Rooms: Size Matters For Your Home Studio

When it comes to choosing a room size for your home studio, it matters. More specifically, the dimensions of the room matter. For those of you who have the option of choosing a room in your house to be turned into a home studio, this one's for you! If not, you sure can learn a thing or two in this one because it gets deep!

It’s no secret that bigger rooms generally sound better than smaller ones. Why is that? The answer is two fold and both relate to one thing: Reflections.

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Resonance

The first reason why bigger rooms usually sound better is because it’s basically a giant resonator. What do I mean by that? Well, if you play something like a flute, you’re blowing air through the instrument, and depending on where air can escape, it will dictate what note you are playing.

The air inside the instrument resonates with multiple frequencies, the one most prominent being the note you’re trying to play. But there also exists frequencies usually in multiples of that note, being harmonics, as well as other frequencies being the overtones.

The sum of these frequencies with their respective amplitudes/volume is what make up the sound/tone/timbre of the instrument. Basically, all you need to know is that blowing air through the instrument causes air to resonate creating a certain note and dictating the “sound” of the instrument.

In a room, air is also moving, and can act in the same way. Each room has its own “sound” and “tone” to it. Since the sound can bounce off the walls, it can create resonance between them. You can actually hear this note pretty distinctly!

Since the room naturally excites this one particular frequency, it’s pretty easy to exploit it and sing/whistle the note. You’ll find that the note has a much longer decay time, and you won’t be able to do short notes like 16th notes without the room muddying up and taking over the sound.

Some rooms are worse than others, depending on the dimensions and stuff/furniture inside the room. If you clap, you might be able to hear the most prominent ringing frequencies, though it’s most noticeable when everything is out of the room.

Why does this happen? The sound bounces off of one wall, goes to the other side of the room, bounces off of that wall, and repeats until the sound dissipates. The most prominent frequencies are those with a wavelength equal to the distance between the walls, and multiples of that; so if L was the length of the room, L, L/2, L/3, L/4, etc will be the wavelengths of the frequencies you hear most.

To find the fundamental frequency of a room with length L, just take the speed of sound, 343 meters per second, divided by L in meters. You can multiply by 2, 3, 4, etc to find the harmonics. This doesn’t exactly help you though unless you’re an acoustician, or you want to use a signal generator from your phone to resonate the room.

Since usually the walls are parallel, there’s a lot of spots where the fundamental frequency just adds up more and more the longer the other side of the room is, because directly across the room, it’s always the same distance.

This makes that one frequency come out even more, which isn’t pleasant when playing and especially recording. The best thing you can do is make or find angled walls and ceilings to make a cleaner sounding reverberation. Since ceilings are usually always parallel with the floor, it’s probably easiest to find an angled wall room!

The angled wall creates more unequal distances from any point in the room to any other point in the room, causing the fundamental frequencies between those distances to spread out more.

Hopefully you’re still with me, I know this is getting super scientific haha. But it’s really easy to see once you understand it; instead of one big frequency jumping out from the evenly spaced distances from the parallel walls, you can have an angled wall which will produce many “fundamental frequencies” throughout the room, spreading out the tone to be more pleasant sounding because there isn’t a big ringing note. Hopefully I explained that well? If I didn’t, let me know!

SO. Back to the point. Bigger rooms have greater distances between points on a wall, so the fundamental frequencies are lower. Generally, the lower the frequency, the less noticeable it will be clashing with what you are playing.

Most of the information of an instrument is stored in the mid range, so if your room is “tuned” to be lower, the less it will interfere with being “clear”.

First Reflections

The second answer to why bigger rooms are generally better sounding: the first reflections are less in the way of the source/instrument.

When you speak, sound will travel to a wall and back; depending on the distance, it will come back to the same spot a later time. This later time is crucial in being able to have good understandability, being clear, and audibly good detail.

If the time is so extreme that the reflection comes back after a word or syllable, you’ll have a generally good, clear sound. If the reflection comes back while speaking the same word, it will cause the sound to be muddy and not very easily heard. To get longer first reflection times, you’ll simply need a bigger room.

Choose Which Room Is Best For You

Bigger rooms do have their drawbacks though; it’s obviously more expensive on all fronts, including treating the room with panels, construction if you have to build the room, and stuff to put in it.

It may be more cost effective to get a smaller room, then you can treat more of the room with panels that way. It really depends on what exactly you’ll be using the room for; if you’re tracking a lot, it may be useful to have a big reflective room and use headphones to mix, and go to like a closet to record dry and intimate vocals. If you’re just looking to produce beats or mix, ie not record with a microphone, it might be best to get a smaller room and treat it so it isn’t very reflective.

For a mixing room, you don’t really want it to be reflective, so it doesn’t really matter what the size is as long as you can dampen the reflections with treatment. You don’t want to do too much though, otherwise it will sound so dead and unnatural it’s actually physically hard to stay in the room. The best word to describe it I think, is suffocating. Because treatment can get VERY expensive, it’s a good thing you don’t need to go overboard!

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So here’s a recap because I know the above can get confusing:

• Generally the bigger the room, the better the sound (untreated)

• Each room has its own sound; try to avoid ringing and noticeable frequencies

• Avoid parallel walls; find angled walls

• Find a room best suited for what you’re looking to do; being reflective (in a good way) or being somewhat dead (for mixing)

Sometimes you can’t choose what room you’ll be using, and in that case, you’ll need to work with what you have. Soon we'll get into what you can do treatment wise to work with what you have!

Let me know if this helped you or just confused you, for this subject I’m used to talking nerdy so let me know if I can do any better at explaining!

Have a good one!

-Michael