I'm looking to fix the acoustics in my room for recording acoustic steel string guitar and vocals. I want it to sound lively but have a flat freq. response.
This is what I have to work with:
Room: 12'Lx10'Wx8'H
Floor: carpet
Walls: Drywall, 1 layer
Door: hollow wood
Windows: at bottom 10'W.
My current problems are boomy bass and severe saw tooth freq. response. This will be the room I'm fixing. People tell me try another room but this is the one I have to work with.
I was thinking of installing wood floors, 4 ceiling corner traps, 4 bass traps(floor corners), wood slats on walls, absorption on most of ceiling.
What's your recommendation for walls? I don't want to kill too much of the sound so I thought to put diffusion materials on most of them, leave them bare, or install wood panels.
How much diffusion is good, how much is too much? Where is a prime area to diffuse? For example, if I'm playing guitar by one of the short lengths or in a corner say? How will wood paneling/slats for the walls sound? How about diffusion material on drywall? What do you recommend? I'd appreciate any help you can lend, thank you.
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small home studio
Moderators: Aaronw, kendale, John Sayers
-
dymaxian
- Senior Member
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Tue Dec 02, 2003 7:21 am
- Location: Madison, Wisconsin
Greetings!
Got a couple questions for you- you have almost enough info for us to come up with some advice, but not quite.
First- is the recording position you have marked also your listening position when you're mixing? If so, I'd recommend you move it to the middle of that wall, so the speakers are firing the long way down the room.
Second- how much floor space are you willing to give up on the walls? Assuming that the room has enough isolation for you, and you won't be adding any more drywall or anything, you'll still need to eat up some space along the walls for treatment you install or hang there.
That said, with a room this small the low and low-mid freqs are your biggest problem, as you'd observed already. If you want to even out the low end response, but not make the room dead, your best bet is probably panel traps like the ones Ethan Winer describes.
In another thread, we discussed putting panel traps along the back wall (back meaning behind you as you sit at the listening position) and hanging a heavy curtain in front of it. This might work well for you here, too- the panel traps would absorb a bunch of the lows, and the curtain would keep mids and highs from reflecting back at you when you're mixing. When you're tracking, and want a livelier room, you just open the curtain.
You mentioned putting corner absorbers on the ceiling- how about the rest of it? You could try hanging 703 an inch or 2 down from the face of the ceiling, which would both kill off flutter echoes and comb filtering quite nicely.
You mention diffusion in your post, but in a room that size I don't think diffusion is going to do what you want. John Sayers has sidewall absorber units that will make your walls act like they're at angles. I think those would work well for you also. If you think that having that much wood on the walls would make the room too live, you can space them apart further, exposing more of the insulation inside to soak up more highs and mids. They wouldn't act as helmholz resonators anymore, but they'd absorb some LF- and if you have other LF absorption elsewhere this won't be so much of a problem.
In a room this size, your best bet will probably be to get as much bass absorption, over as much of the LF spectrum, as you can fit into that room. Obviously, getting the room's response to be truly flat is almost impossible, but you can even it out considerably.
Hope this helps.
Kase
www.minemusic.net
Got a couple questions for you- you have almost enough info for us to come up with some advice, but not quite.
First- is the recording position you have marked also your listening position when you're mixing? If so, I'd recommend you move it to the middle of that wall, so the speakers are firing the long way down the room.
Second- how much floor space are you willing to give up on the walls? Assuming that the room has enough isolation for you, and you won't be adding any more drywall or anything, you'll still need to eat up some space along the walls for treatment you install or hang there.
That said, with a room this small the low and low-mid freqs are your biggest problem, as you'd observed already. If you want to even out the low end response, but not make the room dead, your best bet is probably panel traps like the ones Ethan Winer describes.
In another thread, we discussed putting panel traps along the back wall (back meaning behind you as you sit at the listening position) and hanging a heavy curtain in front of it. This might work well for you here, too- the panel traps would absorb a bunch of the lows, and the curtain would keep mids and highs from reflecting back at you when you're mixing. When you're tracking, and want a livelier room, you just open the curtain.
You mentioned putting corner absorbers on the ceiling- how about the rest of it? You could try hanging 703 an inch or 2 down from the face of the ceiling, which would both kill off flutter echoes and comb filtering quite nicely.
You mention diffusion in your post, but in a room that size I don't think diffusion is going to do what you want. John Sayers has sidewall absorber units that will make your walls act like they're at angles. I think those would work well for you also. If you think that having that much wood on the walls would make the room too live, you can space them apart further, exposing more of the insulation inside to soak up more highs and mids. They wouldn't act as helmholz resonators anymore, but they'd absorb some LF- and if you have other LF absorption elsewhere this won't be so much of a problem.
In a room this size, your best bet will probably be to get as much bass absorption, over as much of the LF spectrum, as you can fit into that room. Obviously, getting the room's response to be truly flat is almost impossible, but you can even it out considerably.
Hope this helps.
Kase
www.minemusic.net