IT specialist Stu Evans describes himself as an ex-drummer's roadie who has taken up playing and recording. He has built a very smart studio in a single garage adjoining his home near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, and equipped it with Sonar DAW software running on a powerful PC. He called us in because he was unhappy with his monitoring and because he was having difficulty recording his acoustic drum kit in a small room without the sound coming over as boxy.

Stu showed us around his small studio while plying us with assorted Hob Nobs and coffee. He'd divided the garage space into two similarly sized areas, which ended up being almost square. A heavy fire-door separated the live room from the control room, in which a work-surface was fitted to the front and right walls to provide space for the equipment. The control room measured roughly 2.5 x 2.25 metres, which put the mixing position almost in the centre of the room in all three planes — something that's generally accepted as being 'a bad thing', as you can suffer a big drop in perceived bass when you're listening close to the centre of a cube or near-cuboid space. Furthermore, Stu had pushed his speakers out into the corners to allow him to fit a computer monitor either side of his Mackie Control and expander. Placing speakers close to corners tends to make bass unpredictable, with more humps and bumps in the response.

Stu had stuck up some scattered small patches of Auralex foam, which helped tame the mid and high-end reflections, but he didn't have any absorption at the 'mirror' points and there was a flat, hard surface behind him on either side of the entrance door (which was curtained off) that was reflecting a lot of energy back to him. Certainly the room had a noticeably coloured sound when we played back commercial songs.

My first thought was that Stu could buy a couple of TV/monitor wall-mounts with which to hang his two monitors directly above his Mackie Control and expander. He thought this was a good idea — but Hugh, being a little less patient, simply moved the monitor screens and stood them on top of the Mackie Control meter-bridge, leaning back against the wall. This worked fine, and with a bit of non-slip...