Transform Your Bedroom Into a Functional Recording Studio

Every 21st-century musician needs to know the ins and outs of setting up a home studio. That's because it's much easier for musicians to record in a personal setting. Learning to turn any space into a studio is a wise step today when nearly any electronic device can function as a digital audio workstation (DAW).

Can you ace a functional bedroom recording setup? Yes! And we'll tell you all the tips and tricks you'll need.

Before we get to the steps, let us clear something up. Is setting up a recording studio in your bedroom a good idea? A small bedroom home recording studio might be the best option if you are just starting recording. We will look at the benefits and steps to create a home recording studio and then at some bedroom studio setup ideas. So let’s read on and find out!

What Is a Bedroom Home Studio Setup?

Any area in your house can be used as a home recording studio. Some utilize home studios to produce simple demos, while others use them to record entire albums. Live musicians can practice solo or in a group in a home studio. Like an art studio shed, a recording studio gives a sense of calm and encourages productivity.

A recording studio in the bedroom lets you make professional-sounding recordings on a budget. No hourly rate means you can take as long as you need to record your song. A simple home studio costs a few hundred dollars, and as your demands and expertise expand, you can buy more expensive equipment.

Finally, controlling your recording environment is a big plus. You can focus on music production without considering deadlines or dealing with the outside environment.

Benefits of a Bedroom Home Recording Studio

Here are some benefits of a bedroom recording studio setup:

Unlimited Time

When recording at a professional studio, you must keep track of time. You have to ensure that you record within the time slot allotted. This can have a negative impact on the quality of your project, as you may feel rushed while recording. A home studio gives you unlimited time to record.

No Need to Travel

Another huge advantage of a bedroom home recording studio is that your traveling time will be reduced. This will be beneficial in the long run as a lot of time can be saved while recording in a home studio. According to research, commuters waste countless hours stuck in traffic every year.

Furthermore, you can start recording whenever you feel like it.

Steps to Make Your Own Recording Studio in Bedroom

Now that you have decided to build your recording studio in your bedroom, the next step is to figure out how to do that. Here are some steps you can follow to build the perfect small-bedroom home recording studio in no time!

Step 1: Pick a Room

If you are setting up a recording studio in one of the bedrooms in your house, chances are you don't have many options. However, you still have to consider some factors while deciding which room can be turned into a recording studio. Setting up the gear is a small part of the process; the important part is the planning. Choosing wisely can benefit you for the years to come.

The aim is to get yourself a place where you can record any time of the day without causing much disturbance to other people living in the house. Another thing to keep in mind is that you will need a place that doesn't get disturbed often. Choose the room furthest from noisy neighbors and family members. You can even get yourself a privacy pod to ensure that you remain undisturbed.

The average residence has multiple bedrooms; therefore, choosing from the numerous options takes time. In this situation, the best way is to select a room that doesn't have negative features rather than looking for rooms with good ones.

A few things you should try to avoid are low ceilings and square rooms. Choosing a room a bit far from the rest can also work wonders. If you don't have any room that you can use, you can look at prefab studio sheds and small prefab cabins. These won’t take up much space in your house and will give you the perfect room for a home recording studio.

Avoid a confined area if possible, as the larger the room, the better. As a bonus, you'll have more room for the band's expanding collection of instruments and gear. Choose the larger room wisely since it will serve you better in the long run.

Step 2: Soundproofing and minimize disruptive noises

It's easy to underestimate background noise until you hear it amplified a hundredfold or more through a microphone. Vehicles, neighbors, plumbing, chirping, breeze, rain, room fans, and air conditioners are noise sources to avoid.

When you're on your artist's chair producing music, these voices can be highly disruptive and distracting. Therefore, picking the quietest room with the slightest noise for your bedroom home studio setup is essential.

Also, you'll need a noise-free area where you may be as loud as you like, whenever you want. Although some soundproofing may be necessary to produce a usable studio setup, it is possible to achieve this goal using a mix of four strategies, including adding mass, damping, decoupling, and plugging air gaps.

If a room is adequately soundproofed, outside noises won't intrude on your sessions, and your noise won't travel outside the walls and bother your neighbors.

Step 3: Clear The Room

Now that you have selected a room, you need to get rid of any and every extra thing in that room. This might be a little difficult as you are using your bedroom as a recording studio, but you should keep only the necessary stuff in the room.

Step 4: Modify The Room

After selecting, clearing, and soundproofing your new small bedroom home recording studio, you will still have to make some modifications to the room. This is to make it suitable for professional recordings. You can start by getting some absorbers for the room. A combination of both resonant and porous absorbers is usually the most effective.

Furthermore, you should also add some acoustic panels and diffusers to your bedroom music studio setup. This step might seem trivial to you initially, but it can prove to be very harmful in the long run.

Step 5: Set up The Gear

To begin recording at home, a few essential studio apartment furniture ideas must be considered. The cornerstones of your studio will be your computer, headphones, displays, connecting cables, and a professional-grade microphone.

The products you'll need are determined by several factors, including the type of sound and quality of recordings you hope to achieve. For instance, when deciding between a USB mic and an XLR mic, there is no "best" option.

Each device has advantages and disadvantages, and the best one to utilize depends on the specific demands of the content creator. A USB microphone is fine for simple tasks like podcasting or recording acoustic guitar, but an XLR mic would be more suited for recording an orchestra or a choir.

After the fundamentals are covered, it's a good idea to look at things like microphone boom arms, which allow for greater flexibility in mic placement, and reflection shields, which reduce the amount of ambient noise picked up by your mic. A "pop filter" is a device that reduces the volume of "plosive" sounds, or air explosions, frequently occurring in vocal recordings.

How you arrange these items is completely up to you. You can experiment with different setup arrangements until you find the one that works the best for you.  There is really no right setup. You just need to keep trying different arrangements until you come to one that works perfectly for you, and then stick to it.

Step 6: Set up Acoustics

Invest in acoustic treatment products to lessen the echo. Get a set of broadband absorption materials from a local music shop or on the web, including four bass traps and two isolation pads. Once you've installed the gear, you may scatter the roughly 30 panels with the broadband absorption kit across the room. The flat walls of your studio can distort the sound coming from your monitors, but you can fix that using absorption screens, bass traps, and diffusing panels.

Using bass traps improves the quality of recorded bass by dampening the vibrations that cause it. A bedroom home studio setup with absorption panels will have less echo than one with diffusion panels installed.

Step 7: Get Everything Ready

The final action is to prepare and set the equipment of your bedroom home recording studio. It includes things like your computer, microphones, audio mixer, etc. There is no "correct" way to arrange things; instead, it all comes down to individual choice. It is recommended to use logic while planning the cables' routing and the objects' placement.

Other Small Bedroom Recording Studio Ideas

While considering bedroom music studio ideas, be sure to look at prefabricated ADU (or called prefab ADU) and home office sheds as well. These let you add extra space to your house that you can use to build your recording studio. The best part is that these are easy to install and allow you to design them however you prefer. 

In conclusion, a bedroom home studio setup helps you save time, improve quality and keep all your gear in the same place. These are usually not very difficult to set up as you just have to choose the right room, clear some space, and make some modifications. Then, all you need to do is to buy your equipment and set it up.

Remember that you can set up your studio however you want to. There are just a few necessary studio gear items that you must include. Other than these, you can select any arrangement you prefer. Even if you get it wrong, you can easily shift things to change them. Lastly, if you cannot find a suitable room to turn into a bedroom home recording studio, consider WorkPod Versatile.