Setting Up A Home Studio

Hello and welcome to this Sound On Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and with me is Hugh Robjohns. Hello! And we'll be talking about setting up a basic home studio. To start with, Hugh, what do you consider to be the very minimum equipment that you can use to set up a studio at home? Well, it kind of depends what you're trying to do. But assuming we're talking about a normal studio where you want to record some acoustic things, possibly some instruments, guitars, keyboards, that sort of thing, the minimum requirement is going to be a computer of some sort. That could be anything from, well, an iPhone or an iPad up to a full on desktop computer, a laptop. And then you're going to need some kind of interface to get the audio into the computer and out again and all the interfaces can range from very simple one input devices, right up to 128 input devices or more. Yes. So a lot of that depends on, as you say, what you want to do, for example, if you're a guitar player who wants to record themselves playing an acoustic guitar and singing at the same time, unless your acoustic guitar has got an electronic pickup in it, you're going to need an interface with. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think being practical, two inputs is probably the minimum that you'd really want to go for. Though, as I say, there are some single input interfaces around and being realistic, if you're getting into this, once you've got the bug, you're probably going to want to record more than two things at once or with more than two mics at once. So. It might be worth considering buying a four input interface to start off with, just so you've got a bit of expansion room and you don't have to sell it in a year's time and buy something bigger. And some of those things have an expansion port, which uses the old ADAT optical protocol and you can plug in another eight channels of expansion, so it may be worth looking for one of those if you think you might need to expand in the future. Absolutely. It's a very cost effective way of doing it. And there are loads and loads of eight channel preamps you can plug in and devices that will give you eight extra outputs. So it's a very flexible sort of future proof way of choosing an interface. A lot of DAWs have software instruments built in, so if you're a synth player, you don't even have to buy any external synthesizers, but now a lot of the keyboards have got USB on. They plug straight into the system, essentially MIDI over USB, which means you've saved the cost of a MIDI interface. Yeah, I think some of the old school interfaces still have the five pin DIN MIDI connections but a lot of the more modern ones just don't, as you say, because USB is slowly taking over. So again, it depends on what equipment you have and what you're trying to do. But if you do want to use master keyboards or a synthesizer and send MIDI data into the computer and possibly back out again, think about how you're going to do that and whether you want an interface with a built in MIDI in and output or whether you're going to do it via some sort of USB interfacing. So once you've got your interface, you need some way of listening to the end result. Most have got a headphone socket on them, so you can buy yourself a pair of headphones. But in most cases, it's also good to have a pair of loudspeakers because the listening experience is rather different. Yeah, there's an argument that everybody listens on earphones these days and a lot of people do, obviously, but I think, as you say, it's a very different experience listening on loudspeakers and while some people will mix on headphones, the majority of people will mix on loudspeakers still, so that makes sense. Okay, so we'll talk about what loudspeakers and how big and what specification a little bit later on. So, we've got our speakers, we've got our interface. We need a couple of microphones, I guess. Yes, I mean, again, it's going to depend on what you're trying to record. Whether you want a vocal microphone, a microphone to record an acoustic guitar, microphones to record drums. Well, there are capacitor microphones for use in studios. Why do we choose them and what polar pattern is a good idea to have if you're a beginner? We have them because capacitor microphones have a very good frequency response. They're very good at capturing fast things, transient things. They tend to have a very extended frequency response if you compare them to a lot of moving coil mics, which is the alternative, dynamic microphones. They're a good quality mic. And these days, I mean, they used to be very expensive. Back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, a capacitor mic was an expensive thing. These days they're actually very cheap in relative terms and you can get some really very good ones for not that much money. One of my favorites and I think it's probably one of yours too, that we've used a lot is the Audio Technica 2020, AT2020, which is a, it's a budget mic, but it sounds fantastic. It's brilliant and very versatile. You can use it on a lot of things, you know, acoustic guitars, voices, all sorts of stuff. But if it's for your own voice, it's worth going to a music store that sells a range of microphones and try a few of them out there. Different microphones suit different voices because they've all got little wrinkles in the frequency response, as indeed has your voice. So it's finding one that brings out the nice bits and hides the bad bits. Yeah, it's true. I mean, a decent microphone will always give you a reasonably good rendition of your voice. But I don't think there's any doubt that if you get the right microphone for a particular voice, it just adds something, you know, a useful, beneficial quality. It's the difference between sounding excellent as to sounding acceptable, if you see what I mean. So yeah, if you get that opportunity, or you could hire a range of different microphones and see which one works best with your voice, it's worth doing, especially if you're doing this seriously. Okay. And as a starter, I guess buying a single pattern microphone, which is directional is probably the best option because most of the time you want to record what's in front of the microphone. