John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello, I'm new to the forum and would like some personalized help. I've read through a lot of posts, and I'm still not putting together my needs out of the info I've consume. I'm oblivious to acoustics and need your help with treating my rooms. My "live room" is used for tracking drums, guitar, bass, and vocals (all at separate times of course).

I tried to make the layout as close to correct as possible with each square equaling a foot. The dimensions are also on the layout.

Treat me like I'm stupid and explain exactly what I need to do. Right now I have my "live room" ceiling about 70% covered in Auralex 1x1's and misc 1x1 Auralex squares on the walls.

The live room is 10x10x8
The control room is 14x10x8

Here is the link to the image of my floor plan:

http://www.therecordingart.com/images/rooms.jpg

I appreciate any help I can get. My main concern is if I need diffusion, how much bass trapping, how much absorption, and what the placement should be in each room. You'll see in the picture that I can't really do all 4 corners with bass traps due to closet and door placements.

Let's see if this helps - I've just written a "small booklet" on this for another member, located here

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5401

That thread links to some ideas for construction of clouds and traps, as well as explaining some of the "how does it work" stuff - I've marked up your plan showing what goes where, with some other comments.

Your control room isn't too bad modally, other than likely having a bit of a "suck out" problem around 50-80 hZ - deeper trapping in corners should help this. Also, any corners you can't absorb can be replaced with doing the same thing to wall/ceiling corners, EXCEPT for the two on either side of the desk behind the speakers - those NEED to be where shown while you're mixing.

Your live room, however, will require MORE absorption because it's a square - also, the ceiling height is 4/5 of the other two dimensions, so you'll have a LOT of modal frequencies stacking up and causing serious peaks and dips in the room response. Short of moving a wall and sloping the ceiling, heavy absorption is about all that will help. You would then need to add any reverb electronically during the mix.

If that 10 foot dimension in the Live room is EXcluding the closet, leaving the door open with clothes still hanging (plus stored sleeping bags, etc) can help balance out the room better - you might even be able to build a couple of panel traps to place in the center of the two blank walls, tuned to the second and fourth harmonics of your room dimensions - this can smooth out those peaks somewhat.

HTH... Steve

Oh, you probably noticed that I moved your desk to the other end - you need as much symmetry around the mix desk as you can get, and since you don't seem to have a window between the rooms it syouldn't matter...