Living in a big city, you constantly face a lot of trouble trying to avoid all the noise from cars passing by, dogs barking, etc… It’s a lot of noise we get use to listening to everyday. But, when it comes to professionally recording something, you simply can’t have outside noises.
Keeping your home studio silent is a tough and sometimes expensive task. Depending on where your studio is located, you will have to use more than one technique to get professional sound quality.
* Ideally, you should insulate a room with fiberglass filler, which reduces wall resonance and increases the isolation of a regular wall (normally isolates 3-5dB) from 5 to 8dB. The thickness of gypsum in the wall, when it’s doubled compared to a regular wall (usually 5/8” thick), increases its isolation from 3 to 6dB and considerably lowers the resonant frequency. This applies not only for the walls but for the ceiling and floor too.
Ok, that would be the finest option. But, if you have a modest place in your home, how about a few nice simple tips?
* When picking a room in the house to be your home studio, avoid picking up those rooms adjoined to bathrooms or kitchens. There are a lot of people that may tell you that a garage is the best place for a home studio, but, the big door may be a problem for the isolation of the room. If there’s a basement in your house, that’s the best place to build your home studio.
* Fill every crack and hole in your walls, ceilings and floors, even the smallest ones.
* Use flat rubber or rubber and metal gaskets to isolate the door of your home studio. Doors are usually the main cause for external noises to invade a room. Having these types of material around your door is very important to keep your home studio as quiet as possible.
* Parallel walls, when flat, are a problem. It’s highly recommended that you add diffusers to them so that it spreads the reverberant sound, preventing standing waves. I`ll bet you have seen these diffusers a lot of times on studio’s walls:
* Put a carpet down to cover the floor.
* A microphone’s directionality or polar pattern is an important feature in getting the microphone to capture what comes out of your mouth more than what is in the other angles of the room, including external noise. Most of all, avoid an Omni-directional microphone for voiceovers. They aren’t recommended for these kinds of jobs.
If you have any doubts or would like to give another tip about how to insulate a room from external noises, feel free to comment on this post.
See ya next time!
* Resource made in http://arts.ucsc.edu/
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