A student sent me his treatment plan a while ago. Eleven panels placed in a sketch of his room.

Two on the back wall, two under the window, a few on the ceiling, one in a corner. It was all drawn properly, and every panel sat somewhere that seemed to make sense.

But the plan still needed redoing.

Not because the spots were bad. He'd prioritised, which is exactly what you should do when your budget only allows for eleven panels.

The problem was what he'd based his prioritisation on. The plan itself was eleven panels big, and it had been eleven panels big from the first pencil stroke, because that was the number he could afford.

You can't prioritise what you haven't planned. And a plan the size of your budget isn't a priority list, it's a shopping list.

So why do we keep doing it this way?

Because it's the obvious way, and the people selling panels encourage it. Their pictures show a handful of panels in a few smart spots and a room that's "done".

So you take your budget, look for the smartest spots, and place your panels there.

I've watched this in something like a hundred rooms, and it's never carelessness. It's a sensible person making a sensible decision one panel at a time.

Here are two more examples.

Another client of mine had just moved into a bigger room and was thinking about where the corner traps would go. So he asked me: "Are we doing the whole perimeter, or just the front where I sit?"

My answer was to plan it all. Every corner, every surface, the full room. Then, in a second step, we'd decide how much of that he actually builds. Doing it in that order shows you what "ideal" looks like in your room before you start pulling it back to what's realistic.

The third client came at it from the other side. He explicitly didn't want panels everywhere, just something that was "good enough".

So I told him two things that sound like a contradiction. People almost always underestimate how much treatment a room needs (he was no exception), and that he probably needed more than he thought.

Still, not everybody needs to do all of it, because nobody can tell you how much is enough for you.

So the way to justify both claims is to design the complete treatment, then break it down into functional steps and prioritise. You build the first step, then do some actual work in the room, and if a year later you want to take things further, the plan is already there. You just implement the next step.

Three rooms, three budgets, one habit. Plan the whole room. Then decide where to start.

Why the whole room, though?

Because the low end doesn't care about your "smart" spots. Below roughly 150 Hz your room is dominated by standing waves, and the wavelengths down there run to several metres. One or two panels in specific places barely register with them. Damping standing waves is a job for the entire space, which is why I keep coming back to the same three words: bass trapping everywhere.

Low-end treatment in a home studio becomes a space problem way before it's an acoustics problem. And space is exactly what disappears when you don't plan for it.

Just think about it this way: You put up a few panels, you get your desk and racks and couch where you like them, and you settle in. A year later you want to fix the bass, and the corners it needs are behind furniture you're not willing to move.

Now I get some version of that email all the time. The room isn't hopeless at that point. But the fix usually means going back to the start, and most people would rather not.

It's the same reason I tell everyone to build deep panels even if they can only afford a few. Thin panels take the highs and mids out and leave the bass alone, and there's no way to add depth later, so the only upgrade path is replacing them. A plan that started with the whole room never has that problem. Every panel you build is one you'd have built anyway.

A complete plan is what stops you turning in circles when you upgrade.

"But I'm never going to build all of that!"

Good. Almost nobody does, and that isn't the point.

"So if I build a third of it, is the result broken?" No. Acoustic treatment is a lot of small steps, and taking the first few puts you on the right path. You won't get the full end result. But you will get a real improvement, and it's an improvement that fits the next step instead of getting in its way.

"I don't have the space for the full plan." Then the full plan shows you the trade-off you are making, and the purpose of the trade-off. What most people do instead is to make a trade-off by accident, one panel at a time, and only find out what it costs them when they try to fix the low end.

"My partner has a say. So does the window." Same answer. Sound versus daylight versus how the room looks is a real choice, and it's yours. The plan doesn't take it from you. It just makes sure you're choosing, not guessing.

And yes, I'm the person who says "go all out" to every client and then hands them a plan bigger than they had in mind. I know how it lands. It still lands better than finding out what you compromised on without knowing it after you've settled in.

So what do I do with my eleven panels?

Pick up a sheet of paper and a pencil. Then:

1. Plan the room as though money and space didn't matter. Every corner, including where the walls meet the ceiling. The reflection zones on the side walls and the ceiling. The back wall. Draw all of it.
2. NOW decide how far you go this year. Your budget, your space, your partner, your window.
3. Build that part. Live with it. Work in the room for a while and get used to what changed.
4. When you want more, open the plan. The next step is already drawn. You don't start from scratch, and you don't undo anything.

In the case of my student's plan it got bigger while the build list stayed at eleven. Two of the spots he'd filled moved to "later". We stayed with the same number of panels, and the same budget, but this time we had a room that knows where it's going.

See you next Wednesday.

Jesco