but then I found this site and now I want to post this here because I am discovering that the advice here is a notch above the rest.
Thank you! (We think so too...)
how can we treat our rooms so that there is a decent sweet spot for mixing and so that what we record in the room sounds good too?
As with many of the answers you'll see here about complex acoustic questions, the truth is; "It depends". It depends on many factors, such as the size of the room, the instruments to be recorded, and the level of precision that you want, as both a control room AND a tracking room.
I say that up front, because you are asking about a very specific case, and the treatment for YOUR case is NOT the same as what someone else might need for a different situation. So somebody else reading your thread in the future won't think: "Well, Stuart said to do that for buttermuffin, so I'll do it in my room too", then the room turns out terrible! This is advice for YOUR room not for ALL rooms.
Your room is nice and large "around 7m X 5m with a 2.8m ceiling". 3m2 floor area with a reasonably high ceiling, bodes very well for having a room that can be good for both mixing AND tracking. That's very good. Somebody else who wants to do the same but has a tiny closet-sized room with a low ceiling is NOT going to get the same results you can, simply because of the good size of your room. The bigger it is, the easier it is to treat. Why? Because the larger a room is, the longer the natural-sounding decay needs to be, and in general longer decay is better for recording instruments. And secondly, a higher ceiling is pretty much always better for instruments, because they nee "air" to sound good.
I hope to record banjo, acoustic guitar and vocals in my room
Excellent! Those three just happen to have similar acoustic needs, and all towards the "drier" side of acoustic response.
If you would have said "My room is 3m x 2.5m x 1.9m high, and I want to record drums, trumpets and piano, as well as mixing", my reply would have been very different. Basically, it would have been "forget it: not going to happen".
So in your specific case, you have the basic prerequisites that make it possible to do what you want.
Having said that, you already know that tracking and mixing are two different things, so you can't have one single set of treatment that is excellent for both, regardless of the room. So what you will have to do is to use VARIABLE acoustic treatment. You will need panels on your walls that you can swing around, rotate, flip, slide, open, close, or whatever to change the acoustic repose of the room. With one configuration, the acoustics will be perfect for mixing, and by flipping/rotating/opening/sliding/etc. the panels to another configuration, it will be perfect for tracking.
That's the basic method. Make your treatment variable, but very carefully designed so that in one setup it produces the acoustic response laid out it ITU BS.1116-3, chapter 8, and also carefully designed so that in other setups it produces the acoustic response needed for tracking.
I was recommended to use thick low density fluffy absorption across the entire room while adding wooden studs/slats on the top to bring back some high frequencies
Weeelllll..... Mmmmmm.... sort of! But not really.
There's basically two methods for tuning a room: One is to start out with a purely reflective room: all hard solid walls all around, very bright, very resonant, very harsh, then add treatment devices one by one to damp that down until you attain the correct response. The other approach is to start with a very dead room, very dry, very over-damped, very lifeless, then slowly add treatment devices one by one to add life to the room again, as needed until you attain the correct response. Personally, I prefer the second method: start dead and make it live, but sometimes I do it the other way as well. Here are two examples of rooms that I have done, one starting live then slowly killing it, then other starting dead then slowly livening it up.
Studio Three: Started live, and damped down:
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471
Another room: Started dead, and livening up:
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=21368
The second one is still in progress right now, very nearly finished, but you can see how this process works. The first one is totally completed, and you can see the end product.
So basically, yes, your approach CAN work.... but not entirely for what you want to do!
I would assume that your number one priority is to have a great mixing environment, and the second priority is to have it also usable for tracking? Assuming that is the case, if that were my room I would design it so that the basic initial treatment and tuning makes it into a great mixing room, meeting BS.1116-3 as well as possible, but then make SOME of that treatment variable, so it can be flipped/rotated/etc. to make it more live and increase the decay times, such that is more suitable for tracking guitars, banjos and vocals.
That's the basic concept, but the actual details of doing that are rather complex. It's no easy task to design FIXED acoustic treatment, and far more complicated to design VARIABLE acoustic treatment. It can be done, but it's going to need a lot of careful prediction, analysis, and design to make it work.
So no, just using " thick low density fluffy absorption across the entire room while adding wooden studs/slats" is NOT going to do what you need. Rooms need to be tuned specifically for their purpose, and in your case the purpose is complex. All rooms are different, and all need different tuning (thankfully! If not, then I would be out of a job!). Designing a control room just to BE a control room with perfectly neutral acoustics is already hard: designing it to also be variable is harder still, so this is going to take you quite a bit of time.
But it CAN be done: Here's a room with variable acoustics that I designed for a customer a few years back:
Panels under construction, half open:
Variable-acoustic-01--panels--construction--half-open-SML.jpg
Panels under construction, fully open:
Variable-acoustic-02--panels--construction--fully-open--SML-ENH.JPG
Panels under construction, almost competed:
Variable-acoustic-03--partly-completed--SML-ENH.jpg
Compelted room:
Variable-acoustic-04--room--completed--SML-ENH.jpg
Acoustic response graphs for the room, showing how decay times change for different panel positions:
variable-acoustic-05--acoustic-rt60-plots-all-positions-t20.jpg
- Stuart -
