Designing the ultimate home studio

Image by Thorsten Frenzel from Pixabay

When designing a room, you need to balance and prioritize certain aspects against each other. For a home studio, I consider the following three to be the most important: 1) Acoustics, 2) Aesthetics and 3) Functionality. I am currently building my fourth home studio in my garage. Each iteration has had a different priority order and the results have varied accordingly. As with any project, you need to write down the purpose of the room, to understand how the parameters should be rank ordered. In this article, I will describe what I have learned from my different home studios.

I built my first “real” home studio when I bought my first house and had the opportunity to dedicate a whole room to creating music. It was a dream come true and back then, the priority was crystal clear to me. I was going to design the best possible acoustics possible, which certainly was possible considering my own background and extended network. This first studio had the priority order Acoustics first, Functionality second, and Aesthetics wasn’t even considered at all. I covered the windows and front half of the room with sound absorbers, according to the “dead front – live end” design principle. And indeed, the sound quality of the room was impeccable, its functionality was great, and I got a lot of mileage out of it. But it looked terrible. It was not a nice place to be. The room was dark and constantly messy, and I felt like it impaired my creativity. I learned that you need balance to design a good room. Acoustics at all costs clearly wasn’t the optimal design principle.

When designing the second and third home studio I had moved to an apartment, which means that there’s just not enough rooms to completely dedicate one of them to the purpose of creating music. That means I had to design a multi-purpose room using the living room as a base. This time, I put Aesthetics as the highest priority, did what I could with the Acoustics without infringing on the looks of the room, and function got the lowest priority, due to the room’s dual usage as a living room. I installed custom made designer furniture with speaker stands and mounted a 40” computer screen on the rig and illuminated the whole thing with spotlights and ambient lights.  Considering the design priorities, both these rooms were a great success. They were among the best-looking home studios I have ever seen, and the sound quality was very good. But because the functionality was severely lacking, neither of these rooms got any serious mileage. With functionality I mean that you need to have all your stuff connected and prepared, which requires space. In a multi-purpose living room this means unacceptable cluttering. But it also means that you have to connect and prepare anything before you can use it, and then put it away when you are done. This adds at least 5-10 minutes each session but probably more.

Now I am in the process of creating my fourth home studio and this time I will prioritize like this: Functionality above all, Aesthetics second, and Acoustics third. I am now a father, husband and a business owner with two Labradors, so you can easily understand why I put Functionality at the top of the list. If I add just five minutes of setup and teardown, the room usage will go down to zero instantly. The room must work like this: Flick the power switch and GO! Everything is connected and prepared. I cannot over-state how important this is, if you intend to use the room on a daily basis. It is equally important with regards to creativity. When creativity strikes, you need to attend to it instantly. For example, if you get a song in your head, but you need to connect cables and computers for 15 minutes, by the time you get your rig running the inspiration will be long gone. In my current room I am designing a workplace where I am surrounded by equipment and tools on all four sides, with everything I need in an arm’s reach. So clearly, it won’t be pretty, but just like a BMW motorcycle or a McLaren car, there is another kind of beauty when the functionality shines through so strongly. It all depends on the purpose. And the purpose of my home studio is to use it in very short (~15 minutes) daily sessions.

I still use my Zaor designer desk that would easily fit in a million dollar studio (it’s equally functional as beautiful), but I pair it with some old HiFi speakers from the ´90s and a dirt cheap 2nd hand computer monitor with a big bright dead pixel and a bunch of others stuff that I got basically for free. When I am done with the room, it’s probably what Mad Max´s home studio would have looked like. The functionality is already leaps and bounds ahead all of my previous rooms and every time I enter, I get this pleasant feeling that this is indeed a creative space.

I think I got the home studio concept nailed now. My wife calls it a man-cave.