Hi Bruce and welcome! Glad to see you took the time to read the instructions before posting! Way too many folks don't bother, and barge right in... Its refreshing when someone like you comes along, and does it right! So an extra warm welcome to you, sir!
I've been reading a lot on room treatment, and I think I've decided on the Real Traps Standard Room Kit for my control/mix room. Good choice?
Sounds like a plan! I reckon Ethan will probably agree, too
:) Ethan is a regular poster here on this forum, and is also one of the owners of Real Traps, so you came to the right place!
How important is equal/similar room treatment for a tracking room?
Not important at all. Most people want their tracking room (aka "live room" or "LR") to have some "character", and sound good with the instruments they play in it. But your control room (CR) needs to be as neutral as possible. In your CR you want to hear exactly what that specific mic on that specific instrument in that specific position in your LR sounds like, without the CR adding any of its own "character". You don't want the CR to "color" the sound at all. You might want the LR to do that. Many people do. Personal preference. But you also do not want either of the rooms to sound dead. So you treat each to get the exact right acoustics, and normally that will be very different treatment in each.
... I think that I have pretty good dimensions to work with, the 8' ceiling in the mix room is kind of a bummer, but other than that, not bad. Thoughts?
Is it symmetrical? That is one of the most important thing you can do to your control room: make it absolutely symmetrical, such that if you were to put a mirror down the middle, the left side would appear identical to the right side, only reversed. If you don't have a symmetrical CR, you won't be able to get a good stereo image, and your mixes will suffer.
I was thinking about placing the monitors against one of the short walls, so my back is against the longest part of the room, and placing the traps as needed for bass nodes and early reflection points.
Yes, you do want the speakers firing down the long axis of the room. That's a good thing!
But you probably don't want your monitors against the walls: If you put a speaker against the wall, it can potentially excite all the modes related to that wall very easily, and will also boost the bass end by up to 6 dB. You don't want to do that. The best place for speakers is flush mounted in soffit panels (which also boosts 6dB, but can be compensated), but that is probably not achievable on your budget. Second best is sitting on decoupled stands just in front of the mix position, angled to face just behind your head when seated at the mix position. The stands need to heavy, solid, and decoupled from the speakers. A stack of concrete blocks work great. Sand-filled metal frame, etc.
The speakers should be at two corners of an equilateral triangle, angled such that the acoustic axes meet at the third corner about 20 cm behind your head, at an angle of 60 degrees. The speakers should be at your ear height when seated, which is normally around 1.2 m above the floor for most people.
They should be roughly between 1 and 2 meters apart, which means they will also be about 1 to 2 meters away from your head.
Bass trapping is most effective when placed in the corners of the room, and in a small room you need LOTS of it. No, what you are thinking of isn't enough: Think BIGGER! No that's STILL not enough! Think HUGE! You need truck loads of it. One good method for building an effective bass trap is to cut pieces of mineral wool into triangles that measure at least 60 cm on the longest side, and stack a whole bunch of those triangles in the rear corners of the room, from floor to ceiling, with the long side facing the room. Frame and cover with acoustic cloth, for aesthetics. That takes care of your two rear corners. Now you can think about treating the other ten corners .... (rooms have 12 corners....)
How should I construct the tracking room? I get the feeling, reading a couple threads here and other places, that I should not need a floating floor (the garage is a concrete slab right against the ground, and the house has about a 3-4' crawlspace under it.
Yup! You almost certainly do not need to float your floor if you have concrete slab on grade. Besides, your budget is nowhere near enough to do it anyway. So skip that.
How to build the room? Just take off the drywall on the inside of the studs in the garage, use it to beef up the outside surface from within the wall, between the studs. Seal and caulk airtight. That is your outer leaf. Now build a second stud frame a few inches away from that outer leaf, and put a couple of layers of 5/8 drywall on it. Seal and caulk airtight. That is your inner leaf. Fill the entire gap between the two leaves with insulation, such as fiberglass or mineral wool.
Now build a new inner-leaf ceiling across the top of the new inner-leaf walls, and put a couple of layers of 5/8 drywall on that too. Seal, caulk airtight. Put lots of insulation (fiberglass, mineral wool) on top of that new ceiling. Voila! You have a room!
Of course, you might need to put a door in there somewhere, too ....
:)
The concept is building a "room within a room", with two leaves, and ONLY two around you. Not three, not four, not one. Only two. Very important.
My main concern with the tracking room is keeping sound inside, but I am a little concerned about outside noise getting in,
It's the same thing, basically. Sound doesn't care which way it travels. If sound can get out, then it can also get in. You can't block it going only one way. If you block it going one way, then you just blocked it going the other way too.
The "room within a room" concept that I outlines above is the very best way of getting good isolation at low cost. There are other ways of getting good isolation, but they involve more exotic and expensive materials, such as sheet lead, steel plate, or reinforced concrete.
The type of two-leaf construction that I mentioned above is often called "Mass-Air-Mass", or more correctly "Mass-Spring-Mass", in honor of the principle of physics on which it is based. The two leaves of the wall are the two "masses", and the air in between is the "spring". The insulation damps the spring. So basically it is a resonant system (a tuned circuit, in electronic terms) that passes sound very well at its resonant frequency, but blocks sound increasingly well at all frequencies above 1.4 times the resonant frequency. The trick, of course, is to get the resonant frequency of your MSM wall way down, well below the audible range, so that it blocks sound across the entire spectrum. To do that, you need lots of mass on the walls, and a large air gap. Simple physics. It works very well, and is economical to build (I didn't say "cheap"! I said "economical", as compared to other methods.).
I will be pretty loud, loud distorted guitar tones, I play modern hard rock, Dark New Day, Alter Bridge, Nickleback, etc.
