Transforming A Bathroom Into A Studio: How We Pulled It Off

If you’ve followed this article series I’ve been posting here, you would have known already that my musical pursuit has made me work harder, because studio time is expensive. But me and my pal Gifter decided to lower the cost further, and that is by choosing to record the vocal parts of our 10-song digital album right in the confines of my own home.

Knowing that we need a soundproof area for it, we chose the bathroom that’s just beside my bedroom.

We think it’s spacious enough.

The house where I currently live is actually my grandma’s house. As of the moment, there are only 3 of us in this rather large house: Me, grandma, and our lady helper. If you count our dogs, then there are actually 6 of us, hehe.

The house is where my family clan usually gathers, and one of the embellishments of this ancestral house is the large bathroom beside my bedroom. It’s around 2.5x3.5 meters – technically large for only 3 residents. It’s actually the larger one of the 2 bathrooms within the house.

Gifter and I debated a bit about whether or not we should record our vocals in that bathroom. Eventually, we both agreed that the recording should take place there since it’s spacious enough.

Doing sleep-depriving research.

I mentioned in my previous articles that Gifter is some kind of a geek – he does very extensive research just to obtain whatever knowledge he needs. That’s normal. What’s not normal however is he does that to the point that he gets little to no sleep at all.

When that happens, that’s how the ‘mother in me’ kicks in. I might be way too small when I stand next to him, but there are times when I literally scold him for not sleeping or eating enough – as a real mom would! There are times when I’d give that litany in which he should rest for a few days if I can sense that he works too much.

But being the stubborn brat he is, he rarely listens. Sure he rests, but only for a few hours. Once he gets some little sleep, he gets back to seeking information about home recording.

After only a few days though, Gifter had enough methods in his head, so we moved on to doing the next step.

Soundproofing the area.

This is the toughest challenge we dealt with. Being the brutal music nazi that he is, Gifter is a very unforgiving perfectionist, if he demands that the bathroom should be as soundproof as a real studio, then it should be as he deems it.

We have no money to buy those expensive sound diffusing foams, so we utilized the following:

• cardboard boxes around the house

• the styrofoam of my keyboards (thankfully, I have 2 keyboards, so we’ve got more than enough styros.)

• packing tape.

We used the following to block the sound that for sure would pass through the bathroom window, and from those little slits in the door. But we had a problem – using cardboard for those slits would make the door so hard to close. It would be such a hassle for me and my grandma.

So we compromised on buying something online, a door sound insulator. For this object, we conceded that we needed to spend on something. Thankfully the thing was very affordable, just at 60 pesos per 2 meters.

We worked on installing these “poor musician’s” amenities for an entire day, not counting the time we allocated for waiting for that insulator we used at the door. I could see Gifter sweating a lot through the entire process, but I can see on his face that he’s smiling a lot like he’s very happy to craft a very brilliant invention.

In my previous article, I mentioned that we recorded 1 song already in a professionally-built studio. We did it for some additional research. What we found out there was that a recording room doesn’t need to be totally soundproof, it just has to be quiet enough that the outside noise wouldn’t penetrate the microphone.

Thankfully, we made it happen in the bathroom… with just cardboard and packing tape. Cool, right?

Solving the reverb problem.

Since the bathroom is made of concrete topped with shiny tiles all-over, there is a huge problem that Gifter told me we have to eliminate – reverb. Being a total newbie to audio recording, I didn’t know what Gifter was babbling about.

He demonstrated it by loudly saying “haaaaaah” inside the bathroom. When I heard that mini-echoing sound from the bathroom walls, it was then that I understood what he meant. I asked him what’s the big deal if such a kind of sound exists.

“Isn’t it enough that the room is soundproof already?” I asked. Gifter then discussed something about eliminating that reflected sound so that only the raw signals of our vocal chords will be picked up by the mic.

According to him, the best way to come up with a clean singing track is for the singer’s voice to be raw. Effects will then be added later using computer software. It was then when I said that Gifter being a geek is truly helpful after all.

So how did we solve the reverb problem in the bathroom? Well, let’s summarize it by looking at this photo.

That box is the cardboard of one of my keyboards, we split it wider, then put some more cardboards that would serve as its floor and ceiling. Inside the box, we push-pinned my keyboard’s bag, to serve as a sound diffuser.

This idea is a product of both of our research, and that makeshift device in the photo served as the recording booth that we used for days as we recorded our vocals.

Gifter’s annoying obsession.

Gifter is still unsatisfied with that setup. He still thinks that sound might still be reflected somewhere else in the bathroom. To solve it, we used my bed cushion. We let it stand vertically behind us as we began singing.

Thankfully, the cushion was thick enough to stand upright as it leaned on a heavy chair. Still worried about other possible reverberation, Gifter took my towels, some bags, and even my laundry basket and placed them strategically in some areas of the bathroom.

These, he said, could diffuse the reflected sound further as it would prevent some minor noises of our body movements from penetrating through the microphone. Oh, if you could only see how annoying he is when he does things such as these.

So how did we sound as inside that bathroom studio? Well, let’s just say it’s a story for another day.

Thanks for reading!

Keep safe everyone.