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, everybody knows about unidirectional microphones. Certainly most of the budget models are going to be cardioid pattern, which picks up from the front, the sides. It's only about three DB less sensitive than the front. So it's still going to pick up a lot of sound from the sides. But directly on the back, it might be 20, 25, 30 dBs less sensitive. So it's going to tend to reject sound coming from behind. A safe bet is probably one of the cheap, small diaphragm condensers. They're actually pretty good these days. They don't cost that much money and you can record virtually anything with it. Or you could go up to, you know, a large diaphragm, a capacitor mic that you might see in a studio used for vocals and that sort of thing. Yeah, some of those are very inexpensive as well, in fact, there's an argument to say it might be worth buying one of each as the small diaphragm mics are usually very good on instruments and general purpose stuff that isn't vocals, whereas the large diaphragm mics can be quite flattering on vocals. Absolutely, yes. And again, the price range is from 100 upwards, really, up to 10,000 or more if you really want to go that far. So there's a very wide range of options available and you can start small and cheap and progress as your experience and your interests develop. And if you don't have the budget for that yet, But you do have maybe a dynamic microphone that you use for live performance, give that a try because you can get a very good vocal sound out of many dynamic microphones. It probably wouldn't be my first choice for acoustic guitar where the extra top end really helps. But dynamic mics are great for electric guitar and for vocals and for percussion. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things with a dynamic mic is because of the way it's put together, you've basically got a big lump of copper wire glued to the back of the diaphragm. There's a lot of mass there, so it's a bit reluctant to move very quickly. If you hit a drum, the first thing that you get is this very big spike of energy from where the stick hits the skin. A capacitor mic would capture that in its original glory with great big transients, whereas a moving coil dynamic mic will tend not to, it tends to kind of give this compressed sound and it just sounds a bit fatter and thicker and more like you expect a recorded drum to sound. So don't be afraid of using dynamic mics on percussive sources because often it can give you a nice sound. That's a good advice Hugh, thanks for that. How about accessories? We've got mic stands, maybe pop filters. If you're doing vocals, I think pop filters are essential. I mean, a lot of microphones will have some kind of pop shielding built in these days, but an external pop shield does make all the difference. So yeah, a decent quality pop shield is important for vocals. Good stands, good solid stands. The cheap ones will tend to droop after a little while, so try and buy a decent stand that's got a decent clutch mechanism and something you can buy spares for. K&M stands are very well known, very well recommended and you can get lots and lots of spares if they ever do kind of wear out so that's, it's an investment, isn't it? It's going to last you a lifetime. So buy something decent rather than nasty. And the same with cables, you don't need to buy anything too esoteric, but at the same time try and avoid the really cheap ones because the connectors might not be as good as on the better cables. Yeah, I've come across lots of problems where people have had hums and weird radio interference issues and very often it's turned out to be because the connectors are some kind of, you know, Far Eastern knockoff copy that doesn't actually mate properly with the equipment and you don't get a proper ground. And that can cause all sorts of problems. So don't skimp on decent cables, but don't go mad. Don't go and buy the really wacky esoteric stuff that costs, you know, two and a half thousand for four inches of cable and that kind of nonsense. Talking of grounds, we have done the studio SOS visits in the past where we found that people have had hum problems because they've had a laptop based system where all the peripherals are run from power adapters, which are basically things that don't have a ground connection. So you need to ground the equipment somehow. What would your recommendation be on that Hugh? Well, my pet recommendation is to use a dedicated grounding plug from a company called Groundology. You can find them on the web, groundology.com. It's a bit of a wacky tree hugging company that think it's a good idea to lie on bacofoil sheets in bed too, so you're grounded when you sleep, but they do this very safe plug that you can plug into the wall socket. It's only got a metallic earth pin. The live and neutral pins are both plastic, so they're completely safe and then that gives you a lead that you can then put a jack plug on or any other kind of useful connector that will terminate on a spare socket on your interface or computer. And that'll give you a really solid, good ground that avoids so many of these problems. And if the interface has got a metal case, quite often you can secure it to one of the screws that's holding the case together. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, anything like that. I've come across another device which Thomann sells and it's a little box that has jack sockets on either side and a lead coming off that you plug into the mains. And the idea is that you plug your guitar into it and then the output goes into your interface. And again, that provides a ground through that connection. Right, so there's a ground lead comes out of the junction box, if you like. Exactly, yeah. And you can plug that into a main socket, which you know is going to be grounded. So that's another way of doing it. I mean, there are several options like that. But it is a huge problem we come across all the time, particularly with people using laptops. And as you say, devices that have wall watt type power supplies and that kind of thing. It's also important to try and make sure you've only got a single earth in a system like that. Ideally, I mean, if you use balanced connections, it's not such a problem, but with unbalanced connections that you might have from, say, electronic keyboards and things, it can be a big problem. And when it comes to add-ons at a later time, I suppose you've got things like dedicated headphone amplifiers, which will give you multiple headphone feeds. If you've got several different musicians. Yeah, absolutely. And again, some interfaces have two or even more headphone outlets that you can control separately. So if you, if you do a lot of recording with a friend, it might be sensible to look for an interface that has two headphone outputs. Alternatively, as you say, there are plenty of cheap headphone amplifiers with multiple outputs. You can just plug into some spare outs on the back of the interface and use that. And of course, little hardware controllers, if you don't want to do everything using a mouse. The simplest ones will give you one fader which talks to whichever is the currently active track in your DAW. And the other controls give you access to things like transport, scrolling, soloing, muting. And I find those are quite useful. Yeah, I think they're very good actually. It's nice to have a button that you can always go to rather than having to find the mouse, and then find the pointer on the mouse, and then do whatever you want to do. It just feels more natural to have a hardware controller quite often. And they're not expensive, are they? The smaller ones, certainly not. I mean, two minds about the big ones that give you access to all your plug-in parameters. Personally, I find it easier to find the plug-in parameter on screen on the window for the actual plug-in than it is to find it on the hardware controller. Yeah, it can be, you know, you can allocate these things to different controls. But yeah, I agree. For that kind of thing, I tend to go to the screen, but for certainly for adjusting levels, I think a fader is a very good way of adjusting levels. I find it easier than a mouse and transport controls. You know, crying out for hardware buttons, aren't they? Okay, so we've got our basic studio kit. Now we need a room to put it in and probably a desk to put it on. I guess a desk could be as simple as an office desk. Or it could be one of these fancy studio desks with an extra tier for your monitors. Monitor speakers, that is. Of course, the word monitor gets used in so many different contexts these days, doesn't it? It does, doesn't it? It can get confusing, yes. Yes, you've got your monitor speakers, you've got your monitor screens and you've got your monitor mix. Indeed. And if you have a pet lizard. Oh no, let's not do that, no, that's getting silly. So, you've chosen your desk, and then you've got to find a way of getting your speakers set up so that your monitor screens are not in the way of your monitor speakers. The two tier desks are quite good for that, especially if you are one of these people who likes to use two screens. Two screens are very helpful with the DAW. Have you got any observations on that, Hugh? No, like you, I use two screens. You've got to be a little bit careful with monitor screens, that they don't start getting in the way of the sound that's coming from your monitor speakers, because you get reflections and you get diffraction and it can really degrade the stereo image quite dramatically and also colour the sound a bit. So ideally you want the screens either level with or slightly behind the monitor speakers. If you can, or if you can't do that, then you want them well below or possibly even well above the monitor speakers, again so that they're not getting any direct sound to bounce off them. I find the best arrangement is to have the monitors low down on the desk, because that way I'm not craning my neck to see them and have the monitor speakers higher up so that they're firing over the top of the screens. Yeah, that works. In my case, I've got the screens between the speakers and the speakers are quite wide on either side, which works for me. But yeah, I mean, there are different ways of doing it. But avoiding reflections and diffractions is important. So give that a bit of thought anyway. It also makes a difference what you put the speakers on, doesn't it, rather than just plonking them straight onto the desk? Yeah, absolutely. In my own studio, my speakers are on stands which stand on the floor, so they're not actually on the desk at all and I use very solid, heavy stands, so the speakers are kind of held rigidly in space and vibrations are stopped because of the nature of the heavy stand. If you don't have that sort of space and ability to do that, then you may need to put the speakers on a high shelf on your desk and the danger there is that that high shelf, which is basically just a big plank of wood is going to start vibrating and resonating with the vibrations from the speaker and that will generate sound in the room. That isn't what the speaker was supposed to be putting out. So you want to try and stop that if you can. And the easiest way to do that is to put the speakers on some sort of acoustic isolation, which could be anything from a piece of thick foam, which is quite a popular solution, up to some of the more sophisticated