As me, most people start of creating music in the comfort of their own home, since most of us do not have the financials to build or rent a studio.

Over the years, I have gathered a few tricks that I share with you, here and now.

To understand how to create an (as) optimal (as you can get at home) environment you need to know what happens to the sound in a room. And not as your ear hears it, but as the microphone registers it.

As you might have already read in the “What is Sound?”-section of Guide of Sound, you know that each soundwave has a (or rather many) frequency. The frequency is measured as the length it takes for a cycle to complete (or the distance between two wave tops). The reason for bringing this up again is that should you, in your room, have two parallel surfaces, say two walls or the floor and the roof, there is a fixed distance between those surfaces. As your sound travels through the room, it will bounce back and forth on all hard surfaces, and if you are unlucky, your sound source emits a frequency that is an exact match (or double, or triple, or quadruple etc) of the length between two parallel surfaces in your room. This cause a “standing wave” and it boosts the amplitude of this particular frequency, making it louder than every other frequency your sound source have emitted. So you have to watch out for standing waves (in reality, it is hard to create them at home, but you should be aware of them).

What is far more common at home is that you have hard surfaces here and there, like the walls, a painting with cover glass, bookshelves, a roof and a floor, windows, furniture etc.

On every flat and hard surface the sound wave have the opportunity (and it will use it) to bounce off in another direction. This is what causes the sound of the room giving the room its character. In most cases (far from all cases) the sound of the room is unwanted, so you have to listen to how your room sounds through a microphone before you start making changes.

Put the mic where you intend to use it to capture your sound source. Listen in headphones while you stand in front of the mic clapping or snapping your fingers or create a noise with your mouth (I will not assume you can sing).

You will probably hear that even if you stand rather close to the mic, you will have (unwanted) support from the room itself, giving your sound source its own colour and ambience.

In cases where the ambience is indeed unwanted, there are a number of things you can do to reduce it. Be creative, use your imagination and stuff you have at home.

Here are a bunch of stuff you can try:

• Break parallel surfaces. Use what you’ve got, if you have a bookshelf with books (or movies or CD’s), make sure that they are standing irregularly (yeah, I know, it looks terrible, but it will help to break the sound waves from bouncing around in your room).
• Put pillows or a mattress on the floor, cover things with blankets and other soft materials.
• Cover windows (no not on your computer screen) with curtains or blankets.
• Open your wardrobe and put the mic in front of it, so you actually sing(?) straight into your closet.
• Use your winter clothing and put it all over the room.
• Turn the TV or computer screen so its flat hard surface does not face another flat and hard surface.
• Towels, if you have read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know you should never be without a towel, spread them around together with your clothes, defy your mother and build small piles with clothes here and there on the floor and on the tables. Does not matter if they are clean or not.
• Turn a bookshelf and pad the back with your mattress and pillows and blankets, creating a small, isolated (well padded) space to put your mic to minimize the room ambiance.

In other words, use what you’ve got. All soft materials will help to break the bouncing of the sound creating less ambience, giving you a more dry signal from your sound source.

Don’t forget to listen to the mic in your headphones as you keep making the changes in your room, so you know how it affects the character of the room!

I often get the question: Which microphone is the best, or What microphone should I use, I want just one that is good for everything!

My reply is very often: How long is a piece of string?

The most common answer to that is: It depends!

And there you go! There is your answer!

It depends on what you are after!

Many seek the perfect and clear microphone sound, only to realize that it wasn’t what they were looking for. Many microphones that have been used throughout recording history that has been widely used is because they have a certain character, giving a certain sound. So in order to help you in your choice of microphone I will go through the simplified basics of different types of microphones.

Please note that this is the simplified basics, if you want to go in depth on microphones you can do so for several hours. Which is true for just about anything… 🙂

First of all – a microphone contains a membrane that registers the vibrations (or movements) in the air. It is the equivalent of our ear. So, a microphone is the ear of the audio recording chain.

Dynamic vs. Condenser Microphones

In very general terms.

