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Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 6: Acoustic Treatment

May 13, 2014 by Ken 10 Comments

We’ve been doing a series of posts over the last 5 weeks – giving you tips on how to improve the quality of the audio you record in your home studio. The first of the series is here: Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 1.
The first 4 tips were all about technique – ways to immediately improve your audio without having to buy or build anything. A huge majority of people recording in home studios using converted bedrooms and don’t use any acoustic treatment in their rooms. I’ve recorded this way for over 10 years. The problem with doing it this way is that the rooms in our houses have notoriously bad acoustics – making your audio sound reverb-y and echo-y.
So the first 4 tips in this series showed you how to reduce that bad room sound in your recordings immediately, without having to buy or build anything. Then last week, week 5, we talked about microphones – how no matter what mic you currently use, you can almost certainly improve your audio by upgrading to a different mic without having to spend a lot of money – in fact most can do this for $100 or less.

The Best For Last

In this week’s tip I will share something that has completely changed my life (yeah, sounds dramatic but it’s true). II put acoustic foam on my walls that just about totally eliminates that bad, echo-y room sound!
NOTE: This final tip – though it is super helpful in a home studio – is not strictly necessary to get professional sounding audio. I recorded everything for my voice-over and music careers in this same studio with only tips 1-through-5 for several years. But if you CAN afford to do it, make it happen ASAP.
There are several types of acoustic foam that you can use to treat your room with. Auralex is probably the most popular manufacturer, and they have several packages to choose from. I went with a less popular (but a bit more expensive) brand called “Acoustic Fields.”
Regardless of the brand you choose, You’ll want to cover up a pretty fair percentage of the walls in your recording room. Look at the picture at the top of the page to get an idea of how much foam I have on my walls. I put foam starting at about my waist level and going up to the top of the wall.
Overall, I’d say about 20 to 25 percent of the walls have foam on them. You can probably get by with less than that if you place them on the wall opposite where you face when you record, and also on the wall behind your normal recording position.
I recommend starting with about one pack of 14 of the Auralex 1-foot square panels. then if you need more, you can add panels until those echoes are tamed.
Once some of this foam is on your walls, it absorbs the bad room reflections without sucking the life out of the sound of your voice, as is the case so often with other room treatments.

Our Tests With The Foam

Before putting any foam up on the walls in my converted bedroom studio, we wanted to do some before and after tests to make sure it would truly make a difference. So my wife (Lisa, fellow voice-over artist and singer) and I did a series of male and female vocal recordings – spoken, shouted and sung – with no foam on the walls.
Anyway – the tests. After recording samples with no acoustic treatment on the walls, we basically covered the walls with foam, leaving no more than a couple of inches between panels. Then we recorded the same samples. We – were – blown away! There wasn’t even a hint of room sound after the foam went up.
Next, we removed every other panel to find out how much treatment was enough. It is possible to overdo it. Well, it sounded great with no hint of room sound at all. Removing every other panel opened up the sound slightly as well —- “letting the audio breathe a little” is probably the best way to put it.
Below is a bit of the before and after audio. The samples were recorded 18 inches from the microphone to maximize the effects. The shouted phrases were also chosen to send a quick loud vocal through the room. This song for the singing sample was chosen for the same reason, AND the fact that it’s in the public domain. Also, the before and after samples have been normalized to be the same volume to eliminate loudness as a factor. Though the difference is clear listening on your speakers, to hear how truly dramatic the difference is, try listening with headphones;).
Before

Male “Before”

Female “Before”
After – WITH The Foam On The Walls

Male “After”

Female “After”

Close Voice Over Samples

The above audio was used for putting the foam through a tough test of absorbing the worst reflections the room could generate – recorded 18 inches away from the microphone. As we know from Tip #1 in this series, recording far away from a microphone in a room with poor acoustics gives you a LOT of room sound. So if we have no treatment on the walls, we need to get very close to the mic. Most people aren’t going to record from 18 inches away, so the above is maybe not your typical use.
So we recorded fairly close to the microphone (about 6 or 7 inches away) using the foam, and the “omnidirectional setting” on the mic (which we couldn’t use pre-foam due to how much extra room sound that pattern picks up) to demonstrate how good the foam allows our voices to sound now.

Male Voiceover With Omni Setting and Foam on Walls

Female Voiceover With Omni Setting and Foam on Walls

More Testing

After we conducted the above tests, we removed all the foam panels and decided to test the foam against another product, which purports to remove poor room acoustics in vocal recording. It fully encompasses a microphone with acoustic foam – you stick you microphone inside of it. Our goal was to play each sample in headphones, and NOT tell the person listening which sample was being played. In other words, it was a blind test.
We both chose the wall treatment foam as by far the best. In fact, not only did the other product not even eliminate the bad room sound despite completely encompassing the microphone. It actually made our voices sound worse – all muffled and unnatural.
The audio recorded with acoustic foam on the walls, on the other hand, sounded fantastic; no room sound and it actually made our voices sound better than usual. What was really happening was not that the foam “imparted” anything extra to the recordings, but rather it absorbed the undesirable room echoes and what remained was ONLY what should be there – our natural voices – with nuances and polish like we’d never heard.

