You don't need to spend big bucks renting a professional recording studio. Instead, use these helpful hacks to improve your home audio recordings.

There is a lot you can do with recording audio at home to make it sound comparable to a costly recording studio. From the perfectly placed sofa to constructing your own mic stand, you can easily improve your home studio with a lot less than you think.

Before diving into the DIY hacks below, it's worth knowing a little about the field of acoustic treatment. Here you'll find information on absorption, diffusion, standing waves, and mirror points. By understanding a bit about these concepts, you will be able to target problems in your recording space and use the following DIY tricks to help solve the issue. If you want to know more about acoustic treatment ideas, head over to the website Soundfly.

If you've visited a recording studio before, you may have noticed a sofa in the engineer's room. Besides making the control room cooler to hang out in while everyone listens to the mix, it serves a useful purpose. It works to absorb some unwanted audio reflections in the room and where it does this the best is at the back of the mixing room, behind where you sit at your mixing desk.

A bookshelf placed along the back wall behind the listening position will also help diffuse sound reflections. Aim to arrange your books, CDs, and odd bits of gear in a way that leaves gaps that are several inches deep. This works on high-frequency sounds in particular, which is useful if you have a room that sounds particularly 'ringy'.

While making physical changes to your recording space with furniture you already have is a great way to save on costs, you can also do the same with digital assets. Here are some authentic websites to download free VST plugins and instruments.

Electric cables can produce an audible hum that, while barely noticeable on a regular day, can be a pesky problem in your audio recordings. Before recording any instruments, start by recording the sound of your empty room to see if there's anything in particular that is getting picked up by the mics. If not required, unplug any electronics such as TVs in sleep mode and charging cables not in use. Needless to say, unplugging air conditioners and heat pumps is a good idea, and cooling fans on a computer are also something to watch out for.

Dealing with bass frequencies in your home studio can be one of the most challenging problems, and it's generally agreed that you can't go wrong with having too many bass traps. Or in other words, thick acoustic panels that stop bass frequencies building up in the room. If you think you can tackle bass frequencies by gluing foam to your walls, you will be disappointed: if you take that route, you will need some seriously thick wedges of foam to do a good job.

Luckily, a combination of air and foam works just as well, so in other words taking a 4-inch piece of foam and placing it 4-inches away from the wall is just as effective as an 8-inch thick foam piece. Building bass traps isn't particularly difficult, but commercial outfitters are expensive because of the time involved with custom-building and fitting them in your home.

To make them yourself, it's a matter of building a wooden box and fitting it with a dense foam material or Rockwool, making sure to leave a gap of air at the back. Sound on Sound magazine has covered DIY bass traps/acoustic panels many times over the years, making it a great starting point.

A quick fix to a noisy recording environment at home is to hop inside a wardrobe or closet and record your vocals there. Leave your coats hanging up as it will aid in absorbing echoes and reflections. If you're not convinced of this method, then take a listen to the incredible vocal material used in the science-fiction film Dune (2021). Singer Loire Cotler captured the signature sound while sitting inside a closet with her laptop balanced on a cardboard box.

Aim for a clean recording that's free of background sounds, as you can always add back artificial reverb in post-production. Don't have a wardrobe? Then another DIY solution is to throw a duvet blanket over a portable clothesline to create a recording nook that keeps out unwanted noise.

Speaker stands are not just for looks: placing your speakers on their own stand stops sound waves from reflecting off your working desk, helping to improve your overall listening experience. It also gives you the advantage of arranging the speakers for the perfect audio sweet spot; usually by creating an equilateral triangle with the two speakers angled towards your head.

Avoiding expensive store-bought speaker stands, you can build your own out of scrap wood, concrete cinder blocks, or an old PA stand. Whatever method you decide to use, make sure to position the tweeter (i.e. the speaker cone that produces the high frequencies) in line with your ears.

Whether you're recording vocals, a podcast, or a voiceover, using a microphone pop filter will ensure you get clean takes. If you're not familiar with the idea, pop filters do exactly as they say: they filter harsh and loud 'plosive' sounds that come from the letters p, t, k; b, d, g. Left alone, plosives can cause your recording to clip, making it useless in the final mix.

Save some money and make your own pop filter by following this Instructables tutorial, it's easy and affordable, requiring just a pair of stockings, some wire, and an embroidery hoop. If this is your first time getting into audio production at home, make sure to check out our list of the best free music production software.

There is no use holding a microphone in your hand during recording if you're looking to capture professional-sounding audio at home. At the same time, it's not always affordable to add a mic stand to your shopping list. The video above takes an inexpensive IKEA lamp and converts it to a desk-mounted boom mic, one that can easily be maneuvered into position. Perhaps you already have an old lamp at home that's perfect for this DIY conversion.

'S' sounds can be pesky to deal with when recording vocals, and some singers will naturally have a lot more sibilance than others—this also comes through in regular voice-overs and podcasts. You can buy a plug-in or software to remedy the problem, or you can deal with it at the source. It may sound like an old wives' tale, but Sound On Sound suggests placing a pencil across the microphone and securing it with a rubber band. Second, to this, you can also try covering the gap between your two front teeth with dental wax.

Before you could buy amazing and complex reverb plug-ins, studio engineers would add reverb to their tracks by recording in a room that had natural reverb. Audio plug-in presets titled "Theater", "Church", and "Garage" used to be the actual location where they recorded an instrument to capture different kinds of reverb.

The rock band Foo Fighters recorded the album Wasting Light entirely from a garage, and while their garage is likely to be a lot nicer than yours, the principle is the same. Make use of the different kinds of rooms you have at home and try recording in your hallway, bathroom, or garage for a different sound.

For as long as recording technology has been around, people have engineered creative DIY solutions to make the most out of their home studios. Often, making small DIY changes can have an outsized improvement on the quality of your sound, especially when helping you go from amateur to convincing. While you save up for the ultimate studio gear, try out these tricks to see if you can improve your current sound.

Garling loves exploring creative uses for technology. With a background in music, she spent many years hacking computers to make weird and wonderful sounds. When not making music, she writes about the best DIY electronic projects.

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