When I helped a neighbour turn his upstairs room into a recording space, his first question wasn't about an expensive mic. He asked, "how do I keep the motorbikes on the street out of my recording?" Now, that's actually the right question to lead with. A spare room on the second floor of a type-70 home is a sleeping asset. Tweak it a little and it can turn into a room that earns, not just a corner where a ring light sits gathering dust.
What separates a studio you actually use from a content corner that lasts a month comes down to one thing: whether the audio is clean. Footage from a cheap camera can still be salvaged in editing, but audio soaked in echo and street bleed is hard to rescue. So the conversation starts with the room and soundproofing first, gear later.
Why the Second-Floor Room Fits Best
People often eye a downstairs room because it's near the entrance, but the second-floor room has an edge that goes unnoticed. First, it sits farther from street noise. In a home like the Emerald 70 that faces toward Jl. Raya Perjuangan, the ground floor catches the most traffic sound, gate clatter, and passers-by chatter. Go up one floor and the distance plus the walls already soften outside noise before it even knocks on the door.
Second, privacy. Recording needs you undisturbed and, just as much, not disturbing the rest of the house. An upstairs room naturally sits farther from the living room, the kitchen, and family foot traffic. Third, the size. A bedroom in a type-70 home usually runs around 3x3 metres, and that size turns out to be a good fit for a one-person studio: enough for a desk, a chair, a camera or two, without a cavernous room that just sends sound bouncing everywhere.
Soundproofing That Actually Works (and the Egg-Crate Foam Myth)
This is where the biggest misunderstanding lives. Plenty of people buy sheet after sheet of egg-crate foam (that bumpy stuff), stick it all over the walls, then wonder why the motorbikes still cut through. The thing is, that foam does a different job than they think.
Two ideas often get treated as the same when they aren't: absorption and isolation. Both matter, but for different problems.
Absorption soaks up echo inside the room, so your voice stops bouncing around like you're talking in a bathroom. That's the job of foam, carpet, thick curtains, and soft materials. Useful, but only for tidying up the sound already inside.
Isolation holds sound so it can't move in or out of the room. Motorbike noise from outside gets held back, and your voice gets held back from leaking to the neighbours. This needs mass and density: heavy walls, double gypsum, rockwool inside the cavity, and a door gap sealed tight. Egg-crate foam has no mass. So for holding back street sound, it does almost nothing, that light.
So if your problem is noise from Jl. Raya Perjuangan leaking in, egg-crate foam isn't the answer. What you need is isolation first, then absorption as the finishing touch so your voice sounds good.
Shopping for Soundproofing in Stages (You Don't Need It All at Once)
The good news is you don't have to knock down walls or spend tens of millions on day one. Soundproofing can be paid for in stages, starting with the cheapest and most effective. Here's the order I usually suggest, from small change to serious. The figures below are just rough illustrations, and they shift easily with material and labour prices.
| Stage | What you do | Main function | Range (illustration) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thick carpet + heavy (blackout) curtains | Cut echo, slightly hold bleed | Hundreds of thousands |
| 2 | Door seal / weatherstrip on the door gap | Close the biggest leak path | Tens to hundreds of thousands |
| 3 | Acoustic panels at reflection points | Tidy vocal echo | Hundreds of thousands |
| 4 | Rockwool + double gypsum on one wall | Serious isolation from outside noise | Millions |
If the budget is tight, start with stages 1 and 2. Believe it or not, sealing the gap under the door with a door seal often makes a bigger difference than sticking up foam sheet by sheet. Sound behaves like water, it slips through the smallest gap. Only once your content gets more serious and the street still bothers you do you move up to rockwool plus double gypsum on the wall nearest the noise source.
Note: this piece is educational and general, not technical or construction advice. The cost figures here are only a rough picture and can differ on the ground depending on material, area, and labour. Before knocking down a wall or altering structure, consult a builder or the developer first.
Lighting and Camera Angle in a 3x3 Room
Once the sound is sorted, the picture is next. In a 3x3 room, don't shove the desk against the back wall and sit with your back to the window. Light from behind leaves your face dark (that's backlight). Flip it: face toward the window for soft natural light during the day. For night recording, two cheap lamps beat one bright lamp. One main lamp slightly off to the side for your face, one small lamp to lift the background so the shot isn't flat.
Leave about a metre of gap between you and the back wall. Besides giving the shot some depth, that distance also cuts the sound that bounces straight into the mic. Set the camera a touch above eye level and the frame reads cleaner. A 3x3 room is limited, sure, but for one person talking to a camera it's more than enough. What matters is the arrangement, not the floor area.
Earning It Back: One Room, Two Functions
This is what sets a project like this apart from a mere hobby. A room that's already soundproofed and lit properly doesn't only get used at recording time. During work hours it becomes a quiet WFH space, with no kids playing or TV downstairs coming through, and your Zoom calls come out clean. In the evening it flips back into a content studio. One room, two functions, both productive and both tied to income.
If you're weighing up a home-office setup in a two-storey home, a lot of the same thinking runs through our guide on a hybrid WFH work room in a two-storey home. For a deeper look at echo and sound bleed, our acoustic audit for two-storey cluster homes in Bekasi walks through how to measure and handle sound reflection. And if you want the room to still look good, not just work well, the styling ideas in our minimalist two-storey interior design guide are a good place to start.
What makes this sensible in a home like the Emerald 70 in North Bekasi: you already have a second-floor room that's separate and quiet from the start, so it just needs tidying up. This two-storey home, with a 70 m² building area, sits on Jl. Raya Perjuangan, about 5 minutes from Bekasi Station and Summarecon Mall, so if your content occasionally needs a shoot outside, getting around is easy. Just start with one room, one mic, and a door gap sealed tight. The rest can follow slowly as your content grows.
Want to see the Emerald 70's second-floor room for your studio?
The Kingspoint team can walk you through the upstairs room size, the wall condition, and the layout of the ready-stock Emerald 70 unit in North Bekasi, so you have a clear picture before you start building a soundproof room.
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