 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Let me start off by apologising for the quality of the video and audio that you're hearing now. This is only the second video on the channel that I've ever recorded using my phone and my phones built in camera. Another reason why it doesn't sound that great is because I'm in a completely empty room, no room treatment, no furniture, no nothing. And believe it or not, this empty room has been the creative source studio for the last four years or so. It's hardly ideal. For a star, it's square. Now if you've got a choice of rooms available in your house and some of them are rectangles and some of them are squares, don't choose the square one. It's a well-known fact that it's the worst shape room to have as a studio. But much like you perhaps, I didn't have a choice. So I had to make do and make do I did. Then we found out about two weeks ago that we had to vacate the premises. The landlord wanted to take this building over again. We were given one month's notice to find a new place to move out. So I've packed up the whole studio and you'll be glad to hear that we did find a new place with a new studio. So this is it, the new creative source studio. Now you can see if we look up at the ceiling, it is a rectangle. Yay, that's a wing for me right away. Now on the back wall here, we can see there's one big long window. I'll be blocking that off for a couple of reasons. First of all, windows, reflective surfaces, they can play havoc with sounds and there's that. And also because I film video all the time, I want to be able to control the light. I don't rely on daylight. So that will be blocked off is one of the first things I'll be doing. Now if we move around so we can see behind me, you can see the entrance way is a double door and it's in the middle of the wall there, which is nice because that means in the corner over here, I can easily put some corner traps. Okay, when I start doing my room treatment, now if I swing around the other way, we can see there's an odd feature in this in this particular room and that's a little kitchenette. This room was supposed to be a theater room and the idea is while you're watching a movie, you can get yourself a refreshment. I will be using it as that because the last thing I want is a refrigerator anywhere near the studio buzzing away, making noise. I'm probably going to use it at least initially as a storage room for microphones, headphones, cables, you know, the sort of stuff that gets in the way in studios or is messy. So that can be hidden away there, perhaps behind a curtain. However, it's possible that I may use it as a sort of a vocal booth. Okay, let me know in comments down below what you think I should do with that little space back there. Now the purpose of the rest of this video is going to be talking about my initial setup with this room, how I'm going to place things. I want to stress to you, I really want to stress to you, I am not an expert, really cool, I'm acousticians, nowhere near an expert. Okay, just like you guys, I just go by what I read what some people have suggested to me. So you can think of this video as a sort of a compilation of what you would get if you were to Google this subject. Now, many of these things are often in contention in forums, so I'll let you know when I think there's sort of reasonable consensus on particular things. Now I just want to quickly thank the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you do want to release music to the world through all of the popular platforms, you get a great discount from them. If you follow the link in the description down below. So we're going to start off by talking about desk placement. So here we come to the first of our rules, the desk placement. There is a general consensus, a really good consensus, that in a rectangular shape room, you should place the desk along the short wall so the speakers will be firing down the length of the room. Okay, so I will be doing that. Now I won't be having it right up against that wall however. First of all, I like to have access behind my desk so I can get to all the cabling, etc. But probably more important, of course, the desk position is determined also by the sitting position or the listening position. Okay, and there is a kind of a rule which people talk about, it's the 38% rule, which says that when you take the length of the room, the best listening position is 38% down that length. Now I'll describe it as a rule, but many people say it's a starting point, okay, that you need to use your ears and listen and kind of find the best place, which is what I will be doing. So that is the desk and the listening position placement. What about speakers? So there's a couple of things we should avoid with monitor speaker placement. The first is avoid having them right in the corner of the room, okay. Another one that I've heard of is avoid having them 25% along the length of the room. People do suggest that perhaps even around 20% is okay, but try to avoid 25%. Now one of the things you should be trying to achieve with the placement of monitor speakers is creating an equilateral triangle between the speakers and your listening position, okay. Now that's not always going to be possible, and I always thought this was a rule rule, but apparently it's a guide rule, okay, it's a desirable thing, and you should be aware of how