I just registered here after i got the recommendation to consult you guys with some of the questions i currently have in a couple of local german recording forums.
After reading all of the instructions, i decided it might be necessary to open up a new topic, so here goes:
1. What's this about?
Me and my band had the opportunity to move our rehearsal space to an old US-Army facility in Mainz/Germany that is right now being converted to completely serve as practice space for bands and musicians. Neighbours and soundproofing is absolutely not an issue, which is great because we're a four piece hardrock/stoner rock combo with a drummer that likes hitting hard, a deep love for tube amps and a despise for everything in-ear.
All of the walls and ceilings are solid concrete. Additionally the concrete ceiling has a suspended ceiling made of plasterboard like you'd find in an office space.
Whats exceptionally great about the space is that we can now call an entire four-room officers-appartement within the facility our own, which led to the idea of building a small studio with a live/practice room, a controll room and a storage room (a fourth room is rented out to a drummer buddy of ours to make the overall costs work out).
I've spent the last couple of months not only renovating but also reading on acoustics, building huge cornertraps and absorbtion panels and measuring our progress using REW. But now i've come to a point where i really can't figure out the next steps on my own, hence this topic.
This is not meant to become a professional recording studio. The rooms are way too small for that and being mostly young and just off from university, we're all somewhat of on a budget (but since this is an ongoing project and we split it by the four of us, we can definitely manage to put in a couple of hundret Bucks). What this is meant to become is our own little rock'n'roll recording paradise within the limits we can reach. We're well aware, that the rooms aren't optimal - but since we've had great sucess recording our music DIY in a far worse environment, we'd like to step up our game and just make it the best we can for now.
2. Overwiew
This is the overall layout:
Room No. 2 is our live/practice room
Room No. 3 is our storage room (which we couldn't really use as anything else since theres a huge AC unit controll panel for the entire building fixed to the wall)
Room No. 4 is our controll room
Room No. 5 is rented out to our drummer buddy to make the overall rent we're paying work out
Here's a nice little render our drummer generated to give you a little bit of a feel for the layout:
The floor used to be some ugly sort of vinyl floor that we changed out for a more sturdy and nice looking thick laminate:
Since we're mainly focusing on the live room right now (controll room might come later), here's the measurements of lenght and width of the live room.
The room is 240 cm high floor to suspended ceiling and roughly 260 cm high floor to concrete ceiling. I hope it's okay to use Meters and Centimeters since we europeans have little to no clue about imperial or US customary units.
("Fenster" is german for "window")
3. What we've done so far
The first thing we've done is simply build the biggest corner traps we could fit, using rockwool sonorock. Unfortunately there's only two corners usable for huge triangle traps. The third corner is blocked by the entrance door and the fourth corner is a little hallway.
Here's the corner traps built into the first two corners:
In the third corner just behind the main entrance door i've basically just tried to fit as much rockwool as i could:
Here you can see the little hallway in the fourth corner of the room (just behind the drumset):
Next we've build some absorption panels out of rockwool, just trying to treat some of the first reflection points and placing them just by ear (that was basically done so we could start rehearsing again but the results were already huge so the've just stayed where they are until today). We've also hung up a thick acoustic curtain to treat the window.
Since we couldn't fit a corner trap in the hallway - these are basically just extra thick rockwool panels.
And also one just behind the guitar cab that i had left over and worked wonders in rehearsal.
(old bass cab beneath the marshall cab is just abused as a riser)
The long black wall is still completely untreated because I wasn't really sure wether to just "plaster" the place with absorption panels or introduce some sort of diffusion instead. This will be part of my questions at the end of this post.
So this is the current situation. I wasn't really sure how to best go on from here so what i did was measure the room just as it is right now for you to see what's going on.
Since i've just run out of attachement space, the measurements will be up next in a separate post.