*Dynamic mic’s does not need a power source, the membrane react to the movements in the air and induces a current that can be recorded.

This makes the membrane heavier to move and you often need more energy in the sound to be able to get it registered by the membrane.

*Condenser mic’s does need a power source, either a battery inside the mic itself (usually 9V battery), or phantom powered by the equipment it is connected to (usually 48V).

Since it’s already driven by power, the membrane can register smaller changes in the air, making it more sensitive that a dynamic mic (in general).
Keeping above in mind, should you want to record gentle sounds, condenser mic’s would be the natural choice, with the downside that it is more sensitive for transients (spikes) that can cause unwanted distortions. Condenser mic’s are often more clear in their sound with less colouring.

Should you want to record that are very dynamic in it’s range, rich with transients, the natural choice would be a dynamic mic. And dynamic mic’s often have their own character (all mic’s do, not only dynamic) and colouring of the sound.

To make it more complicated, I want to add two more aspects, membrane size and microphone characteristics.

The size of the membrane on the microphone is also essential as to how it registers the movements in the air. A smaller membrane often has less span to move in, making unwanted distortions more common as a result of transients in the sound.

As to where a bigger membrane often has more room for movement, making the risk for unwanted distortions due to transients less (although, that risk is always present).

Larger membrane usually gives a cleaner or cleared sound than a smaller membrane.

Microphone characteristics. This one is tricky. There are a lot of variations on how and where the microphone has it’s “optimal pickup range” in terms of direction of the sound. There are omnidirectional mics that reacts to sounds in every directions, there are directed mics that reacts to sound in a specific direction and there are variations in between. The important thing is that you know what characteristic the mic you are using have, so you can use it and place your sound source within the “optimal pickup range” of the mic.

Bear in mind (no, not beer in mind) that above is very general basics, and there are unlimited variations and examples that you can find proving above wrong by comparing different microphones. So keep reading and look for input from other sources to get a better understanding of microphones.

Last but not least, microphone usage.

General thumb rules are:

*The closer to the sound source, the greater risk for unwanted distortion, but also less of the surrounding sounds and the room itself.

*The longer from the sound source, the less risk for unwanted distortion, but also more of the surrounding sounds and the room itself.

This being said, use your creativity and experiment. Where and how do you get the sound you are looking for? Closer to the mic, or from a distance? Does it sound better if you stand in front of the mic or behind it? What happens if you mix one take in front of the mic with one take behind the mic? (Yeah, I am serious about that question!)

There is no such thing as using the mic wrong (unless you want to use it as a hammer to drive nails into the wall). Does it sound good, you are using it right. If it doesn’t sound good, change the way you are using it until it sounds goood. And by sounds good I mean sounds good in your ears!

One more quick note regarding mics. Frequency. Different mics have different frequency curves, which means that they are meant for different purposes. I.e. a large membrane mic is better at capturing low frequencies than a small membrane mic. Look at the mic’s frequency curve to match your sound source, but don’t be afraid of experimenting with mic’s. Who knows, maybe it is a good idea to record song with a mic meant for picking up kick drums? (Yeah, I am serious about that question too!)

A very simplified explanation would be that any sound source created vibrations that propagates through the air. Even if it’s not completely true, closer to reality would be saying it causes compressions and thinning of the air. But let’s stick with vibrations for now, or even better, waves (as in soundwaves).

These waves moves like a chain reaction in the air.

When the waves reach our ear, it affects the tympanic membrane in the ear that causes a chain reaction in the mechanical part of the ear, eventually creating tiny electrical signals that our brain interprets as sound.

If we look at ourselves, our primary source of sound is the glottis in the throat. As we push air through our throat we control the glottis (or vocal cords) to vibrate and those vibrations propagates through our throat, up in the scull, getting acoustic resonance support from different chambers inside our skull and throat, finally formed by the shape and movements of our mouth and lips, exciting as spoken or sung words, or what ever we are aiming at to mimic.

