Your workspace is very important and should not be shared with other activities if possible. A wall of a bedroom or hobby room will do fine if you have nowhere else to set up your system but the ideal, especially if you wish to record with microphones, would be to use a spare room as a home recording studio. A garage is far from ideal because dirt and damp may damage your equipment, also the doors will not stop sound from outside and metal doors will ruin any attempt to make a good recording.





Set up your recording equipment - computer, input channel or mixer and monitor speakers - along the middle area of a wall if you can. Corners of rooms make bass louder (bad for monitoring, even if you love bass) and should be avoided. Monitors (speakers) should be mounted at ear level and should form a triangle with your head so that you can hear the stereo image accurately (see diagram). The worst place you can fix them is high up in each corner of a wall.

An echoey room makes a poor workspace, so it makes sense to dampen the echoes if necessary. If you are planning to use part of a bedroom, the bed and other fixtures such as curtains will dampen the sound quite well. An empty spare room will need some treatment to dampen the echoes, a thick carpet and some curtains will help but may not be enough.

Using egg boxes. If you have heard the myth about using egg boxes to dampen down sound reflections, forget it! It is a complete waste of time.