John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

my basement studio is a 17.5' x 14' room. the top and bottom walls (14' apart) are concrete; the left wall is drywall; the right wall is a canvas curtain blocking off storage. the ceiling is only 6' high all around (canvas-covered insulation).

i'm recording drums, and i need some ideas on how to be making the drum room. hopefully someone here can answer some questions i've got:

- the floors are carpeted. bad? floating floor?

- i can't build permanant walls, so i'm stuck moving around big old temporary walls and hanging quilts. it works, but i think i might need something else for the insides of the walls. isolation is not a concern, only acoustics.

- considering the ceiling is only 6' tall, should the room be acoustically treated at all? i'm sure it depends on the size and the location.

sound i'm looking for: tight, powerful, broad

anything? things can move around real easy, so placement is not much of an issue. thanks.

Looks like this one got lost for a while, sorry; what's your sound like as is? Are you close to what you want, or a mile away?

With that low a ceiling, the canvas over insulation should work pretty well; I'd lose the carpet though, having absorbent on both parallel surfaces can make things too dead; and carpet only absorbs high mids and highs, making things too unbalanced.

It almost sounds like the cover in front of the storage could be augmented by gluing either rigid fiberglass insulation or mineral wool slabs to the cover, making a sort of bass trap of the storage area.

Then, more of the rigid fiberglass or mineral wool placed diagonally across the room's corners will even out the room response quite a bit; if you're handy with tools, you could build some of the corner slat absorbers for a couple of the corners; they're movable, and can be made so they fit in your low ceilinged room -

http://www.johnlsayers.com/HR/index1.htm

Hope this helps some... Steve