How to build a Raspberry Pi 500 home recording studio: setting up your space
Silent and powerful, Raspberry Pi 500 is a perfect recording studio computer. In the first part of this series from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, we’ll set up a budget-conscious sound-absorbing recording space for vocal and simple instrument recording; next week we’ll bring you part 2, on the equipment you can use to kit it out.
This feature focuses on voice recording and very basic instrument recording – if you need to record a full band on a regular basis, you’re looking at a more involved studio setup with a full room which should lean into techniques like building rockwool panels and bass traps. A garage is both the stereotypical rehearsal and recording space, and a good choice. But if, like us, you don’t have an unused indoor garage going spare, you can turn a wide variety of small spaces into studio environments. We equipped a small nook in a converted loft space next to a flight of stairs.
What you’ll need
- 30×30×5 cm acoustic foam tiles
- 3M VHB 5952 foam tape
- Scissors, scalpel, cutting board
Warning: Only use craft knives to cut tiles or peel off tape backing if you’re steady-handed and comfortable with doing so.
01. Find a space
In principle, when recording voice or acoustic instruments through a free-standing mic, you don’t want to be too near a wall, and you should especially avoid corners. However, the realities of DIY recording spaces that can be created within your average home means that you’ll have to make compromises regarding both what kind of acoustic modifications are practical and permitted to make. You’ll want a space that’s as isolated as possible from external sources of sound, ideally without windows. Pay particular attention to surfaces directly in front of your mics and to the corners of the room. These are where your sound-absorbing material will make the greatest difference.
02. Furniture & gear
You want to work out what furniture and – to a certain extent – equipment is going into place before you start soundproofing. This both allows you to ensure that your furniture will still fit after soundproofing, and that you can soundproof the right spaces. Consider issues that might affect your acoustics and your requirements. Will you primarily be recording voice, or will instruments come into play? What kind of desk and instrument or equipment racks will you have? Will your mic be on a boom arm or on a stand on your desk? Where will you be sitting or standing when you record your voice? What computer equipment will be in place and how much noise does it make?
03. Assess hard surfaces
In our future studio space, a cupboard-lined storage area under a roof, the main reflective surfaces were a hard wall right in front of us, built-in wooden shelves on the left, the wood-surfaced sloped interior ceiling of a pitched roof, and a metal radiator on one wall. In our case, the essential thing to soundproof was the wall right in front of our mic, a hard surface that reflects our voice straight back into the microphone. This alone dramatically improved the quality of our voice recordings, and, in the right space, is a minimum viable acoustic setup.
04. How to mount acoustic foam
If you have walls that reflect sound back into your microphones, which you almost certainly do, you’ll need to soften those surfaces. The easiest way to do this is to use acoustic foam, also known as ‘eggbox foam’. It’s available in sheets, rolls, and tiles. We opted for the latter to add basic acoustic absorption to our walls, largely because it’s easy to fit. Budget eggbox foam tiles usually come vacuum-compressed and can take anywhere from a couple of days to over a week to return to shape. Once they have, apply thick double-sided tape – 3M’s 1.1 mm thick VHB 5952 foam tape is ideal for this. For application to our papered and painted partition wall, 2 cm strips in each corner worked well, but you’ll need more tape for other kinds of surfaces.
05. Take the corner
Pay special attention to corners where walls and ceilings join, as sound bounces between these hard surfaces, creating more unwanted echoes than a flat wall.
If, like us, you’re dealing with irregular, angled spaces, you can cut acoustic foam tiles along the diagonal to meet at the corner and into other shapes to fill inconveniently placed gaps. Note that if you’re going to be sticking tiles upside down or along inverted inclines, such as ceilings beneath a roof, then you’ll need to run longer strips of foam tape along them to ensure good adhesion.
06. Alternative materials: rockwool
Acoustic-specific spun fibreglass insulation – most ubiquitously made by rockwool – is another popular material for acoustic absorption. It’s very cheap, and while acoustic foam mostly absorbs high frequencies, rockwool will also reduce unwanted mid-range and bass frequencies.
