Can You Improvise On Everything? - Building My First Studio

My first studio

Ever since I started playing the saxophone professionally and engaging in music studio sessions, I have always wanted to build a small space for myself where I can explore music, creating and recreating pieces.

I however could not achieve that until I started earning significantly. And this only started to happen when I finished medical school.

A significant part of the little free time I had while I was in medical school was spent playing live music, playing at concerts or gigs, setting up sound for events and the likes. So I pretty much had some basic knowledge of sound engineering and music.
Buy I had never set up a space for a music studio before.

Playing at a dinner party during my medschool days. This event happened in the heat of clinical postings. Activities like this kept me sane.

When I started my internship at the University College Hospital Ibadan, I was privileged to be given access to a room to stay while I interned (yeah, it's a privilege to have what should be yours unfortunately sometimes in Nigeria🥲).

It was a self-contained one-room apartment. That simply means the room including the kitchen and toilet spaces are baked in together with just partitions.

My room was on the last room on the first floor

I decided to take this opportunity to sample what building a small studio space looks like.

After doing a paint job (done by a friend of mine) - painted white with a dominant saxophone graffiti in the central part of the workspace wall, I bought some equipment which I considered basic.

The Graffiti wall painting in the background

The equipment I got include:

• A cheap studio microphone (BM-800) with cables and a boom.
• A Behringer U-Phoria UMC22 soundcard (to get high quality sound from my microphone ro my laptop)
• A Laptop
• A Microphone Sound Isolator (the room was echoey already)
• A Midi Keyboard
• American Audio Headsets
• A workspace table with leather padding
• A full room acoustic carpet (basically a thick carpet)
• A Window Air Conditioner
• Bright room lights.
• A Cheap Studio Chair
• A Quality Mini multipurpose HiFi Speaker
• A lot of cables

I already had my saxophone and my bass guitar, so they just took their positions.

After purchasing these I arranged them in place and began creating music in the space after a while.

I also shot some videos from there when I could.

It's been over 2 years since I built that space. Being in my current studio space there are a few lessons I learnt from building my first studio space.

Here are some of them (I also included solutions to these problems):

1. In Media and Content Production, GREAT AUDIO is almost always king

It is a common saying for video creators to say something in the line of "valuing your audio even over your video quality" and it's true. If you produce video and the audio is bad, it puts the consumer off immediately.
I didn't pay so much attention to producing pristine clear audio during recording sessions. I discovered I had apparently ignored important aspects of ensuring I had good sound. Some of them include:

• Having a Noisy Air Conditioner. Most of the time I had to resort to putting it on and off in between recording takes, because I could not open my windows because of external noise and the weather was usually hot.

ARROW: The Noisy AC

SOLUTION: Get at least a split AC which can guarantee you little to no noise while recording and still cool the room even more effectively.

• Lack of room acoustic treatment: I never thought I would need beyond my carpet and the microphone noise isolator. I still recorded significant amounts of echo and noise despite using this. Now I have discovered this to be super important from experience in my new studio.

SOLUTION: Get at least a few Original acoustic foams in your recording space. THEY HELP!

• Microphone Quality: I bought a Generic BM 800 microphone as my first studio microphone and it honestly works well. It however still has limitations. The frequencies are not well distributed and its too sensitive. It picks even noises from as little as a touch on the body of the microphone.

SOLUTION: The BM 800 was good but I would have pushed a little bit more to at least something like the Behringer C1 if I had the money. Get the best for your budget, but know how to work around getting the most out of it. That was what I did.

The BM 800 microphone mounted on the sound isolator

2. Lighting Problems:

I wasn't thinking too much about lighting when I first built this studio. I thought the bright harsh central bulb light was all I needed. I was smart enough however to have painted my walls white. That already helped the visuals in the room pop. But I could not get cinematic professional looking videos without using lighting equipment.

SOLUTION: Invest in lighting if you intend doing video content in your space. It doesn't have to be the expensive stuff. Basic Ring Lights work! They were my first lighting equipment.

3. Invest in equipment that can have multiple uses:

I got this one right, but I didn't apply this principle well enough. I bought this HiFi Speaker which I used as a sort of studio speaker sometimes for music playback. It also doubled as a woofer for my bass guitar (the frequency range was quite good). I also sometimes rented it out for small events because it came with microphones and the sound production was quite good and loud.

My HiFi multipurpose Speaker. I still use it for my bass guitar till date

Looking back I have learned from that.
Now, from my smartphone to my videography to my devices, I selectively bought them all to serve at least more than 1 purpose. A good example is my smartphone. I invested into a phone that had good cameras, good display, multitasking ability, a stylus and much more. My phone alone is a MOUNTAIN of creativity for me!

I did a review of it recently.

4. Overbuying:

Yes! Despite having a tight budget to spend on back then, there were things I did not absolutely need. I bought a mini mixer back then, which I NEVER REALLY USED🤣.
I just sold it recently. I thought I would need to do multichannel recording, but I never did even with the fact that I once hosted a podcaster for his Podcasts in my space. I never had need of it all through my stay there.

The mini mixer I "overbought"

SOLUTION: There are some things you just don't need. Invest in the best versions of what you need first!

5. Your worst content might be the best, so just start!

After purchasing equipment, I did not produce anything for a while because I thought I did not have all it took.
I only realised that I had more than enough already when a friend who was a professional podcaster decided to use my space to record his Podcasts.

Setting Up for my friend's podcast.

Some of the episodes we recorded:

See more at https://www.littlebitsofstuffwithnick.com/

It was a great success despite the limitations! That was when I took production and recording more serious and started making content.

I did this video after realising I could do a lot with what I had on ground

Just do something - put good effort into it though. A not too good content is and will always be better than nothing!

Throw the excuses away, get up and do something about those plans in your head today!

You want to know how I built my current studio?

Stay tuned!

The New Studio