Life Changing? Really?

So how did this “change my life?” Well, for one thing it will cut my production time by more than half of what it was. Without the foam, in order to reduce the amount of room sound in your recording, you have to get very close to the microphone (that was tip #1 in our series). But that results in a lot of p-pops, which have to be edited out (that was tip #5) after the fact. At least half of my vocal recording production time was devoted to editing out the p-pops! But now I don’t have to get close to the mic, so there are no p-pops.
Just that alone would have been awesome. But more than that, our voices sound better than ever. And we don’t have to fight our room anymore. We don’t have to set up bulky baffles or stuff the mic into anything. We don’t have to go into the closet. We get to use the room! Also, I can now use the omnidirectional and figure-8 settings on my microphone, which is pretty much impossible in a bad-sounding room because those settings make room sound even worse. This means we can record small vocal groups (try fitting THEM into a closet!), podcasts with multiple people using a single mic, and a lot of other things that were simply impossible in a bad-sounding room if you wanted the audio to sound professional.
So the final tip in the series is “try the new acoustic foam from Acoustic Fields.” It will basically make it unnecessary to employ any of the usual counter-measures to fight the room sound in home studios, making it easier and faster to produce great-sounding voice recordings.

Here is how to get started

Like I said, there are several brands of acoustic absorption foam. But one of the most popular and easily available is Auralex. Below (on the left) is a package of their 1-foot square panels to get you started:

Auralex-Acoustic-Panels-Pic — Auralex Acoustics SonoFlat Acoustic Absorption Foam – 14 Panels

Yes, there is a cost involved here – an investment really. Consider this. Even the most expensive microphones will sound bad if used in a room with bad acoustics without applying tips 1-5. Two very popular vocal mics are the Neumann TLM-103 and the Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic. These cost $1,100 and $1,000 respectively. If you are serious about a career in voice overs, I recommend treating your room BEFORE you purchase that expensive microphone. You might find that a much less expensive microphone is all you need, once your room is not adding echo-y, reverb-y ickiness to your voice.

Join Us For More Home Recording Awesomeness

Att Home Brew Audio, we are trying bring professional audio recording into reach for regular, non-engineer and “techy” folks. To get you started producing professional sounding audio from your house, see the picture below to get access to the first 6 lessons in our tutorial course “The Newbies Guide To Audio Recording Awesomeness.” In this course, you will learn how to set up and start using your home recording studio for a budget of about five bucks (or less) in about 30 minutes.

Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 5

May 6, 2014 by Ken 4 Comments

This is week 5 in our series of videos and posts giving you tips for improving the quality of the audio you record in your home studio. All the tips so far (if you’ve missed them, you can start with week one here: Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 1) have shown you quick, easy ways to improve your audio without having to to buy or build anything. But they also had something else in common. They all work to make your audio sound more professional no matter what kind of microphone you are using – cheap or expensive.
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The Microphone Is Not The Most Important Thing

It was quite intentional to NOT make “buying an expensive microphone” the first tip in a series about how to record better audio. Usually, it’s the the first thing people think they need to do in order to record more professional audio. But that simply is not the case. I think it belongs at about number 5 or 6 on the list. If you’ve been trying out all the tips in this series, you’ll know first-hand how to massively improve your audio using the exact same mic you started with, no matter how cheap or expensive it is. Technique — how you use your gear — is by far the most important element.

Better Audio With A Better Mic

Even though I don’t think it’s the most important thing, it doesn’t mean you can’t improve your audio quality by using a different/better microphone. And this week’s tip is that no matter what mic you currently have, you can probably upgrade to the next level for much less money than you thought. For example, if you change from using a $5 computer mic to a $25 USB headset, it’s going to sound better. Cost of upgrade – $20. If you start with the USB headset and switch to using a $49 USB handheld mic like the Samson Q2U, the quality will skyrocket dramatically. Then moving from that to a $65 large-diaphragm USB mic like the Samson C01U, the quality jumps again. Make the switch to an audio interface with a standard large-diaphragm condenser microphone for a couple hundred dollars and the quality goes up again, and so on.

