acoustic quieting, noise mitigation, and noise control can be used to limit unwanted noise. Soundproofing can suppress unwanted indirect sound waves such as reflections that cause echoes and resonances that cause reverberation. Soundproofing can reduce the transmission of unwanted direct sound waves from the source to an involuntary listener through the use of distance and intervening objects in the sound path. The first most important thing after reading the above, we all think – How much is it going to cost us? Well, as a matter of fact, as i told you we are discussing how to do soundproofing for your home studio in an affordable way. By all means, we will try to keep the cost down as much as possible. As you have gone through my other tutorials on setting up your own home studio; over here i would like you to take the most important aspects on selecting, organizing and implying the necessary to achieve what we are here for. I will guide you step by step and you will in no time will be up on your feet setting up your own studio. Materials required
- Curtains – We will start looking at our room first. Do you have a window in your room? if you don’t, it’s fine and if you do, definitely you must have covered it with curtains. If your curtains are thin, i would suggest you to have it changed. Go to a local market and buy any cloth which, you will find thick enough that it will not allow light to pass through your window. Remember the more thicker / heavier cloth (much better), as heavy materials absorbs sound in a remarkable manner.
- Carpet – If you don’t have a carpet in your room, please do get one. Cover your room fully from one end to other with THICK carpeting. Now, we got more sound absorbing materials after carpeting the entire room. Stand in the center of the room and CLAP and listen if you can hear any echo or reverberation what you used to hear before changing your curtains & putting your carpet or rug.
- Soundproofing windows & doors – No matter how much hard we try to get our room soundproofed by heavy carpeting and curtains, the main culprits who lets the outside sounds in disturbing our recording sessions are the windows and the doors. As they have corners and access to get in sound and throw out sound from their corners, we need to seal them with soft foams which we get in the market for very cheap price. We can even use the window AC filter foams or if you can afford to spend a bit more then, you can find a bit thicker foams which, are already available in the local hardware store to purchase to soundproof the doors & windows. Once, you have sealed the corners, now we have to do something on the flat surface of the door. The door usually made of wood, but it’s smooth surface will hit back the sound and will not give the proper soundproofing. For this, if you have the extra carpet which, we used for our floor or extra cloth for the curtain; we can utilize that and stick it on the door. Or else you can even put a curtain in front of your door as a nice drape. After we have achieved this, once again stand in the center of the room and clap your hands and scream or shout and listen if you can hear any reverberation or echo. It must have drastically reduced now.
- Bass traps – This might be the last item which, will be a bit tougher for most of us to do. Let me give an idea about what bass traps are. “A BASS trap is simply a device designed to absorb low frequency sound and enhance your overall sound experience”. We can achieve this by building the corners of the walls of our room in a flat manner. Usually, when the sound travels, most of the sound gets into the corner and gets trapped over the corners. When those sounds reflect back we don’t hear much of clear bass. If you can build or get a carpenter to get this work done then, you can get a much better soundproofing.
