Creating Good Acoustics in a Recording Studio

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Gregg Tauriello. I'm from Sweet 16 Studio, and I'm here to talk to you about soundproofing for a recording studio. Okay, I would like to talk to you about interior sound management a little bit, and that is the acoustics of the room that you're designing. Acoustics play a big role in how the room sounds, how music is recorded, how it's going to sound when it's finished. If I record somebody in, let's say, a small bedroom that's carpeted and has drapes and has a lot of furniture in there like a bed and a dresser and so forth, I'm going to have what's called a "dead sound", which means the sound doesn't bounce around very much. In many cases, that's what I want. As apposed to if I record somebody in a very large room, let's say, 40 feet by 40 feet with glass, no carpeting and bare walls with no curtains, it's going to echo a little bit, kind of like my big room here. If you want, I can just clap my hands and see if you can hear it. Hear that? Check! Hey! Hey! It's just a little bit live, that's the way I want this room because in some cases, like for drums, and certain instruments, you want that little bit of natural acoustic sound in your recording. But what I did here was I left the cement floor, and I use roll out carpets whenever I want to deaden the room, that's a great idea for you to have both options. So when I want a live sound I roll up the carpets and put them away. When I want a deaden it down I roll out the carpet. With the ceiling, I'm going to show you in a little while, the ceiling, I've used this egg crate. Now many folks think that by stapling up a bunch of this egg crate, "Hey my neighbors aren't going to hear the band", this is not the case. Egg crate is so light and let's go back to what I was talking about before. Mass stops sound, only mass. Egg crate does nothing for stopping sound, however, it does stop the sound from bouncing around inside your room, and it deadens your room. So we're going to use some of this egg crate and in the next segment I want to show you how I built a whole separate room inside of my studio with this egg crate to get maximum absorption and deadness."