Creating a DIY Home Recording Studio
Some additional tips for recording at home.
Choose a Room Full of Soft Materials
Start by picking a room for your recordings. Opt for a space with sound-absorbing materials like carpets, rugs, and furniture. Bedrooms or walk-in closets are often great choices as they typically contain many soft items, helping to minimize echo and background noise for a crisp sound quality.
Try Out a Pillow Fort Recording Booth
Stack up your thickest pillows to form a box or pyramid shape, and surround your microphone on all sides. Avoid leather pillows as they tend to reflect sound, giving your audio a boxed-in feel.
Record Under An Umbrella
Place yourself and the microphone under an umbrella when recording. It helps to reduce echoes and surrounding noises.
Get Acoustic Foam Panels
Acoustic foam panels are designed to absorb sounds and reduce echoes and background noises. They come in various types nowadays.
You can try it with a single sound-absorbing wall decor, which looks like a picture painted with a single color but made of sound fabrics.
Or you can get regular sound panels in various shapes and put them on your walls or closet, or even build a small recording booth. Those panels have spikey surfaces and remind of egg cartons.
Lesson Summary
Before you press Record, it’s worth spending a little time on your room and equipment. This lesson shows how to choose the quietest place available, reduce unwanted noise and echoes, and position your microphone, pop filter, and headphones for your first recording session.
Transcript
Module 4: Recording Your Voice.
Now we come to the heart of the matter: your very first recording session. Before we begin, let’s discuss optimal recording conditions. Because we’ll be recording your voice with what is known as a live microphone, it’s best to find the quietest space possible in your home. This may be difficult at various times of day, depending on where and with whom you live. The aim is to capture the cleanest possible recording of your voice, so managing background sounds in your environment is vital.
For example, if you’re a stay-at-home parent with children, the best time could be in the middle of the day while they’re at school. If you live with a partner or in a shared household, choose a time when you know you have the house to yourself. If you live in a busy city area, it may be at night when there is less traffic noise outside. Consider your personal circumstances and living arrangements.
You can also improvise. Once, while visiting my mother, a client asked me to make a last-minute voice-over edit. I fashioned a temporary sound booth in a bedroom cupboard. Early in the morning, while my mum was out walking, I closed the room’s windows, curtains, and doors and used the clothes hanging in the cupboard to absorb outside sounds. That gave me a workable, quiet space, and I recorded the edit and sent the audio file to my client within an hour.
Now we’re ready to connect the equipment and prepare for your first recording. Start by attaching your Samson Meteor to the microphone stand. Fold up the microphone’s legs and screw the unit onto the thread at the end of the boom stand. Make sure the front of the microphone—the side with the light and volume control—is facing you.
Attach the pop filter to the microphone stand by tightening its clamp onto the boom arm. Adjust the filter’s flexible arm so the fabric shield is in front of the microphone, about five to six inches away.
Using the supplied cable, connect the Samson Meteor’s USB port to a USB port on your powered-on device. The microphone’s blue light should illuminate. If you’re using an iPad, you’ll need the camera adapter shown here.
Next, plug your headphones into the headphone jack on the back of the Samson Meteor, just above the USB port. Your equipment is now connected and ready for recording. Before we set up the recording project in REAPER, please watch the following tutorial for some useful vocal techniques that will help your recording sound its best.