However, it’s a skin irritant and obnoxious to work with – you’ll want to wear gloves and a mask. If you install rockwool, you’ll need to cover it with something to keep it from shedding, and it’s also heavier and more challenging to install. Mounting it on wood or making panels to stuff it into is a popular choice, but will require you to drill into your walls, which isn’t always an option in rented accommodation.
07. Panels and air gaps
Professional studio installations often use acoustic panels suspended from the ceilings and walls. That’s a bit much for DIY, but if you’ve got a large enough space – if you’re converting a garage or have an entire room, for example – then free-standing or air-gapped wall-mounted acoustic panels are an outstanding choice. While you ideally want an air gap behind your panel roughly equal to its width, for a home installation this is far less of a concern than simply having acoustic panels at all. If you have woodworking tools and skill, you can build a box, fill it with rockwool, and cover it with fine mesh screen material. However, acoustic screen panels are also an option, whether you DIY them or buy pre-made ones. You’ll find these sold as office furniture as often as you’ll see them described as recording studio gear, and if you can find some being sold off cheaply as furniture, they’re worth considering.
08. Irregular surfaces
Although purpose-made equipment is great, you can dramatically improve excessive sound reflection by hanging curtains on walls and cupboards. Acoustic fabric is best, but at around £20 per metre, you might prefer to see if you can acquire heavy standard curtains made of velvet, fleece, or similar textiles. Favour fabrics that you can’t easily breathe through – anything dense enough to make this difficult can also reflect sound. We used a fur fabric curtain on a built-in cupboard, and an old fleece on an inconveniently located radiator – some people use towels on radiators, and these can ring in response to high-frequency sounds.
09. Flooring
You’ll hear a surprising amount of online debate about how you should approach flooring in a recording environment, with some people suggesting thick carpeting, but the general consensus is that hard floors such as sealed concrete are best. In our budget DIY setup, we found our wooden second-story floor covered with laminate flooring to be absolutely fine, particularly for voice recording and isolated guitars rather than a full band. If you’re going to be recording at a table, it’s genuinely not a major issue.
10. Bass traps
If you are going to be recording instruments – particularly drums, acoustic instruments, or miked-up speakers – then you might want to get into more DIY construction by making bass traps for the corners of your space, as an alternative to buying expensive pre-made ones. You’ll need to build a box at right angles to fit into a corner, stuffing it with rockwool and covering it with strong mesh. For a room-scale studio build, it’s recommended that you stack these from floor to ceiling in each corner, although this isn’t necessarily something you’ll need for a smaller setup. See this DIY bass trap guide from Mastering.com for an example of construction methods.
11. If you can’t build a studio
Recording in your car, already a soundproof space, can be a great stopgap or on-the-road solution if you’re using a portable recorder to make a podcast, but it doesn’t lend itself to a full studio setup.
Also popular is the blanket fort setup, the most bare-bones version of which is a duvet over your head and a sock over your phone’s mic to act as a pop filter. Some podcasters swear by dragging a fleece blanket over both themselves and a USB mic. However, many people find this to be hot, claustrophobic and unpleasant, and it doesn’t work too well for a lot of hardware configurations.
12. Portable acoustic optimisation equipment
If you don’t have space or permission to start putting up acoustic foam tiles or the tools to build movable rockwool-stuffed boxes, you can buy dedicated acoustic absorption screens that’ll fit most mics and can in turn be mounted on a mic stand, which have come down to around £60 in recent years; for instance, t.bone’s Micscreen range. You can also pick up clones for around £30 or potentially DIY something using acoustic foam if you’re handy – we’ve seen builds using spray or hot glue and everything from old ring binders to cardboard or plastic storage crates to mount your foam on.
Check back next week for the next part of this series, where we’ll take you through choosing equipment to kit out the space you’ve set up.
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