How to treat your room.

The number one consideration of a home-based project studio is not soundproofing, but the making of a quiet room. I find it kind of funny that some people will spend thousands to treat their room yet never quiet the stuff inside the room itself! You walk in and hear a noise coming from computer fans, whines coming from hard drives, zip drives, scsi drives for samplers, fans in samplers, fans in amps. This is no way to work on music or produce audio. What one finds is that this racket masks other problems in the studio, like 60 Hz hum at the console outs, poorly set up gain on mics, synths and other instruments. It's rather ironic. People who have a noisy studio create their stuff, mix and master it and never really notice that the entire production is imbued with noise problems. When the piece is done, they still don't notice it because, yep, they listen to it in their noise-infected studio. So let us post rule number one. Ready? Here it is.

To create music you must be able to hear your sounds. Doh! OK, I can see you dudes rolling your eyes. Some of you have bought the hype that you need $2,000 studio monitors to do this. Yes. Studio monitors are important, but even if you have the best monitors in the world you are still going to have major problems if you cannot clearly and totally hear what is coming out of them! So let us be clear. The number one enemy to good sound is the noise in your room, coming from the very devices you make music with. The louder your room is, the louder you have to monitor your music, the faster your ears will fatigue in a session and the greater the likelihood you may damage your hearing after years of constant, relentless exposure to high sound pressure levels. On the other hand, with low ambient noise in a room, you can find a lower comfortable volume level at which to work. This saves the ears a lot of wear and tear and you can work longer, and do those major projects that require successive all night sessions.