Setting up your room
How to set up and treat your room for mixing.
Perhaps the most important element in recording and mixing music is being able to properly hear exactly what you are working on. This has to do with a lot of things like choice and placement of speakers, room shape and size, listening position, and amount of treatment. The more acoustically sound your environment is, the better you will be able to make judgments about the sounds you’re hearing.
The first thing you want to do is figure out where your listening position will be. This is the place your head will be at when you are mixing. Generally, the best spot for this is at about 38% of the longest dimension of your room. So if your room is 20 feet long, your listening position will be 7.6 feet from the front wall and 12.4 feet from the back wall.
Once you figure out where your listening position is, you need to figure out where to put the speakers. The goal is to create an equilateral triangle between you and the speakers as illustrated by the green triangle in the picture below. For near-field monitors, you are going to want the speakers about 4-5 feet apart, and therefore, 4-5 feet from you as well. Measure from your ears to the center of the speaker cones and also measure the distance between the center of the two speaker cones. If each measurements are all the same, then you’re in the ‘sweet spot’.
Other notes on speaker placement:
- The drivers of your speakers should be at ear level.
-Avoid putting speakers in corners or right up against a wall, if possible, pull them out some.
-If your speakers are sitting on your desk, use some kind of padding do decouple them.
-Angle your speakers so they are pointed directly behind your head, so when you lean back they are pointed at your ears.
Treatment –
Now that you have your listening area set up, you need to deal with how it reacts with the room. The most important things you need are bass traps in the corners and absorption panels at the first reflection points.
For bass traps you want to use panels that are at least 2’x4’ and 4” deep made of Owens Corning 703 or something similar like mineral wool or rock wool. For absorption panels you will need the same materials, but you can get away with it being 2” deep. Panels should be covered with a lightweight material that will allow sound through. You can purchase room kits from places like RealTraps.com or GIKacoustics.com or you can make your own for fairly cheap.
Placing panels –
Place bass traps in the corners of the room, ideally in every 90degree angle in the room, but at least in the 4 main corners as shown in the picture below.
Place absorption panels at your first reflection points. The first reflection points are the places where sound is bouncing directly from the speakers to the walls to your ear. Basically on the walls next to your ears, the ceiling above your head, and in front of and behind you. The red lines indicate the path of sound for the first reflections on your sides. One way to determine your first reflection points is to place a mirror on the wall, adjust it so that you can see your speaker in it from the listening position and that is where the first reflection point is.
Once you’ve done all this, you can take your room to the next level with some diffusion. I don’t know much about this, but from what I understand, you put it at the back of the room and it spreads the sound frequencies out.
Of course every room is different and you may need to adjust accordingly. For example, I have found that my room reacts better if I have my speakers firing down the shorter dimension of my room. If possible, try some different setups.