help me treat my room?

Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 10:01 pm

Hey guys

My recording room desperately needs to be acoustically treated. Its a very small room that already sounds pretty dead due to all the furniture, but I'm hoping Ill be able to do something with it to make it sound good or at least better. My limitations are no construction, like tearing down or adding walls, and I need to have the bed in the room, since its where I sleep (but I can move it).

What should I do with the room to treat it? I was planning on buying 32sq ft of auralex acoustic foam and using that, and I could make some panels that I could mount on the walls. Also I could build a cloud to mount on the ceiling. Theres the issue with the window and the bed, too, since I don't know how they will affect the sound.

There are so many questions and ideas floating around in my head that I'm kinda lost, and I was just hoping for some guidance.

Please don't tell me to get a bigger room, cause I can't. And I know I can get pretty good recordings in this small room - I've heard some producers make amazing recordings in tiny rooms just like mine.

Would getting a autoCAD like pic of the room help with deciding how to treat it? All I have are these pics...but I can throw together a sketch.

Here are the pics(apologies about the shitty cam):

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:02 am

I'm going to venture to say, that there's probably nothing that you could spend money on within your budget that''s going to make any real difference.
Perhaps some curtains on the window would be my only advise.
Maybe also a bigger wardrobe in your closet.

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:10 am

oooof... ditto what natural said....

I wouldn't waste any money on foam... all it'll do is suck up what high frequencies are there.

You have no room for corner traps... except at the ceiling... which is gonna shove you right out of your bed.

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:37 am

I wouldn't ask you to get a bigger room if you would reduce the pix size down to about 700px wide.

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:38 am

Well, as Max and Natural indicate, what you really need are corner traps - not foam on the walls. Read up on this. There are DIY ways to do it, but will require a lot of rearranging. There are also some commercial products that might be stored in another place in the house and brought into the room when you record.

Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:24 pm

I understand that I won't be able to make this room sound amazing, but I kind of wanted this to be a dead room. Might as well - Everything I am recording is metal and I'm going for the dead sound anyways.

Would layering all the open space on the walls with foam work or would it make it sound like shit?

Is a dead room decent to mix in?

What about a cloud going over the open part of the ceiling (in the middle not shown in pics)?

I also had an Idea for a bass trap: I put a tightly rolled up packing blanket in the corner of the room behind the drums and forced a wooden board over it to make the corner triangular with the blanket filling the hollow spot. (does that make sense?)
I couldnt really tell, but then again I'm not an acoustical expert at all so maybe I don't know what I'm hearing yet, but will that idea work?

sorry space I changed the image sizes

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 3:15 am

http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=535
http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=534
http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/5/266097.html
Check out some links here
Will that work? I am certain it will do something, Better or worse? Who can tell you over the net. The use of untested materials can not be predicted.
Bass traps are really not very expensive to make probably less than what you were looking at for a "foam" kit, the problem from what they are saying is you face more of a limited space issue.

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 3:27 am

Where to start...

A mix environment should be flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20kHz.

Small rooms have an abundance of low frequency build up.

When you have a lot of LF in an enclosure you are trying to mix in, your mixes usually come out thin and lifeless.

The best way to deal with it is through bass trapping.

The amount of bass trapping a room as tiny as yours is, there should be broadband bass trapping in every corner, including the ceiling:wall corners. There should also be bass trapping on the walls and ceiling... e.g every square inch covered in bass trapping might get you close to flat, but probably not close to reasonably flat. (Without any dimensions, there's absolutely no way to tell for sure.)

Foam bass traps do so little absorption of LF compared to OC703/mineral wool, that IMHO, they would be a waste of money.

Hanging foam on your walls will suck the high's and mid's out of the room, only further skewing the frequency response in the wrong direction.

Hanging anything on the walls, will kill any flutter from parallel walls. Which can also be accomplished by diffusion, btw. But making the room "dead"...

I absolutely hate mixing in a dead room.

Verbs and delays usually end up being too strong. Most people also have a tendency to mix the mid's too light, and your vocals end up being smothered by everything else, especially guitars.

You should do a search for bass trapping, bass traps, and super chunk bass trap, to find out how to correctly build one.

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:20 am

so then will tracking in the same mixing room still give good results?

If you can make a room sound good without being dead, then what is the point of making it dead in the first place?

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:39 am

xMannequiNx wrote:

so then will tracking in the same mixing room still give good results?

Ooof... Here we go down this path again...

As with 99% of all things audio... It depends...

In general terms, if a room has a flat enough response and a short enough RT60 at the mix position, then yes. You can get EXCELLENT results... but as far as in your particular environment???

THAT is going to depend upon your skills as an engineer, and whether you can overcome the issues of your gear, room and hearing.

Quote:

If you can make a room sound good without being dead, then what is the point of making it dead in the first place?

BINGO!!! The million dollar question!!!

Who suggested that a mix or tracking environment is supposed to be dead?

No one around here (in this thread, anyway) openly advocates a dead room for mixing, OR tracking... other than maybe a small isolation booth... (which is a misconception AFAIC.)

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:22 pm

The most effective basstrap, in your case, would be to open the window, maybe even the door. That does not cost you a thing and reduces the sonic build up by simply letting the sound go right out the window. If your drumming reaches 100dB then the window is probably letting 80ish+ percent of that out anyway. Open it up and be a 100 percenter!

As was mentioned, heavy drapes on the window and more cloths in the closet wouldn't hurt, in your case, even with an open window.

Your space is mostly hard surface. I am thinking that cymbals are slicing your ears and the snare may be causing nose bleed. Then again, the mattress on the bed may be having some effect on this.

Small rooms are acoustically deadly because, as I have read it said, the room modes become the acoustics of the room.

It seems that anything that can be addressed to help with this room, all the people who posted have addressed.

It is, after all, a bed room. You have to have a realistic idea in mind when attempting acoustical magic at this level.

Good luck and as always, write if you get work!

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:54 pm

I did do a room sweep with RoomEq Wizard. I hooked up an sm57, since I don't have a db measurment device, and stuck in the very center of the room at a centered height and ran the sweep (I made sure all the levels were right). Suprisingly all the frequencies were VERY even db readings accross the board.

Now am I even doing this right??? I'm not even sure if Im using the right mic or even if I should run two mics in stereo or something. I also was just running the sweep out of my krk rokit 5 monitors off of the desk, since I wasn't sure where to run the sweep from.

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:17 pm

A singular mic should be centered to the speakers in the vertical plane, and centered horizontally between the speakers (at the listening position), pointing straight at the wall.

An SM57 is not the best choice. It's a dynamic mic that has a pretty narrow pattern with relatively low sensitivity. A better choice is an omni condenser like the Behringer ECM8000.

[edit]
oh yeah... and I'm pretty sure that Frank (et al) will tell you about the same thing over at Slutz.

Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:40 pm

ok ill try that

haha you noticed that I'm multi-foruming (shh!)

EDIT:
Since I'm using this room for tracking as well, how would I go about testing the room eq for that?

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