Basic Audio Production Tips: Making the Most of Your Set-Up! (Patreon)

Hi! Welcome to our first (!) Basic Tips & Tricks post focusing on Audio Production!🎉 Today, we’re going to learn how to make the most of your audio production space, whatever that looks like. Let’s start! (As usual, nothing in this post is an affiliate link.)

Soundproofing vs. Sound Treating

When you want to get into recording audio, you might think you need a soundproof recording area. Soundproofing is nice and all (especially if you live in a noisy environment!) but it’s actually more important to sound treat. What’s the difference?

Soundproofing = No sound gets in or out of your recording space.

Sound Treating = Making your recording space an ideal acoustic environment for crisp, clear audio

No matter how good your performance is, a poor acoustic environment will create problems in your audio, such as:

Reverb: If you’ve ever been in a tiled public restroom and heard your voice echo, you know: sound bounces. The bigger the space and the harder the surfaces in that space, the bigger (and louder!) the bounce. In audio production lingo this is called reverb, and if it happens in your recording space, your microphone will pick it up and amplify it. We don’t want that.

Noise: Not just noise, but noise. The technical term for the audible background hiss that is the natural ambiance of a room. You may not notice it, but your microphone certainly will. We want to reduce it as much as possible. There are ways to do so using editing software, but the less post-production fiddling you have to do on an audio, the better it will sound.

These are the biggest problems you’ll run into in a space that hasn’t been sound treated, so let’s tackle ‘em!

Reducing Reverb Part I: Shrink Your Space!

First rule of thumb: the bigger the space = the bigger the reverb, so we want to reduce the size of your recording area as much as possible. If you have a closet that’s large enough to fit you and your equipment, they make great recording booths. But if you’re not lucky enough to have that, there are other options!

If the only room you have to work in is large and echo-y, you can build your own mini-recording booth to isolate your microphone. For instance, when I first started my channel, I built something like this:

From DIY $23.00 Mini Sound Booth build in under an hour.

Personally I wanted something a bit more rugged than most of the DIY options out there, but I'm not a gifted carpenter. So, I used a wooden craft crate exactly like this one:

I lined it entirely with craft foam to cover the gaps in the slats, then cheap craft felt on top of the foam. Once that was done, I cut up an old mattress topper, stuffed that in there and voila, portable desktop voice booth!

• Crate: $12.99 
• Craft Foam (5 sheets): $4.95
• Craft Felt (6 sheets): $2.94
• Mattress Topper (Twin): $12.99

Total Cost: $33.87

There are cheaper ways to get a similar result: substituting a cardboard box for the crate, for example, or swapping out the felt/foam for old fabric you have lying around. Like I said, I wanted something really sturdy. It took maybe an hour of time and a few hot glue burns to put together, but I think having it really gave me a leg up when I started my channel. 

If you’re not the DIY type, there are also pre-made options available commercially:

TroyStudio Portable Sound Recording Vocal Booth Box - $45.99, Amazon

Because they're foldable, they take up less space, but the trade off is that they're also flimsier.

If you want to get even fancier, there are heavy-duty isolation shields that will stand up to more abuse:

XTUGA Recording Microphone Isolation Shield - $59.99, Amazon

Of course, with better microphone isolation comes a corresponding increase in price. 😬

Bonus Tip #1: If you use a desktop isolation booth like these, don’t place your mic with its back to the wall, facing out into the room to record. Behold my hilarious quick MS paint diagram to demonstrate:

If you can sound treat the wall behind you, even better! (We'll get into treating soon!)

Bonus Tip #2: Make sure your microphone is as far back/deep in the isolation booth as possible for maximum reverb and noise reduction.

A desktop booth like one of these is a good choice if you have very little space. If you have more room (and money to burn) there are even bigger ones:

Snap Studio Ultimate Portable Vocal Booth - $499.99, Amazon

Given the price, this is more suited to an upgrade if you choose to go pro rather than a starting point! 

But what if you’re broke? Flat busted? Twenty dollars is a pipe dream, much less sixty? Trust me, I’ve been there, dude. Good news, though! You have a perfectly adequate recording booth at your fingertips.

Blankets! Consider them your secret weapon. Any thick blanket you have lying around the house will do, but layers do just as well if you only have thin ones on hand; just climb under there with your microphone and record! It's not quite as good as an isolation box or a properly treated closet, but it's a huge upgrade from nothing.

Bonus Tip: Acoustic blankets are totally a thing! They’re very expensive ($50-$80 each, yikes!) but there’s a top secret alternative:

Sure-Max 4 Moving & Packing Blankets - $39.99, Amazon

Moving blankets. Super thick, super good at blocking out sound! You might notice they look suspiciously like the material of that expensive recording booth up there, and that's because they're basically the same thing.

Reducing Reverb Part II: Treating Your Space!

Shrinking your recording area will take care of a lot of reverb, but it won’t get rid of all of it. That’s where treating the space comes in! Like I said before: sound bounces. And it loves to bounce off hard, flat surfaces more than anything. So to keep that from happening, we need to soften those surfaces up!

(Disregard this section if you’re recording under a blanket; you’re already surrounded by soft surfaces! Go you!)

There are lots of potential ways to treat a bare room to help reduce reverb. The preferred method of professionals is acoustic panels on every wall:

Egg Crate Panels Acoustic Foam Sound Proof Wall Tiles, 6 Pack - $18.99, Amazon

But doing a whole space with them can get expensive pretty darn fast. That little six pack will only cover six square feet. Even if you’re working out of a tiny closet, you’re potentially looking at a few hundred bucks if you want to treat it completely. There are less expensive ways to get a similar result, though!