Yup! it sounds like you will certainly need good isolation! I see some MSM walls in your future....
I keep reading about room ratios, What does that mean, and would it apply to the tracking room?
The room ratio is just the ratio of the three dimensions of your room: height to width to length. Usually written as 1 : 1.51 : 2.78, for example. In that case, the room is 1.51 times wider than it is high, and 2.78 times longer than it is high. In your case, with the dimensions you gave for your CR, the ratio is 1 : 1.25 : 2.81.
Why is it important? The answer is "Room modes and standing waves". Google it!
:) Basically, if a sound wave or one of its harmonics fits a room dimension exactly, then that is a "mode", and the room will naturally vibrate at that frequency if you excite that mode by playing that exact note, or one very close to it.
In your case, a 70.6 Hz wave fits your room length dimension, so if you play a low C# or a D on a bass guitar, then it will tend to excite that mode, and the room will vibrate in sympathy. There are three types of modes: axial (the wave bounces back and forth between two opposite walls), tangential (it runs circles around the room, bouncing between any four of the six walls (the floor and ceiling are also called "walls" here)), and oblique (hits all walls). As you can imagine, it gets complex fast to figure out what these waves are doing with the walls!
Obviously, all rooms have modes. If it has walls, it has modes! large rooms are better in this respect, and small rooms are more complicated. You can't get rid of the modes, but you can design around them. So the idea is to find a ratio where the modes are evenly spread out across the spectrum, rather than bunched up in just a few places, with large gaps in between. That evens out the response of your room. In other words, if you build your room as a cube, 8 feet on each side, then the modes in all three axial directions would all line up perfectly, and reinforce each other, so you would have a really terrible resonance issue in such a room.
You only need to worry about modes up to about 250 Hz or so. Above that, there are so many and they are so close together that it just doesn't matter any more. It's the low end of the spectrum where problems lie.
Over the decades several researchers have figured out some sets of "good" ratios, where the modes are very evenly spaced. Yo need to aim for one of those. Right now, you don't have one!
:( Yours is not bad, but it's not there. Nudge your dimensions a bit to get to a known good ratio.
... the 8' ceiling in the mix room is kind of a bummer, but other than that, not bad. Thoughts?
Wellll..., see above: your ratio isn't ideal. It's OK, but not as good as it could be, with a little nudging. And yeah, an 8 foot ceiling is not fantastic either! But you have to live with what you've got, right? Raising the entire roof a couple of feet is probably out of the question, right?
:)
I am a little worried about the mix room being to loud at night, the house was built in 1950, and I doubt it has much insulation. From what I'm reading, I can caulk everything I can find, and add heavy doors, but that's about it as far as soundproofing an existing room. ... any major construction in the mix room is a no-no.
If you cannot do anything major to the CR, then you will probably have a problem. Caulking and sealing are good ideas, and will help a bit, but it won't be anywhere near enough.
You didn't mention what kind of levels you plan to mix at, but assuming that you are an average kind of mixer-guy, you'll mix somewhere in the region of 80 to 90 dB(C), with peaking at maybe 100 or so. So you are going to have noise issues. A normal single stud wall with no insulation and and a single layer of thin drywall on each side will get you maybe 20-something dB of isolation, 30-something tops, with with lots of luck. If you have peaks of 100 inside, that will make your peaks around 70 to 75 in the outside world. And 70 is
not quiet! The level in a quite bedroom at night is probably around 40 to 45. Normal conversation is around 60. So the sound escaping from your CR will be about twice as loud as normal conversation just outside the wall, and about eight times louder than a quiet bedroom... Your CR will probably be audible in the entire house. A bit muffled, but audible. I'm guessing that this is not good news for your wife? Are you sure you don't want to isolate that room a bit better? It can be done affordably, but it does involve doing nasty thing to the walls and ceiling... You might want to re-think that part about "no construction n the CR".
but his mix room is a little more broken up than mine,
What do you mean by "broken up"?
I have a lot of windows in that room, and as much as it might help to brick those up, it's not going to fly with the wife unit,
You don't have to brick them up: You can plug them. Build removable plugs that fit in tightly when you are mixing, but can be removed at other times, to let the light in.
Well, I hope that's enough info to get you started, I have ordered some books
You didn't get the right ones! I have both of those, and one of them gives plain bad advice in some places.
The books you really need are "Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros" by Rod Gervais, and "Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest. with those two, you will have a solid basis for doing it right.
I downloaded Stetchup 7, but it won't work, keeps giving me error messages.
That's strange. Try removing it, downloading again, and re-installing. Maybe the download was corrupt. What error messages?
Anyway, you came to the right place here. This place is chock full of the best acoustics advice you can find anywhere, and there are several world-class studio designers / builders / acousticians who drop in occasionally, including (obviously!) John Sayer, who owns the forum, and Rod Gervais, the guy who wrote that book I mentioned above.
The smartest thing you can do now is to browse around this forum, and read through the build threads of folks with situations similar to yours, to see what they did and how it worked out for them.
The next "smartest" thing you can do is to design your rooms very, very carefully, thinking everything through ten times, and asking folks here to take a look every now and then, to make sure you are not doing something silly. Then, and only then, should you buy any building materials and get our your hammer for the first time. One of the experts here use the signature "90% design, 10% construction". He's right. if you spend enough time designing it right, the actual build will go smoothly and you'll end up with a great studio at a good price.
You'd be surprised how some newbies barge in here every now and then, to brag about what a wonderful job they just did on building their studio, so now they can show the rest of us how to do it right!... Until they start posting photos and diagrams, and start learning from the real experts here (I ain't one of them!) about all the things they did wrong, and they learn why their studio must sound pretty lousy, compared to the way it could have been if they would have come here first to learn. Sad.
So welcome, and good luck with our build.
- Stuart -