Home recording studio tour

Some home recording studios look so cool you just have to share it with the world.

This page illustrates with a picture tour of a great sounding project studio how you can easily build your own home recording studio. I know these two Icelanders that created a very professional sounding home studio by converting an old workshop into a fully functional project studio. 

This studio is capable of handling most tasks, from voiceovers to rock drums. They have a separate live room that is acoustically isolated and coupled from the environment, creating an amazing sounding small room as well as a comfortable control room. If you are interested in their services you can contact them at www.recordingstudio.is.

control room

As you can see from the pictures, which were taken by Jónas, the studio's owner, they have managed to convert a medium sized workshop into a very sweet looking home recording studio. Although this kind of project borders the line between home studio and commercial studio, this is something you can do easily if you have the space and resources available.

acoustic treatment

Using materials you can get from any hardware store they have created effective acoustic absorbers that they placed on the walls at strategic positions. See where they've placed them behind the monitors and by the sides to eliminate reflections from the side walls.

They area above the mixing position also has an interesting slanted ceiling. Ceilings like this serve the purpose of deflecting the sound to the far side of the room. That way they eliminate reflections from the normal ceiling bouncing back down into the ears of the sound engineer.

Monitoring

These guys are using two different types of monitors; the Dynaudio BM5A and Yamaha NS10. The NS10s have an infamous reputation for being a studio standard. The joke is that these monitors are so ruthless in showing you how bad your mix is that once it starts sounding good on the NS10s, it'll sound like silk anywhere else.

The NS10s are used for main monitoring so when the engineer is sitting in the sweet spot  they are positioned for correct listening and stereo imaging. The Dynaudio monitors are used for checking for anomalies in the mix as well as positioned for impressing clients listening on the couch.

Live room

They also have a great sounding live room that can serve quite a few purposes. It is big enough to record great sounding drums and can accomodate the recording of any type of acoustic instrument.

The room has a really warm sound, not too live but not dead at all. The sound of my acoustic guitar was incredible in there and we managed to get a great drum sound suitable for most tracks.

They also have an ingenious way of recording vocals in the live room. By creating their own reflection filter they have the option of having it open when recording vocals or closed when they need the liveness and extra reflections.

By opening up the panels they have absorptive materials all around the vocal microphone, eliminating reflections resulting in a clean and dead vocal sound. But when they want to use the room for something else or they want more reflections they simply close the panels.

A simple and creative way to build a multi-functional live room. 

Conclusion

Building a home recording studio like this might seem a little overbearing. A lot of hard work and money has been put into the building of this home recording studio, but that's not to say you can't achieve something similar. 

I hope this little picture tour has given you some ideas on what you can do with your home studio, however small it may be. You might not have an empty workshop to convert into a home studio but you can definitely create something usable out of the space you have available.

Do you have a home recording studio? are you building a home recording studio? Share your experience here below!

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