Podcasting DIY series: easy solutions for soundproofing a room with things you already have.
The ways to think and act when creating a recording space in any room.
If you ask an audio professional what’s most important in a studio, you’ll most likely get the answer — room acoustic treatment. Why is that?
Acoustics is where everything starts and it doesn’t matter if you have the most expensive microphone in the world or the best software to take away room noise. The fact remains — you will not achieve a professional and balanced recording in an untreated room. You might feel tempted to say: “but I have conversations in my living room every day, why wouldn’t it sound good on a podcast too?”
It’s a valid question with a simple answer — what we hear in a professionally sounding voice recording is actually far from what we hear in nature (and with ‘nature’ we also mean your apartment). In order for us to be able to hear the conversation clearly in a podcast, we add compression to the recording. Without compression, we either have to turn the volume up extremely high or we simply don’t understand the conversation. This is where the problem with untreated rooms becomes real.
You might go into the room, clap your hands and hear the minimal echo, thinking: “good enough!”
However, when this recording later gets compressed, the echo of the room also gets compressed and it can quickly turn into a very annoying and harsh sound since the compressor has a hard time determining what's your room and what's your voice.
You might have heard of fancy software claiming to take away room sound flawlessly and some of them are actually impressive, for example, Izotope DeReverb. Software of this caliber is very expensive and to be frank, they solve a problem that doesn’t need to exist in the first place. They also tend to introduce a lot of unpleasant artefacts to the sound.
Solution step #1
We get it. You just bought your podcasting gear and don’t want to spend an extra $1000 on room treatment right away. Thankfully, there are lots you can do to minimize room ambiance on a budget.
No surprises here, the cheapest alternative is to take a good look around and use the things you already have. Think about it like this: sound at its core is just air that moves and when it moves, it also bounces from wall to wall which creates the echo. A simple cure for echo is to increase the number of soft things around you, often called ‘sound absorbers’. They “eat up” the sound and can make it echo less. If a sound is a bouncing ball, throwing it at a brick floor would make the sound bounce back at you (and create more echo) more easily than if you throw it at the sofa where it just stays and is absorbed.
Solution step #2
However, you should not go overboard with this. It’s tempting to just bury yourself in pillows and blankets and start recording but this is not only a bad idea for sound, it’s also highly unlikely you will feel comfortable recording something valuable in that environment. Not to mention inviting guests to your pile of soft cushions.
Why it’s a bad idea for sound to absorb too much has to do with the fact that soft things just don’t “eat up” everything the same way. Pillows and blankets are very good at “eating up” high frequencies but leaving the low ones where they are. Low frequencies by nature are stronger — this is why your neighbors would get angry faster if you’d be playing the bass than jamming out with the tambourine.
The low frequency penetrates even thick walls so you can imagine how pillows and blankets are not the best tools of treatment. A pile of blankets leaves you with a recording that sounds “boomy”, “mushy” and uncontrolled. And when adding compression…yes, you guessed it right — the sound would become even more of those things.
The solution here is to add a ‘sound diffuser’ to your already existing ‘sound absorber’. If a sound absorber “eats up” the sound, then a sound diffuser breaks and spreads it. A diffuser can also be described as everything that is uneven.
Having a sound diffuser is good for several reasons. Let’s get back to the bouncing ball metaphor and imagine that you’re throwing it with full power at the wall in a square room with just a sofa in the corner. The ball is likely to bounce until it naturally stops. However, if you add a sound diffuser on the wall, the ball is more likely to accidentally hit the diffuser and therefore change direction and end up on the sofa to be “eaten up”.
Knowing these two factors opens up the possibility to experiment with what we have around us.
Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks for achieving both sound absorption and diffusion at your home.
- If you have curtains, choose a thick material for the fabric, and the more of it the better.
- If you have a sofa, try pulling it away from the wall and angle it. This way it works both as an absorber and a diffuser.
- Use your thickest carpet in the room you’re recording in. Carpets are great sound absorbers.
- Position yourself in the middle of the room rather than in a corner or by the wall. This makes the distance between yourself and the “bouncing” walls even and longer.
- Plan your room so you have some randomness and uneven surfaces. This can be almost anything. Go crazy and stay safe!
- If you have a big full-length mirror, place it in one of the corners of the room. It will work as a diffuser.
- The fewer 90-degrees corners you have in the room, the better. Move your bigger furniture to have some angle (see the point about sofa).
- Buy one or two of these 9$ Ikea clothing racks (or similar)and hang your thickest carpet or really anything soft over it.
Summary
A word on professional studios.
These tips are meant to work for mainly podcasting and would likely not work as well if you’re aiming for producing music. The reason professional studios need to have an almost “dead” sounding room is not to record podcasts, but to make fine adjustments in the very low sub-bass instead. These are frequencies we don’t have to worry about when recording voices, even less so if they’re female voices since their naturally higher pitch makes the room reverberate less.
One last factor that should be mentioned is that all this is directly connected to how loud your voice is. If you’re a group of five dudes trying to record a live commentary football podcast, chances are that you need to buy two more sofas for the room. And vice versa — If you’re launching an ASMR podcast you’ll be fine using your whole budget on the microphone instead.
Stop Making Sense productions is a podcast production duo from Sweden. We produce, make quality sound experiences, and work with storytelling. Read more about us on our website. Support us by clapping, leaving a comment, or subscribing to our publication. Groovy podcasting!