Cheap foam mattress toppers are your friend, and I can’t emphasize that enough. They’re made of the same material as acoustic panels, are of the same thickness, and cover a much larger area. That $12.99  mattress topper I suggested for DIY-ing a desktop studio? It covers 21 square feet. I use a couple of them myself in my current recording space, with a few $3 fleece blankets on the surfaces they can’t cover. Are they hideous? Oh, absolutely! Do I care? A little, but my penny pinching will win out over aesthetics every time!

If you live in an apartment and don’t want to damage the walls, you can use removable mounting putty to affix the foam.

So, now you know how to treat walls...but that fiendish enemy reverb doesn’t stop there! Sound also bounces off your ceiling and floor! What can we do about it?

The floor is easy enough: if your space isn’t carpeted, get a rug. (I got an inexpensive, cute Pokemon rug and I'm so happy to see Bulbasaur every time I record.) Can’t afford a rug right now? Put a blanket or something down. It doesn’t need to cover every inch if that’s impossible because of the size/shape of the room; every little bit of sound treatment helps.

The ceiling is a little trickier, for obvious reasons. Ideally, you’d treat the entire thing, but there are a million reasons why that may not be possible. (In my case, my ceiling is too high and I'm too dang short!) But that doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions!

The worst offender on a ceiling is the corners and “seams” of the room where it meets the wall. I bring you another lazy MS paint diagram to show how sound interacts with that area of a room:

That’s three hard, bare surfaces where sound can bounce, in every single corner! Twelve total! Not only that, but because of the physics of sound, lower frequency noise (remember noise?) tends to hang out in corners. But we can fix it!

4pcs/Set Studio Acoustic Bass Trap Foam Corner - $39.99, Amazon

These little guys are bass traps, and they’re used to treat the corners of a space. I don’t have proper bass traps myself at the moment simply due to the cost, but I picked up four cheap foam craft cubes ($10), wrapped them in felt ($2.94) and stuck them to the corners of my ceiling with some mounting putty. They don’t do as much for noise, but they do make a difference with reverb. Someday I’ll upgrade, but for now they do the job!

If this is out of your price range, don't worry. What matters most is making the corner soft; a t-shirt or other piece of fabric stretched across the it and tacked up there can work in a pinch.

Reducing Noise

Okay, so we've shrunk our space and treated it, now it's time to reduce noise! I saved this part for last because it’s often the easiest fix. There are thousands of sounds in our daily lives that we never notice that your microphone will. Got a fan in your room? Turn it off. A/C? Heater? Turn ‘em off. Computer? TV? Playstation? Off. Off. Off.

Reducing noise doesn’t just stop in your recording space: try to be aware of ambient sound outside. You live on a busy street? Record at night when there are fewer cars whizzing by. It’s raining today and pattering like crazy on the roof? Don’t record until it stops. A plane flies overhead? Pause your performance until it passes.

When I scope out other ASMRtists and VAs, I often notice these things in the background of their recordings. If you fix them, you’ll be ahead of the pack already!

Other Tips: We Can Have a Little Soundproofing, as a Treat

We've talked about sound treating, now it's time to pay some lip service to soundproofing. I don't recommend soundproofing as a beginning recording artist because of the prohibitive cost and complexity of doing it properly. I don't even anticipate doing it myself until I can invest a chunk of change to do it right. But! There are a couple of things you can do to soundproof a little.

Blackout Thermal Insulated Blind Curtains - $27.89, Amazon

Whether to cover your windows or to divide a room into a smaller recording-friendly space, noise reducing curtains are great. I had blackout curtains before I started doing youtube because I just hate that old devil sun, but my proclivity for living like a vampire all year round is actually useful for audio production. I live in a busy area with lots of cars; I can't imagine how much worse my audios would sound without curtains to block the racket.

Door Draft Stopper - $17.99, Amazon

Windows aren't the only way sneaky sounds can get into your space, especially if you don't live alone or you have pets. (I'm looking at you, my cat Noodle, with your  arms you like to stick under the door when I'm trying to record.) 

Draft stoppers like this one block noise (and noodly armed cats), but if you balk at spending almost twenty bucks on a little pillow for your door, just roll up a towel and use that.

Other Tips: You Noises

I'll likely cover these more in depth when I talk about working with a crappy microphone instead of against it, and achieving good vocal quality in your audios, but here we go anyway!

You can treat your room, you can reduce your ambient background noise, you can even soundproof if you want, but there is still one sinister source of weird, unpleasant sounds that can ruin a recording...

🌩 thundercrack🌩

YOOOOOOU!

Pop Filter - $9.99; Windscreen for Blue Snowball - $9.98, Amazon

This tribble and tennis racket looking combo is a pop filter and a wind screen. What do they do? They make sure your microphone ONLY picks up the best parts of your vocal. Modern mics are incredibly sensitive and human speech is full of all kinds of sounds that produce weird effects when recorded by such finicky equipment. 

Together, a pop filter and wind screen reduce the unpleasant pops that come from plosives in speech: for instance the puh and buh sounds that words starting with P and B make, among others. They also soften the hissing, lisping noises of sibilants: words with sssss and ch sounds that can make an audio sound crispy.

Finishing Up...

I meant this post to be a nice overview of all the things you can do to make your recording space the best it can be but I'd like to end it by saying this:

You don't need everything in this post to be successful. You can make good audio with less! If you can't make/buy/do it all, that's okay! A microphone of some sort is the bare minimum, even if it's just your phone. What I would personally recommend if you do nothing else is to get a pop filter and make/buy a mini recording booth. That's what I started with.

Everything else? They're upgrades and gravy. Something to shoot for if you find you like making audio and want to improve the quality of what you make.

I hope this post was helpful/informative. Good luck out there! I'm rooting for you. 🤗