it affects your stereo image if you can't achieve that, okay. So if you were to have your monitor speakers really, really close together, you'll probably tend to exaggerate stereo image, okay, because to you everything will sound kind of narrow to other people. It may just sound too wide in your mix. If you have them, you know, too far apart, then the opposite of course will happen. Now it's all going to sort of depend on some of the other things in your room, the width of your desk and how your screens are positioned, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm just going to make that a goal because I'm not sure that I'm going to get an exact equilateral triangle, but we'll get as close as we can to it, okay. So the next thing I'm going to do is start to experiment, is try and combine all of these rules together and, and you know, see where I think the best placement is at the moment, okay, without any room treatment. Yeah, this is another thing that's been suggested to me, is that do your initial test before you even put your room treatment in, you know, see what sounds best to your ears without that and then work from that. So let's take a look at my little experiment with that. So here is my test set up. I've got the chair that I normally use for mixing set at the regular height that I have it set to. I'll be sort of moving that around to different positions and the monitors as well. Now with the monitors, notice that I have them both on stands as I normally do. Now for years I've used monitors on stands rather than have them on the desk. I think it's one of the cheapest ways that you can drastically improve sound. So if you've never tried that, if you've got the space, definitely do that. You may notice as well, just under these monitors that I've got these things under, they're called isopucks, okay, just those sort of cylindrical things you can see there. I've never used them before. This is my first time. I've heard great things about them. They just help to isolate the monitor from even the stand. So I'll let you know later on what I think about those. I may do some tests. I've got hooked up to this audio interface and my laptop. This is a new audio interface from Audient and ID 24. I reviewed this just the other day. I'll put a link on the top right there for that. And essentially what I'm going to do is just try some variations on these sort of default positions. I've marked out that 38% under there on the wall down here. I've sort of marked out where 25% is. So I'm trying to avoid that. And I'm going to move around to a few different positions until I find the best possible position. Talking about the best possible position, it's always a good idea when you release your music to try and get in a good position on a playlist. One of the ways to get more listens to your music is to get on a Spotify playlist. Now DistroKid makes this fun and easy for you to get on their playlist with a feature called the Wheel of Playlist. I'm going to go to the top of my DistroKid account here, click on the menu at the top there, then go down to Get Heard Now and then click on Wheel of Playlist. The first thing I need to do is pick one of my songs. I'll go ahead and pick one randomly here and then I click on Connect with Spotify. I then have to agree that DistroKid can access my Spotify account, which I have done here. And then the Wheel of Playlist comes out. Now the idea here is that you get three spins and the best of these three spins determines how high up you are on the playlist. I'll click on the first one. Now of course the higher up you are on a playlist, the more likely it is that your music will get heard. I'll click again here and we've come up with what we've got. It's teasing me, 2880. And then finally we have 1,927 is the best result. Now don't worry, you can play this every single day to increase your chances of getting a higher ranking. This is included for free with your DistroKid account. Follow the link in the description down below to get 7% off today. So I've done my tests and I've got to be honest with you, I ended up pretty much where I started out with the chair around about on that 38% down the links of the room. Just a little bit back from that. And also the monitors as well. It was within an inch or two of where I actually started out to be honest with you. So I feel happy about that so far. Of course, there's no room treatment in here. There's no furniture with all the other stuff which would be in the studio. So look, I feel like even though it's been suggested to me to do this with the room empty, I kind of feel like I may still end up jiggling things around just a little bit once I get more things in here. But I'm pretty satisfied with where we're at so far. Now the fun part comes sort of putting up the room treatment, plugging everything in and seeing how it goes there. Now I want you to let me know in the comments down below whether you've ever followed these rules. Do you think they're good rules? Do you think they're rubbish? Have I missed some? Maybe a bit of an expert? If you think I'm doing something wrong or could be doing something better, I'm happy to hear from you indeed. Just make it quick so I've got time to make changes. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to make another follow-up video once I've filled this space out a little bit more and I'll see you in that video.