DIY Home Studio Project

This blog is going to serve as a complete progress report of my home studio project, starting in about 2 weeks time.

From entering the empty room for the first time, up to having a semi-pro studio setup at home, which could take up to 6 months.

Keep checking back for photos of the progress, technical details of building and installation, costs of labour, materials and equipment.
(Keep in mind that I live in South Africa - so some of the equipment will be more expensive than US or UK, but the labour costs much less.)

I am going to try and do this as cheap as possible, so it will probably serve as an example of setting up a decent but affordable home studio that could possibly make you some money one day.

In no way am I an authority in home studio building, but I am going to try and detail all problems, obstacles and decisions I may come across during the project. Lets all learn together!

Check back here for my first instalment of "BUILDING A HOME STUDIO FOR DUMMIES".
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17 April 2008

Day 1 - Started stripping the room. Removed a big cupboard with Winnie the Pooh doorhandles. Removing Light-fittings. Sanded down and covered teddy bear motive paintings running around walls. Carpet is ugly and old - will replace that next week after basic painting.

The room is an odd shape, and I hope that it does not mess around with the acoustics too much:

I hope that I won't have to spend too much on bass traps etc due to the weird size.

With a basic furniture layout I'm hoping something like this:

I am just painting the walls white for now. It is all concrete (very thick too!) and I am still contemplating if I should put wood panelling up or not. The door is not great - and opens up into the room and blocking where I want to position the couch. I am in good time replacing the standard door with a sealing door that rather opens to the outside.

Cost escalation at this point is not much: The painter is painting the whole house, but I could probably work on a percentage per room working out to about R250 ($32 or £16) for this room. The removal of the cupboard was free - I gave it away, and they removed it themselves.

OK - unfortunately that is it for now. I am looking forward to continue sharing the details of this project with you all.

Till next time.

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11 August 2008

OK, it's been a great while since I posted anything at all. My Apologies!

The project is coming along great and I have just been too busy to take pics while I was doing things.
Not particularly interesting watching someone drill holes into walls I guess. Also it is happening a lot quicker than I thought, considering I have only final touches left before its all done!

Here's the current progress report:
We have moved into the new house 2 months ago, and since then I have been doing bits and pieces to get the studio up and running.

Painting was done and moisture issues were resolved.

Carpets were put in.

Furniture in place, equipment rigged up. I still need a 2meter wide desktop to fit on top of my smaller table that was right for the old house but the bigger room now requires something wider.

I had my power supply malfunction on my M-Audio ProjectMix. I need to go buy a new one. Strange - it is the second power supply breaking on me from M-Audio products. They need to sort that out!

Acoustic absorbsion panels were installed along the back of the room and it looks WICKED! They are mounted by drilling a wooden panel into the wall that has an tapered edge at the top and the actual panel has a matching edge facing down to wedge into the mounted panel. Sounds confusing but I will upload pics soon.

See the image of the floorplan I had to draw up for the manufacturer of the acoustic panels. He installed 6 panels at R650 ($90) each. They have layers of compressed FibleGlass, Foam, Press-wood and a beautiful black stretch material over it all.

Foam diffusion panels were mounted on the front wall behind where the monitors will be. These I got for free from the acoustics guy!

Purchased the Monitor (Speaker) Wall Mounts - installing that later this week. Complicated assembly... These were R1500 ($195) for both. I have acoustic foam base layers for the monitors to rest on as well (another freebie).

Light fittings purchased and after trying a DIY on installing and nearly taking out the whole grid with sparks and flames, I am phoning an electrician to do it rather before I blow something up! These were R300 ($40) for 2 lights without the electrician's future costs.

The sound-proof glass is being installed tomorrow - I will not be there while it is happening, but here's the basic. 6.67mm laminated glass will be be installed into the existing steel frames with a foam cushion layer to eliminate sonic frequency boom. Instead of normal putty it will be secured with silicone for strength and flexibility and it adds a bit of a sound-proofing quality to the sealing as well. It is going to cost about R6000 ($780).

Wide and thick wooden blind were chosen from a catalogue and I need to place the order for installation in a few weeks time.

Other than the fact that I have to purchase a few good studio microphones and a decent 5-string bass guitar, there is not much other financial layout left for this project. A few good mics and guitar will probably set me back as much as this project has cost me so far, but that can wait for a few months... I have some basic condenser mics and very old 4-string, so the recording can carry on like that until there's money again.

OK - thats about it for now - watch this space for some photos soon!

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18 August 2008

Just a few notes related to the studio setup that I felt are interesting to mention:

I am running Mac (in particular - a Macbook Pro 2.16 with 2GB RAM) and was busy setting up and wiring up everything this weekend. I have had in storage an old Powerbook G4 12" 1ghz with 1GB RAM. It was hit by lightning last year and it was pretty fried. I pulled it out and checked if it was salvageable. The one USB port is gone, also the modem is fried and the optical drive is not happy either. Network port and HD still fine, including the RAM and other essential bits. After many hours of struggling, I managed to load OS10.5 on it and it runs great! So now I have 2 machines in the studio. This is significant because of the following:
1. OS10.5 has this great little utility called Screensharing. I have set up the Powerbook on top of my Keystation Pro 88 Keyboard on the other side of the room. Besides the fact that the Keystation has transport control and many other assignable buttons and sliders, I can now also fully access the main computer with Logic, Reason etc with the trackpad from the other side of the room. This is truly awesome and saves from jumping up and changing things all the time!
2. Also, Logic has a utility called Logic Node, which allows you to share processing power over a network. That means that the little Powerbook can now help out processing some of the effects and filters that take up a lot of power on the Macbook Pro.

Another software tool I use in the studio is a little program called Salling Clicker. It is a remote control program that uses your Bluetooth cellphone as a remote control for your Mac. It also works over Wi-fi should your phone support it. It also works on PC by the way. This software is fully scriptable. I have downloaded scripts that can control Logic, Protools, Garageband etc. This means that I can sit on the couch on the other side of the room with my guitar and press record remotely too. VERY HANDY! Check it out at http://www.salling.com . It does not work on iPhone yet, but there's other software called RemoteBuddy that does the same thing for the iPhone, Apple Remote and even some media remotes that are intended for the iPod like the Belkin and Griffin remotes. If you want to step it up a bit check this out: http://www.folabs.com/proremote.html .

Hardware wireless solutions in the studio are expensive and normally have minimal functions on true flexibility on how much you can control anyway, so why not use things you already have, like your phone - the software solutions like Salling Clicker and RemoteBuddy are very cheap (+-$25), although the ProRemote is $150.

So - considering that I am wiring things up, it must mean that the studio is nearly complete, right? RIGHT!
Only thing that remains is installing Logic on Wednesday, when it arrives, and installing the blinds whenever that arrives.

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27 August 2008

OK - I finally took delivery of Logic Studio yesterday!
WOW - apart from playing with it a little bit in the store I knew it was going to be cool, but not like this!
It is truly incredible software and a huge improvement from Logic 7. All my hardware settings were detected automatically, I had to do very little to get things going. The only thing I am not sure about is Logic Node. I installed it on the other computer and it is running, but how do I know what and how much it is doing from the host computer?

Anyway - it is awesome and my ProjectMix I/O works great it! Reason rewires into it flawlessly too!