Audio-Technica AT2035 Mic — Audio-Technica AT2035

Generally speaking, for vocals – a large-diaphragm condenser mic like this Audio-Technica AT2035 – will work best for vocals. HOWEVER, there are two other types of microphone that sound terrific on vocals. Believe it or not, shotgun mics – typically used for video (such as the Sennheiser MKH416), sound great as close-up vocal mics. And though you would typically stay away from cheap dynamic microphones for vocal recording, certain TYPES of dynamics – called broadcast dynamics – can sound fantastic – such as the Electro-Voice RE 20 or the Shure SM7. In fact, since those mics are dynamic mics AND they have a cardioid pickup pattern, you get a double-dose of audio quality improvement. The cardioid pattern helps reject noise from most parts of a room, AND the fact that a dynamic mic is less sensitive to ambient noise overall, you get a lot less noise (air conditioning hum, computer drives spinning, etc) than with a large diaphragm condenser.
There are too many mics to mention, and we can’t try them all. So here is my advice if you do not already have a really good microphone. If you are not currently using one, try a large USB mic like the Samson C01U. The next step to improving even more – when you are ready to invest a few hundred dollars – is to get yourself an audio interface such as this Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or Scarlett Solo, which plug into your computer via USB. Then get a standard (meaning NOT USB) large-diaphragm condenser mic such as the Audio-Technica AT2035 and plug it into your interface. That kind of set-up — a large diaphragm condenser mic plugged into an audio interface device — is what even the highest-end professional studios use.

Over time, and as your budget allows, you’ll want to try different mics. Here’s what’s on my wish-list right now. I’m saving for a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic for voice-over work. And though I drool over the thought of having one, it will be some time before I’ll be able to afford – or at least convince my wife that we can afford – a Neumann U-87, which currently would set you back about $3,600. Well, maybe some day.
So this week’s tip is that regardless of what microphone you are currently using, you can almost certainly upgrade for a lot less money than you thought. I also told you what kind of mics usually work best for vocals, and I mentioned a few specific mics you can try out. Don’t forget to tune in next week for yet another tip for dramatically improving the quality of the audio you record in your home studio. See you then!

Don’t Miss Out

Make sure you don’t miss any of the tips in this series. Put your email into the form below and get not only the rest of this series as it rolls out, but also the first 8 videos in our tutorial course “The Newbies Guide To Audio Recording Awesomeness 1: The Basics With Audacity.” This course shows you how to set up and start using your home recording studio for a budget of about five bucks (or less) in about 30 minutes.

We will not spam you with e-mails! We typically don’t send more than one message per week, and each of those will only be intended to help you make better audio recordings in your home studio.

Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 4

April 29, 2014 by Ken 4 Comments

We’ve been doing a series of articles and videos showing you how to produce better sounding audio even in (especially in) bad-sounding rooms, such as the converted bedrooms that so many of us use as home recording studio spaces. You can find the first post in the series is here, if you have not seen everything in order yet. Today marks the fourth week and fourth tip to help you sound more professional. This one is applicable primarily to vocal recordings – for voice-over or for singing. It’s time to tame the dreaded p-pop!
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/z567xm8hkn?embedType=seo&videoWidth=640
Whenever we record words with a “P” or “B” in them, we’re creating a sound that linguists call a “plosive.” But when recording into a very sensitive microphone such as a large diaphragm condenser (LDC), which is probably the most common type of vocal recording mic, these plosives tend to create an unpleasant burst of low-frequency noise sounding like a small explosion. Sensitive microphones don’t like sudden blasts of air, so the result is an excessively loud plosive often called a “p-pop.”

Can’t I Just Use A Pop Filter?

It’s common practice to use a pop filter when using an LDC mic. You place them between your mouth and the mic to help tame the p-pops. But some still get into the recording. And if you are recording in a poor sounding room, our first tip – getting your mouth 3 to 4 inches from the mic (unlike the girl in the picture on the right) will instantly improve your sound. However, even with a pop filter in place, getting that close to the mic will increase the problem of p-pops.
So though you can use a pop filter to help minimize those misbehaving plosives, you have to make peace with the fact that some will end up in the recording.
So what do you do now? You edit. You can fix p-pops using audio software after they have already been recorded. I tend to use Reaper for all my recording needs. However, though you CAN use Reaper to fix p-pops in an audio file, it is pretty time-consuming and cumbersome, as you’ll see in the video above. This is definitely a job for an audio editor, such as Audacity, Adobe Audition, Sony Sound Forge, etc.
In the video, you’ll see how much faster and easier it is to use an editor. I demonstrate how to do it in Audacity, which is free. So hey, once again you get a tip that won’t require you to buy or build anything. that’s four for four!

Don’t Miss Out

We will not spam you with e-mails! We typically don’t send more than one message per week, and each of those will only be intended to help you make better audio recordings in your home studio.

Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 3

April 23, 2014 by Ken 6 Comments

For the past 3 weeks, we’ve been posting videos and articles that show you how to dramatically improve the quality of the audio you record in your home studio – especially voice recordings.
In week 1, we learned the fastest and cheapest, yet hugely effective tip of simply getting your mouth closer to the mic. Most folks record with the mic 18 inches away from their lips. But getting up close and personal at about 3 inches makes a LOT of difference.
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/64mk4qe4vq?embedType=seo&videoWidth=640
Last week we talked about how important it is – if you are recording in a converted bedroom with no acoustic treatment (this describes a vast majority of us) – to use a cardioid mic, or the cardioid setting on a multi-pattern mic. This week’s tip is another, just like the previous ones, that will not require you to build or buy anything.

Record As Loud As Possible Without Distorting

Whether you’re recording through an audio interface, a USB microphone, or a PC mic plugged directly into your computer’s built-in sound card, you will be able to control the level of the incoming audio. With PC mics and USB mics that have no volume control knob (some USB mics, such as the Blue Yeti, do have a control on the side), you can use your computer’s operating system to control the recording level. The video above shows you how to do this in Windows. The process is similar with a Mac. Just about all audio interface hardware units have some sort of input level control.
So as you’ll see (and hear) in the video, if you record with too low a level (usually you’ll see tiny wave forms if this happens), you’ll want to “turn it up.” But doing that ALSO turns up the ambient noise. Record too loud though, and you’ll distort, which is really nasty-sounding. The trick is to find a sweet spot where you record JUST loud enough that your loudest bit of audio is just barely below the point where distortion would happen. When you record at this correct level, you won’t have much of a need, if any, to turn it up. So you keep the noise to a minimum. Check out the video for examples of all the scenarios.
Make sure you don’t miss any of the tips in this series. Put your email into the form below and get not only the rest of this series as it rolls out, but also the first 8 videos in our tutorial course “The Newbies Guide To Audio Recording Awesomeness 1: The Basics With Audacity.” This course shows you how to set up and start using your home recording studio for a budget of about five bucks (or less) in about 30 minutes.

We will not spam you with e-mails! We typically don’t send more than one message per week, and each of those will only be intended to help you make better audio recordings in your home studio.

Recording The Benedictine Sisters – Multiple Stereo Mic Set-Ups

April 22, 2014 by Ken Leave a Comment

There is a chart-topping music group you may not have heard of – the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, Queen of Apostles. They have recently topped Billboard’s Classical Albums charts with two of their three albums.
Why do I mention this? Well, we were watching CBS Sunday Morning on Easter Sunday, and they did a story about the Sisters. One scene showed a recording session with lots and lots of microphones. Of course I immediately exclaimed “hit pause!” to my wife (who controls the DVR remote;)). There were so many mics in so many different positions that I really wanted to study what was going on.

What WAS Going On?

The first thing I thought I recognized was something called a Decca Tree. this is a type of stereo recording set-up developed in the 1950s at Decca Records. It’s a tall pole with a “T” shaped horizontal crossbars at the top which holds three microphones. It was used to best capture orchestras by using a spaced pair (left and right) of mics, combined with a third mic to pick up stuff going on in between. You can see crossbars of the Decca tree at the top of the picture up above. Incidentally, the microphones being used on the tree are Neumann TLM-102 large diaphragm condenser mics (or possibly the TLM-103, which have the same shape). I’re read about the Decca tree configuration before, but I’d never actually seen one. Then I saw what record label had produced and distributed the Sisters’ albums – yup, Decca. Duh.
But that wasn’t the only stereo recording configuration they had! A closer look reveals that there is at least other stereo mic set-up, two instances of the mid-side (m/s) set-up (one for each side, since the nuns were split into two sides of the room). In addition to those three stereo mic clusters (seven microphones so far), there are two spot microphones aimed into the group of nuns agains the far wall in the picture. They are placed high and look to be positioned to capture the room/ambient sound. The spot mics appear to be small-diaphragm condenser mics, such as the Shure SM81.
So with two mid-side groupings and one Decca tree, combined with two room mics, this small choir was recorded with nine microphones! And very high-quality microphones they were. It’s no wonder that the production quality of their last three CDs (they had recorded their own prior to Decca arriving at the door) were so high that they ended up selling so well that they ended up on the Billboard charts. DON’T get me wrong! It’s not ONLY the quality of the production that got them on the charts. A really well-recorded bunch of crappy singers would still be that – polished crap. But the Sisters sing like angels. They will tell you (literally – they did in the interview) that they aren’t great singers. But they practice 5 hours a day. Funny how much difference tons of practice combined with excellent recording technique (from the pro engineers working for Decca) and top-notch gear can make.