engineered stands like those from people like ISO Acoustics, for example. Yeah, I find those work very well. If you want a DIY approach, then the foam with maybe a heavy floor tile on top is a reasonable solution. Yeah radial, or prime acoustic do that with a big sheet of steel that's put on top of foam. With foam, it's important that the foam compresses a little bit. So you want, when you put the speaker on the foam, you really want it to compress about maybe sort of 20 percent of its thickness. And that puts it into its springy mode, because what we're creating here is what's called a mass spring mass suspension. If the foam is too dense, it doesn't compress and then it won't act as a spring. And if it's not dense enough, then it'll collapse completely. And again, it won't act as a spring. So that's what we're creating here. You need to choose the foam density to suit the weight of the speaker you're putting on it. So it may be worth buying a commercial foam platform and putting your own tile on the top of that rather than just getting a piece of furniture foam and hoping for the best. Yeah, probably it is. And often with those foam, the manufactured isolation foams, you'll find that they are given a weight range that works for the particular foam they're putting on providing so it's just worth checking on that. Okay, now we come to the tricky business of speaker choice versus room shape and size because most home studios are in a spare room or a garage and they're not always an optimum size or shape. Yeah, usually they're cube shaped with every dimension exactly the same. So a typical spare bedroom is going to be like, you know, two and a half meters deep by two and a half meters wide and two and a half meters tall. And that is the worst possible size and shape of room that you could have. Yeah. And the reason for that is that all the room modes, which are effectively resonances that build up because of reflections between the walls, occur at the same frequency between all the parallel surfaces. So what we're really looking for is a rectangular room, if we can. Yeah, ideally a rectangular room. And the best way of using it is to, so they're firing down the longer axis of the room. It's not essential, but it generally works better if you can do that. Yeah, I think we found it is pretty much essential in smaller rooms. It gets less essential as the rooms get large. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got the business of acoustic treatment, which we'll talk about before we come back to speaker size. And we have these things that we call mirror points, don't we? It's a very simple idea. Basically, what we're trying to do with acoustic treatment in a room is control reflections. We don't want sound reflecting off the wall, because what happens is you've got the direct sound from the speaker to you, and you've also got the sound that bounces from the speaker off a wall or a ceiling or a floor and comes back at you. Now, the reflected path is going to be slightly longer than the direct path. And so what happens is you've got a delay between those two signals. And at different frequencies, those two signals will arrive either in the same polarity, or in the opposite polarity, or somewhere in between. If they arrive in the same polarity, they're going to add and give you a peak in the response. If they arrive in opposite polarities, they're going to cancel and give you a null, well disappear and anywhere in between will just give you a variation in level. So that's going to give you a very uneven listening frequency response in the room, which is what we're trying to avoid. So the idea is we put absorbers on the side walls, try and stop those reflections from coming back. And the place where you put them is where if you had a mirror on the wall. It would be where you can see the reflection of the speaker because light reflects in the same way that sound would reflect. That's from your normal mixing position. From your mixing position. So you sit in your mixing position, get a friend if you need to, to hold a mirror against the wall and where you can see the reflection of the speaker, that's where you need to put the acoustic absorber. So they're called mirror point absorbers because they go where the mirror points would be. And you could have one on the ceiling as well using the same rules. Absolutely. Yeah. And we call that a cloud, but yeah, same idea. You can't do anything too permanent in a, in a domestic situation. You don't really want to be glueing acoustic foam onto the walls unless you know you're going to be there for many years. One of the techniques we did is to get the commercial acoustic foam panels, which are effective for the mid and the high frequencies at any rate. And we do something like stick an old CD on the back and then hook the hole in the CD over a hook or a nail or a pin stuck in the wall. And that would allow the thing to hang there much in the way that you would hang a picture without ruining a wall. Yeah, it's a very cheap, simple, effective way of doing it. Yeah, it does work. If you're handy with a bit of woodwork and DIY, you can save the cost of acoustic foam by buying some cavity wool, mineral wool insulation, which is usually around 50mm thick, sometimes thicker, and cover that with fabric, stick it in a wooden frame, hang that on the wall, and it's also very effective. Yeah, absolutely. You need to look for, well, RW3 is the rock wall name that we usually use, but something that's about 60 kilograms per cubic meter density is the kind of thing you want. If you go much less dense than that, it ends up looking like loft insulation and it's very fluffy and it doesn't work very well at sort of low mid frequencies. If you get it much denser than that, and you can go up to over a hundred kilograms per cubic meter. It can be quite good at low frequencies, but it starts becoming reflective at