The 5 Best Additions to Acoustically Treat Your Studio

Have you ever noticed that your music sounds great in the studio but in a different space, sounds totally different? Have you ever felt like you are missing a tight, studio-like quality sound, or worse, can you hear noise from your room in your recordings? 

These are all common problems that can easily be fixed with basic acoustic treatment and we are going to show you the 5 best ways to acoustically treat your space.

Bass traps

If you decide to only use one tip from here make sure it’s this one! Adding bass traps to each corner of your space can be the quickest and most effective change for better sound and control. 

Believe it or not, an excess of bass frequencies is one of the most common problems when using a bedroom or untreated room to create music. Since the majority of frequencies that build up are bass frequencies, adding bass traps to your setup can really help to level out the frequency spectrum of your space.  

Hard surfaces

Hard surfaces (or reflective surfaces as some would say) can often be the source of the sonic issues within a room. Mirrors, windows, or even hard, smooth walls can all cause problems for a home studio as sound is more likely to bounce off these surfaces and come back into the room.

In a studio, the ideal types of surfaces are ones that are highly uneven, rough or even porous, because as sound hits these surfaces, it has less opportunities to bounce directly back into the room. If you have any major hard surfaces in your studio space, try your best to cover them with sound treatment. 

Reflections

Limiting the sound reflections coming from the various walls of your space is a highly important step that can make a drastic change to the way you hear music. Not to be confused with reflective or hard surfaces, the reflection points of your room include certain zones of a wall, ceiling, or floor space that harshly reflects the sound coming from your speakers. 

Leaving these spaces untreated can cause unwanted problems like flutter and comb-filtering, both of which are extremely detrimental to a proper studio environment and can fool your ears into hearing something different than what’s actually in your music. 

Luckily, these points reflect the sound directly coming from your speakers, so that makes them easy to find. All you need to do is place a mirror flat on the surface and move it until you can see your speakers! It’s a detailed fix but a very important one.

A cloud

Similar to the previous tip, adding a cloud in your space will help to eliminate any sound reflections coming from your ceiling. A “cloud” is simply acoustic treatment that resides directly above the ideal listening zone: right above your head. 

Keep in mind that acoustic treatment is often heavy and obviously we don’t want anything heavy falling down directly onto our heads, so make sure you secure your cloud securely before sitting underneath! 

Although adding a cloud to your space isn’t the most important step when treating a room, it’s pretty darn close! Adding a cloud to a space actually makes a significant change to the listening experience as it quiets down loads of audio reflections that you may not realize exist!

Your stuff!

This last tip is about as simple as possible: leave stuff in your studio! Have you ever been in a room that was entirely empty? Did you ever notice how bad the echo was before it was furnished and then how much better it sounded afterwards? 

The reason rooms often have less echo once they are furnished is because everyday items like couches, beds, rugs, and curtains are great at absorbing sound waves! 

While the urge to purge your studio space of any furniture can lead to it looking more like a workspace and less like a bedroom, these things can often do a good job as sound treatment. If you are on a tight budget, it doesn’t get much better than that for a quick fix.  

Acoustic treatment can prove to be incredibly useful in a home studio setting. Even with small changes, the impact to the overall sound within the room can be significant. These changes can decrease sonic reflections, increase clarity, and create a more controlled environment to record and listen to music. 

If you want to experience what a controlled room sounds like first hand, pay a visit to a professional studio so you can hear the difference for yourself.