WeWork, The Farm, The Productive; you may have heard of at least one of these if you have visited any urban dwelling in the last three years. If you haven’t, the term ‘co-working space’ or ‘shared workspace’ should have penetrated your eardrums at some point, perhaps whilst buying an overpriced organic latte from a trendy vegan coffee shop.

It all begins with an idea.

There is no simple answer to this loaded question. Designers and marketers will obviously tell you a hard YES with a bunch of good reasons why.

Welcome to the Square Mile. This is the name I call my studio weighing in at a humble 77 square foot. 7’x11’ to be precise. So…what is one to do with so little space?

I’ve had the idea to start my own studio since I first showed interest in the audio realm when I was about 13. In fact, at the age of 14 or 15 my brother and my dad built a recording studio in the garage to have jams and make a bit of cash from recording local bands.

It’s no secret that a lot of my time in the studio is spent cleaning up dialogue. In fact, for a longform documentary I will generally spend more time on the dialogue tracks than on the sound design and mixing.

There are a lot of how-to articles and videos on the net about building acoustic panels for your studio or control room. They're really handy additions to any environment that requires less acoustic reflections and they're cheap and easy to make. I need mine to tighten the acoustics of the listening position in the room I'm currently in. Generally I'm sound designing and mixing commercials for TV which can be less forgiving when it comes to quality control than mixing music. My goal is to make more of these with bass traps also but for now I just built two panels that will be placed at the left and right mirror points from my speakers. Quite honestly, the way in which I built these is not that different to everything else on the interwebs except I did mine in 100-degree weather with a PBR in hand in about 2 hours for $22 per panel. My point is that this is easy to do and shouldn’t be a grueling or tedious process.