5 Low Cost Ways to Improve Your Home Studio

Not getting what you want out of your home recordings? Let us give you some ideas to help you get more out of your recording space – without draining your wallet.

So you’ve bought your Mbox, installed Pro Tools, managed to plug the right wires into the appropriate inputs, but so far your home recordings sound like… well… home recordings. Maybe you’re not getting a great guitar tone, or no matter what you do your mixes always end up sounding too muddy. Let us give you a few pointers to help you improve your home recording set up, without breaking the bank.

Microphone Placement

One of the most overlooked aspects of recording in a home studio is where you physically place the microphone. If you’re overdubbing a guitar solo, you’ll more than likely reach for a SM57 and place it a few inches from your amp’s grill cloth. You’re ready to go, right? Maybe, maybe not – by doing a little experimentation with the placement of the microphone, you can be sure that you’re getting the best possible sound from your amp on tape.

If you’re recording a guitar amp, start with your typical placement of a few inches away from the grill cloth, slightly off-center, record a few bars, stop and take a listen. Do you want a brighter more trebly sound? Then move the microphone closer to the center of the speaker cone -- maybe backing it away from speaker a few more inches. Want a warmer tone? Do the opposite, move the mic away from the center of the cone and position it closer to grill cloth to take advantage of the microphone’s proximity effect, emphasizing lower frequencies. If you have multiple speakers in your cabinet, try the microphone on each one; one of the speakers might have a preferable sound over the others.

Whether you’re recording a snare drum, guitar amp, acoustic guitar or a vocal, you owe it to yourself experiment a bit with where you stick the mic. You’ve put careful thought and consideration into the choice of your instrument and/or amplifier, don’t get lazy now; put a few extra minutes of effort into microphone placement. This can have a dramatic impact the quality of your recordings.

Room Treatments

If you’re like me, you live in an apartment or house that wasn’t built with acoustics in mind. You might be recording in your bedroom, your bathroom or your basement, all of which are probably not ideal recording environments. When recording at home, we’re usually doing so in a small room with untreated hard-surfaces and parallel walls. Such a space is a breeding ground for a mess of sound reflections and even worse standing waves. Without diving too far into the technical details, let us sum it up by saying that recording music in an untreated small room is going to prove to be a difficult task with your sound source reverberating uncontrolled all over the room. Doing so is going to leave you with a very muddy sounding recording.

The good news is that you don’t have to shell out tons of money on acoustic treatments; it's more than likely that you have enough lying around the house to effectively treat your recording space and reduce those unwanted reflections. Duvets, comforters, throw rugs, moving blankets, and old mattresses work wonders in these situations. You can build a homemade vocal booth relatively easy by building a simple frame out of some PVC pipe and draping some moving blankets over it. Too much work? Take a couple of extra microphone stands and build and L-shaped vocal booth by extending the boom arm so it lays perpendicular to the ground, using a few heavy duty office paper clips to secure a duvet to the stands. If you can find them, old office dividers (cubicles) can come in handy if you need to isolate a drum set or a guitar amp.

Use Balanced Cables

If your gear allows it, run your signal though balanced cables. You’re probably already using balance cables for some of your gear – if you’re using a low-impedance microphone with a XLR cable, then you’re running a balanced signal. If you’re running your microphone through a tube preamp into your audio interface or recorder, check to see if your equipment has balanced ins/outs, you could really improve the quality of your signal by using TRS or XLR balanced cables to connect your gear.

A balanced cable separates the electrical audio signal into three wires – positive, negative, and ground, whereas an unbalanced cable (a guitar cable for example) separates it into two, one for positive and the other shares the negative signal and the ground. Having one wire share both the ground and negative signal can lead to increased noise entering the audio chain. The benefit of a balanced cable separating out the ground from the positive and negative signal is that you can run cables at much further lengths with far less noise. If hum or other electrical noises are mucking up your audio,  balanced cables could be a solution to your problems.

Keep it Simple

Digital recording is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? You don’t have to clean tape heads or buy expensive reels of tape, editing on a computer is vastly easier than splicing tape, and you have an entire arsenal of tracks, virtual instruments, and effects available to you at the click of a mouse. We can argue the merits of the quality of analog versus digital recordings in another article, but I think most would agree that recording music onto a hard drive is far more convenient than doing so on tape. The problem is that with all of those tempting plug-ins and virtual instruments, your home recordings can turn into quite the beast complete with twelve tracks of guitars, tons of reverb, and a virtual didgeridoo thrown in for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for experimentation, layering, and the use of unexpected sounds – I think those techniques can add a great amount of interest to a recording – but I think a little bit of subtlety can go a long way here. If you’re ending up with mixes that sound too busy, chances are that your recording has too much going on in it. Resist the temptation to add an extra track or effect just because you can and make it a point to have a purpose for each element you add to your recording. Sometimes it’s the things you don’t do that make the most impact.

Aim For Your Desired Sound from the Get-go

We’ve all either heard it or said it when recording “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it when we’re mixing." Do yourself a favor now and remove that phrase from your list of excuses. If you have a particular sound in mind you’re hoping to achieve, do your best to get that sound before you start recording. If you want a big, beefy guitar tone, don’t start by recording a Tele through a practice amp, take your time to audition different guitars and amps at your disposal to help you attain that sound before you press the record button. It’s much easier to mold your sound playing with different guitars, amp settings, and various effects pedals than it is to try to transform what you’ve already recorded into something entirely different. Taking the time to get your sound dialed in before you start recording is going to pay dividends when you’re ready to mix down.