Part 1 - Building a Home Rehearsal & Recording Space  

When most musicians hear the words home recording studio, they picture a room built around recording equipment: a computer running recording software, an audio interface, microphones, studio monitors, perhaps a keyboard, and enough acoustic treatment on the walls to make the room look appropriately serious.

The purpose seems obvious. You go there to record music.

But I think a home studio can be much more useful than that.

For a working musician, the same space can serve as a rehearsal room, writing space, practice room, recording environment, listening room, equipment workspace, and production studio. Instead of being a room that comes to life only when it is time to make an album, it becomes part of the entire process of making music.

That distinction changes how you should approach building one.

Start With What You Actually Do

Before worrying about microphones, acoustic treatment, interfaces, monitors, or recording software, ask a more fundamental question:

What do you actually want to do in this room?

A songwriter recording acoustic guitar and vocals has very different requirements from a four-piece rock or metal band rehearsing with acoustic drums and guitar amplifiers. Someone creating electronic music may be primarily concerned with monitoring and computer workflow. A drummer is going to care considerably more about physical space, ceiling height, reflections, microphone placement, and volume.

My own requirements were fairly straightforward.

I wanted somewhere musicians could actually play together.

That meant enough room for acoustic drums, guitar and bass amplifiers, vocals, microphones, PA speakers, stands, cables, recording equipment, cases and, of course, the musicians themselves.

But there was another requirement.

I wanted to record what happened in that room.

Not just occasionally.

Regularly.

That eventually changed the question from:

How do I set up a room for recording?

to:

How do I set up a room so recording is always available?

There is a significant difference.

The Studio You Actually Have

There is plenty of recording advice based on ideal circumstances.

Place the microphone several feet from the instrument to capture the room.

Great advice—if your room sounds good.

Move the guitar cabinet into an isolation room.

Also great advice—if you have an isolation room.

Record the drums separately from the guitar amplifiers to eliminate microphone bleed.

That can work extremely well when producing a recording one instrument at a time. It is considerably less useful when four musicians are rehearsing together on a Tuesday night and you want to capture what the band actually sounded like.

Most of us aren't working in commercial recording studios.

Your space might be a basement with a low ceiling. It might be a bedroom that still needs to function as a bedroom. You might have concrete walls, windows, heating equipment, a garage door, neighbors, or a computer sitting six feet from an acoustic drum kit.

Or, like me, you might be working in a detached building that was never originally intended to become a music studio.

None of those things automatically prevent you from making good recordings.

They simply give you problems to solve.

My First Studio Was an Experiment

My first dedicated music space started with a 12-by-20-foot barn-style shed kit purchased from a big-box hardware store.

It wasn't designed to be a recording studio.

It was a shed.

I modified it as I built it, including adding a loft for storage. At the time, the loft seemed like a good idea. Musical equipment has an impressive ability to accumulate, and extra storage sounded useful.

Unfortunately, the 2×4 beams supporting the loft spanned the twelve-foot width of the building and left me with a ceiling slightly under seven feet.

It worked.

But it felt cramped.

Put an acoustic drum kit under a low ceiling and then add cymbals, microphone stands, guitar amplifiers, PA equipment, cables and several adults, and a 12×20 building becomes considerably smaller than it looked when it was empty.

The building was also insulated, but not particularly well.

That became much more obvious once I started recording.

Wind could find its way onto recordings.

Rain could find its way onto recordings.

So could the neighborhood.

Microphones don't know which sounds belong in your song.

Still, I don't consider that first studio a failure. Quite the opposite.

It proved the basic idea worked.

We could rehearse there. We could record there. I had a dedicated place to play drums and work with other musicians.

More importantly, living with that room taught me what I wanted from the next one.

Building the Second Room Around the Music

When I later had the opportunity to start over, I approached the second studio differently.

Instead of taking a building and asking how I could turn it into a music room, I could think about the music room first.

The new studio is 12×24 feet.