Should we look at technology, the equivalent of the our glottis would be a loudspeakers. Their purpose is to get the air moving and recreate the waves (the sound) we want to listen to again. And on the other side, the equivalent of our ear would be the microphone that captures (records) the waves (the sound) we want to recreate and listen to again.

Now that we know that sound is waves that are transported through the air (or any other matter, but let’s not get into that now) there are two more things we need to understand about these waves. Amplitude and frequency.

If we look at the amplitude first. This is a way of determine the energy or the force of the wave. How hard it will hit the membrane (or ear). The harder the impact, the louder we experience the sound.

The scale the amplitude is measured in is decibel. Or deciBel, dB for short.

Now, there are a million (well, not a million, but many) different dB scales, depending if you measure the pressure of the sound or if you are into digital or analog recording, or looking at the actual electrical signal that the soundwaves generate. There are a lot of material to read about decibel, and you can start by reading the wiki article if you are interested to know more about it. It may look like greek, but it is the reason why I do not go in depth with it.

The lower the energy the sound, the lower dB value it will get (no matter what scale you use) and the more silent we experience the sound (as do the microphone).

The more energy in the sound, the higher dB value it will get (no matter what scale you use) and the louder we experience the sound (as do the microphone).

There are two aspects of amplitude that you need to be aware about. The first located in the silent part of the scale and the other in the loud part of the scale.

I start with the loud part of the scale.

Should the sound contain very much energy it is very loud, and may cause damage in our ears. Too much exposure may cause permanent damage to the ears.

As for microphones, even if the membrane not very often break due to too much energy in the sound, it still causes unwanted distortions in the signal, since the membrane can not move past it’s maximum range, even if there is more energy that keeps pushing on it.

This results in a clipped signal which you can see (if you use some kind of audio recording software) as a straight line on the soundwave.

When the energy is too much for the membrane to handle is very individual. You’ll need to test your microphone and find the boundaries it has.

General thumb rule is mic close to sound source gives a greater risk of unwanted distortion, too far from source gives too much of reflecting sound in the room, rather than the sound source itself (which may not always be unwanted).

On the other end of the scale there is when the sound is too silent. Every electronic (analog or digital) component has it’s own noise. The lower the better. And of course the lower the components self noise, the more expensive it gets (in general). If you want to read more about this, look for signal/noise ratio. The basic principle is that you want the sound from your sound source to be louder than the noise that the components emit. Much louder. A low quote between the signal and the noise means that the unwanted noise from the equipment is a big part of your wanted sound (the noise pollutes your signal).

Frequency. This is the last aspect of what sound is (that I will go into here).

The scale you measure frequency is Hertz (Hz) and what it measures is the distance between two cycles. Should you compare it to waves on the ocean, the frequency would be the distance from the top of one wave to the top of the next wave. The longer distance between the tops, the lower frequency. The shorter distance between the waves, the higher frequency. (Same example with amplitude would measure the height of the waves, the higher a wave, the more energy, giving a high dB, the lower the wave, less energy, giving a low dB.)

A low frequency gives a low (dark) sound and a high frequency gives a high (light) sound. If you sit in front of a piano, you have darker (lower) tones to your left. They have lower frequency. And to your right you have lighter (higher) tones. They have higher frequency.

The human ear can catch frequencies from 20 Hz (the lowest) and 20 000 Hz (often written as 20 kHz as in 20 kilo (1000) Herz). As we age, most of us lose the highest frequencies.

Different sound sources emit noise in different spectra of the frequency range. I.e. the human voice has a span of 200 Hz to 3000 Hz (3kHz) – roughly, a violin that has about the same range as here a cello goes from 65 Hz to 1050 Hz, and a piccolo flute around 550 Hz to 4000 Hz (4 kHz).

A strange thing about most sound sources is that you have the pitch of the sound (the precise vibration it causes) but it is not only that frequency of that tone you hear, the sound is built up by overtones and subharmonics in different combinations, which adds up to the whole character of the sound.