John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi everyone,

Treating my new room, have a bunch of semi-rigid, and it's about to get under way. Since I built my last traps 18months ago, I am seeing alot more prevelence of the Superchunk method, so I am trying to choose thee best method for treating my corners. My last room had four-inch thick semi-rigid in frames, across the 90degree corners, stacked floor to ceiling. This worked well, but I want to improve the performance, if possible.

What would be better for controlling the corners of my room:

Superchunk method measuring 40cm x 40cm x 56.5cm front face?

OR

Six-inch thick semi-rigid, 60cm wide, open front and back, gobo style?

The gobo style does make the traps more versatile, I could move the gobos when needed to other uses. Is the Superchunk method that much more effective that I'd be better off for-going the versatility of the gobo design?

My room is 3.45 metres long, 3.4 metres wide, 2.5metres high, with a 65cm deep wardrobe running along one of the long walls. Despite the squarish dimensions, it doesn't sound too bad. Floor is solid polished hardwood, walls and ceiling are fibro. This will be a mix room, and will see tracking of vocals and acoustic instruments/guitar amps. Basically a one room mix/overdub studio. Two (possibly three) corners are to be Superchunk'd (if that is the consensus of this post) all other surfaces/corners will be handled by movable gobos, six-inches thick, open front and back, floor to ceiling. There will be a 4inch cloud above my mix position.

Any help y'all can give would be great. If you need any more figures/diagrams, please let me know. I have proven to be fairly useless with Sketchup, so please don't ask for a 3d room model. It won't be pretty!

Thanks,

Heath.

Although superchunks are better than a thick sheet diagonally across corners, in a single-room setup I'd tend toward gobo's - reason being, you want shorter reverb times in CR's than in live rooms - with the gobo approach, you'd be able to pull out some of the absorption during tracking if you want. See John's new reverb calculator (sticky at the top of this forum) to see what your room would be like with differing amounts of absorption.

Generally, for tracking in small rooms you'd go for a RT of around .3 to .4 seconds, and about a tenth or so less for a mix setup. Reason being, if your CR has long reverb times you'll tend to think you dont need to add any 'verb to a mix when you probably DO... Steve

Hmmm, very good point, thank you Steve.

The point about reverb times hadn't really crossed my mind, mostly because I tend to gobo off a little room for vocals, and tend to do a similar thing for amps and acoustics too. I think I will try for a little more 'live' sound in my future tracking sessions. When I build my gobos, one side will have thin plastic under the fabric, and the other won't, so I can use the sides that best fit the sound.

Oh yeah, by the way, this forum does truly rock! Thanks again for the thoughts, Steve.

heath.