Four additional feet doesn't sound transformative, but it increases the floor area from 240 to 288 square feet—a 20 percent increase. In a small rehearsal space, those extra 48 square feet matter.

I also eliminated the loft and went with a conventional eight-foot ceiling.

The room has better insulation, a proper exterior door, small windows for ventilation, convenient electrical power, recessed lighting, acoustic treatment, bass traps, storage, seating, and a smaller refrigerator that doesn't consume nearly as much floor space as the full-size refrigerator I put in the original studio.

None of those decisions individually created the studio.

Together, they made the room easier to use.

And that's something I've come to believe is more important than making a home studio look impressive.

Build for Musicians, Not Photographs

An empty room can be deceptive.

Put painter's tape on the floor and mark out a drum kit.

Now add guitar and bass amplifiers.

Add the PA.

Add a recording workstation.

Add microphone stands.

Add cables.

Add guitar cases.

Then add four musicians.

Suddenly the room isn't very large.

A rehearsal and recording space has to accommodate people as well as equipment. Musicians need somewhere to stand, somewhere to sit, somewhere to put their cases, somewhere to plug in and enough room to move without climbing over cables and equipment.

They also need to hear and see one another.

A technically impressive room that is miserable to rehearse in isn't a particularly successful rehearsal studio.

Comfort matters.

So does lighting.

So does temperature.

So does having somewhere to put a drink that isn't on top of the mixer.

These things don't appear on a frequency-response graph, but they affect what happens in the room.

Make Recording Part of the Room

One of the most important decisions you can make is reducing the amount of work required to start recording.

If every rehearsal begins with forty-five minutes of positioning microphones, running cables, assigning inputs, creating tracks and configuring software, you're probably not going to record every rehearsal.

I want the opposite.

Whenever practical, frequently used microphones can stay positioned. Cables can remain routed. Inputs can remain consistent. The recording system can already have the correct tracks, routing and basic setup waiting in a template.

Walk in.

Turn everything on.

Check the levels.

Press Record.

Play.

The technology should gradually disappear into the infrastructure of the room.

That's when something interesting starts happening.

Your Rehearsal Room Is Already a Recording Environment

You don't have to be recording for the room to affect the recording.

If the guitar amplifier is painfully loud, the drum microphones are eventually going to hear it.

If the bass overwhelms one side of the room, putting a microphone in front of something else won't make the bass disappear.

If the vocalist can't hear the PA over the rest of the band, increasing the PA volume can create another collection of problems.

The better the band sounds standing in the room, the easier recording becomes.

That's why amplifier placement, acoustic treatment, PA coverage, musician positions and rehearsal volume are all part of recording.

In a sense, you're already creating a mix before the sound ever reaches the computer.

You're just doing it physically instead of with faders.

Don't Chase the Perfect Studio

It is easy to look at professional studios—or elaborate home studios online—and start compiling a list of everything your room doesn't have.

Don't.

A commercial studio may have purpose-built rooms, sophisticated isolation, separate control and tracking spaces, expensive infrastructure and enough physical space to solve problems that simply cannot be solved the same way in a bedroom, basement, garage or shed.

You don't need to duplicate that.

You need to understand the room you have.

Ask practical questions.

What are its limitations?

What can you change?

What can't you change?

Can the musicians hear one another?

Is outside noise interfering with recordings?

Is the room comfortable?

Can you leave enough of the recording system connected that you'll actually use it?

And most importantly:

Does the room make it easier to make music?

That's the standard I use for my own studio.

It isn't a commercial recording studio.

It's a working music room.

We rehearse there. We record there. We work on arrangements. We listen back. I mix at the workstation. Equipment has somewhere to go. The musicians have somewhere to sit. There are cold drinks available. The recording system is already connected.

And after working in two different versions of that room, I've learned that the goal isn't to build the perfect studio.

It's to build a room that works well enough that you stop thinking about the room and start making music.

That's where a working home studio begins.