high frequencies. So 60 is about the optimum to aim for It is, but if you're on the cheap and cheerful path, then just go to the DIY store and find the cavity wall insulation, which comes ready cutting panels and packs of five or six and it's usually 1200 millimeters by 600 millimeters by whatever the thickness is. And that works well enough. Absolutely, yeah and you can, you can stick foam on the front. We've done that before to make it look pretty, or you can wrap it in a fabric. You want to put something over the front, just so that any loose fibers are unlikely to sort of fall off and float around in the room. They're not nasty, they're not carcinogenic or anything, but it's not the kind of stuff you want to be breathing in. And it's going to add to the dust in your room. And we all know that our studios collect dust like nothing anyway. So put something on the front, wrap it in some kind of porous fabric, put foam on the front, whatever, just need something. Yeah. Now, back to this business of size of speakers, because, especially people doing dance music, they like to hear lots and lots of bass, but the problem with lots and lots of bass is that it doesn't always agree with the small, untreated room. Yeah, absolutely. There are always two truisms for home studios. One is that the speakers are always way too big. And the other is that there's never enough acoustic treatment at low frequencies, bass traps. In other words, you can never have too much bass trapping and you can definitely have too big speakers. It works a lot better in small rooms to have small speakers. You have the problem then that you're not going to get the kind of bass that flaps your internal organs around. But you also won't get all those nasty standing wave room resonance problems that make it really difficult to actually understand what you're mixing. I'd say that in a typical sort of bedroom studio, something with a six inch driver is big enough. And if you're In a room that's even smaller than that, as I am in my office upstairs, which I call Studio B, I've got monitors with a five inch drivers and they sound perfectly good in there too. If you want to hear what the deep bass is doing, you can always switch to your headphones. Yeah, definitely. I would recommend headphones because you're removing the room from what you're listening to at that point. Again, you're not feeling the bass, but you are actually hearing it. With a reasonably flat frequency response, it will allow you to make decisions about, you know, the balance between the bass guitar and the bass drum and that kind of thing, which can often be very difficult on loudspeakers in rooms where the room's becoming resonant. So I agree, my rule is the same. Six inches is big enough for a bass driver in a small bedroom studio. And then we come onto this business of systems with subwoofers, which can be a dangerous direction to go in, in a small room. But if you know what you're doing, it can also be a benefit. If you've got very small speakers and a modest subwoofer, the advantage is that you can put the subwoofer in a position in the room where you get the most even frequency response at the low end. It doesn't have to be in between the two main speakers. If the speakers have got to go in a certain place, it might give you a little more flexibility. And in that instance, there is a method by which you can find the best place for the sub, isn't there Huw? Uh, yes, I'll crawl around on the floor method probably the easiest way to do it is having set up your main satellite speakers, your left and right speakers, put the subwoofer where your normal chair would be for your normal listening position in front of the computer. So you put the sub where the chair would be play music through it. Ideally something with a good sort of broad range of different bass notes. And then basically you have to crawl around the edges of your room, listening carefully for where you get the most even bass response with the most even balance of all the different notes. And when you find that place, you can move your subwoofer there, put your chair back in the listening position and you should have a reasonably decent balanced frequency response. It's not perfect, but it's quick and easy. And as long as nobody's looking at you and seeing how big your bum is, it's a very practical way of finding out where the best place is going to be. You mentioned bass trapping earlier on, Hugh, and it's quite correct that certainly in a serious studio you can never have too much bass trapping because that makes the bass response more even. But bass traps tend to be quite large and in a domestic room it's not really practical to have them. Because of the way domestic rooms are constructed, at least the door and the window act as a bass trap to some extent, because they allow some of the low end to get out of the room and not come back. It goes out to annoy the neighbours instead, which is fine. But trying to put a metre depth of rockwall in each corner, you'd probably end up with a space the size of a phone box to work in in the middle of the room. Yeah, it can be a problem. I did a feature article in the magazine some years ago now, about it. I think called something like making a small studio or something like that (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/studio-sos-making-small-room-sound-good). Uh, you'll find it on the website, where I describe what I did in my room, which is not a big room. It's about three and a half meters by two and a half meters, something like that. It's not a big room, but I did manage to get some really seriously big bass traps in three of the four corners. I couldn't put it in the fourth one because there's a door there. I lost quite a lot of floor space in the room. But the sound balance in the room improved enormously. So it's a compromise between how much stuff you can put in the room and how much