Live room treatment for my studio: help needed! (fixed)

Hi guys, Although I've been reading this forum for a little while, this is actually the first post I've made. I'm currently in the process of attempting to treat the live room of my home studio. This room is primarily going to be used for tracking drums. Other instruments and amplifiers may also be placed in this room. I also use the room for band rehearsals as well, with the main focus still being drum tracking. The room currently sounds pretty bad. There are a few areas of concern that I have that I'm really not sure how to handle. I have a ton of good resources of how to construct bass traps/panel absorbers, so I just need help with how many and where to place them all. One area I am concerned about is the left side of the room which features a large natural wood wall unit and a leather couch. Unfortunately these items will have to remain in the room. Would it be best to somehow isolate this side of the room from the rest? Maybe build another wall? I would prefer to NOT have to add another wall if possible. Another concern I had was the drop in the ceiling. Is the best idea to create an angle to the part of the ceiling that is higher? Perhaps somebody could help me with these questions. I'm aiming to treat this room with a price in the area of $200 - $350. All of the work is going to be done DIY and would prefer to use materials I can acquire at a store like Home Depot. I may have access to some OC703 but may have to use Rock wool. Any help or direction that could be provided would be very helpful. I've provided as many accurate measurements and placements as possible and have done the diagram to scale in Microsoft Visio. I would like the room to be well balanced, and not too dead sounding to be able to capture some good drum sounds. EDIT: All flooring is faux-wood laminate. This detail was not in the diagram, sorry! Here is the full size to-scale version of the diagram: http://www.kosmonaut.ca/recordingstudiofloorplan.jpg Thanks alot! Brian

Hai TF, welcome here. May I ask how you got to thsi forum? (I'm doin' a bit of a survey here)

Hi Ro, I believe that I pretty much found the forum by doing a Google search for something along the lines of "bass traps" or "studio room tuning". Can't really remember exactly as it was a little while ago. I must have seen a thread title that caught my eye and clicked on. But I suppose it was all thanks to Google, heh. -Brian

Thanx As this forum is a very good resource there's other resources that might be a good place to visit. As you sure know, you said you've been reading this forum for a while, Ethan Winer has some good articles about setting up acoustics in a room. Check that. I'd advise to read this part of the forum some more since there's much good info here. Your budget is tight, but for pure DIY acoustic adjustment it might do... altho, it IS a tight budget.

yeah I realize the budget is a bit tight. I suppose it could go a bit further than that, but my real goal was to just build some panel absorbers using readily available materials and just place them properly. I suppose I just needed help with how many, what size, and the best placement for them. I realize that there should be bass traps in the corners to kill the 90 degree angles and soak up the low end. However, I was just wondering what to do about my situation with having a giant wall unit. I was considering blocking that area off with some sort of thick curtain. In doing so, would I then eliminate the need for bass traps on the left side of the room due to heavy curtains? These are just the kind of things I need some basic help with.

Again, basic help is already present at Ethan's site (I have to look up the URL, but you can do that yourself by reading this forum) (notice I keep on pressing to read the goods ;) ) Add (bass)traps in the corners, there's more than 4 corners in a square btw. Add panels (cloth wrapped wool for example, it's really that simple) on walls and ceiling. Check the stickies for more, there's even a sticky with links to panel build diaries. How, cool is that :)

Ro wrote:

Again, basic help is already present at Ethan's site

Thanks for the mention Ro. Here are some links to get Brian started: Acoustics FAQ RealTraps Articles RealTraps Videos --Ethan

Thanx for the links, Ethan.. (I'm lazy, but so is Brain apparently)