space you've got in there versus, you know, the quality of the monitoring that you've got. But it is it is very difficult, I agree to put enough bass trapping in a small room. We talked about subwoofers and I'm not a fan of subwoofers in general, for the reason that most rooms don't have enough acoustic treatment and you end up with a very lumpy frequency response. But having said that, there's a difference between the monitoring you need when you're mixing and the monitoring you need when you're creating music. And sometimes you need that low frequency energy to give you the vibe and the energy you need to perform well. So, you know, if you want to put a subwoofer in to give you a nice flappy bass beat, to make you feel like you're engaged in the music while you're creating, when you're monitoring a mix and trying to get your mix right, maybe you want to turn the subwoofer off and use headphones for that sort of critical bass balance decision making. Yeah, that's probably fair enough. And also, a lot of people will turn the sub up too much. It should only be loud enough that you just miss it when you switch it off, shouldn't it really? Yeah, again, people pay money for these things and they want to hear them working. But as you say, Hugh, it should be really quite subtle and you would only notice it when you turn it off. And you think, well, where's that bottom octave gone? But as you say, a lot of people do do turn up a bit too far. Now, one thing you can do in an imperfect room is improve the acoustics for recording something like vocals using a lot of DIY techniques, because what you don't want are room reflections making your recording sound boxy. You'll never hide that no matter how much reverb or processing you put on it. One of the economical tricks that we do is to hang a duvet behind the singer. And why behind the singer? Well, that's the direction the microphone's pointing in. And the chances are that the microphone that you've chosen is probably a directional microphone, a unidirectional microphone. So it's picking up the singer plus anything that comes back over their shoulders. So the duvet behind them helps. If you want to cut out reflections from other parts of the room as well, then there are these curved reflection filter kind of things that you can put behind the microphone. They will help, but I think the duvet makes more difference in the first instance. Yeah, I agree. And one of the things we get quite a lot is people saying that they want to build a vocal booth in their room, and they've got a small room to start with and then they put this vocal booth in there, which they built out of, you know, bits of 2x4 and whatever, and you end up with a telephone box. And it sounds like a telephone box. You're actually a lot better off getting rid of the vocal booth. Forget that idea completely. And as you say, record in the big room, but with duvets and other absorbing materials behind and round to the sides of you, it makes so much difference. It sounds so much better. That's very true. I mean, we have built vocal booths and to make a good one is quite a complicated affair, isn't it? It is. I think people see them in studios and they think oh look, it's not a very big booth. We can do that. But what they don't realize is that the, you know, the fabric on the inside of the booth is probably a meter away from the actual physical wall that goes around, you know, the three sides of the booth. They don't realize quite how much sound treatment there is in there because you can't see it, but there has to be a lot. So forget the idea of a vocal booth at home. It's never going to work. Use duvets, works brilliantly. A big double duvet hung behind you. Coming around to the sides is helpful. Possibly something over the top if you've got a reflective ceiling. Possibly even, you know, rugs or something on the floor, if you've got a hard floor and then something like the reflection filters can help, you've got to be a bit careful with those because they're curved. They have a focus like a mirror would have a concave mirror would have and they can cause weird kind of cone filter recoloration effects if you let the mic go too far into them, so keep the mic roughly level with the front edge of the curve is probably the best bet, but they can be helpful, certainly, and they also work by stopping some of the sound getting out into the room in the first place, which then obviously reduces the amount that can be reflected back. Okay, then, Hugh, just to recap before we finish, we need a computer, we need some DAW software, and of course the light versions of the DAW software can be very inexpensive, there are even some free ones. Some interfaces will come with DAW software as well. That's true, some interfaces come with free software which will include DAW software and a few effects and maybe some soft synths as well, so worth exploring that certainly. Some DAW software is specific to the type of computer. So logic will only run on a Mac for example. Most DAW software will run on pretty much anything. It's probably a good idea to choose a DAW software that your friends are using, because that way you get free support. If there's something you don't understand, maybe they figured out how to do it for you and you can get, you know, good support that way. Failing that, go onto some of the forums and Sound On Sound forums for example, there's people that use pretty much everything that exists and are very helpful about sharing knowledge on how to do things. Reaper is the one I use quite a lot. It's very cost effective. It's very powerful. It's got fantastic plugins built in and a lot of people are using it now. So that's one to consider. Well, I think we've covered pretty much everything we need to on the basics here. So it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from. Goodbye. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.