Painting a design on a canvas covered bass trap?

Nate74

Nate74

HR4FREBR
I am about ready to put up the traps in my new room. In my last room, I had a pretty dark motif going on with all my traps finished in black canvas. This new room is a bit smaller and I'm going to go with a natural canvas color on most of them. But the one that will be right behind me is sort of in a central location so I was wondering about leaving it black and maybe painting something on it. Maybe an upright bass, or old jazz guitar or something... but I'm wondering if the paint has the potential to mess up the acoustical properties of the trap? Anybody ever done this? Tried a search to no avail... thanks.
 
Just regular thin paint, not huge amounts globbed on it? I have no data to support it, but I think it'd be negligible. MAYBE a teeny tiny bit on the super high freq's. I think you'd never be able to tell, someone can correct me if I'm wrong. The kinda freq's youre TRYING to trap will go right thru it.
 
I never heard of using canvas to cover bass traps. You want material that lets the sound through - generally the best way to tell if its porous enough is try to breath through it (burlap, thin cotton sheeting work good, for example.
 
Thanks guys. The canvas I used is a really loose weave, almost like a burlap just not as course feeling. Honestly, I think it's what was on sale at Joanne's when I first built them. And yes, you can breath through it no problem. Heck, you can actually see through it when you hold it up.

I'd probably use an acrylic paint which probably would close off the weave but I'd try to do a design that was relatively simple and wouldn't cover more than say 20% of the surface area.
 
Scenic painters refer to some fabrics as holes tied together with string - the test is simply as has been said, can you blow through it, or see through it. If you want to maintain the acoustic performance, then painting it with dye instead of paint is the preferred technique. It's a common requirement for theatrical cloths where they are needed to be transparent to light - and they use a gauze material that is weaved with triangular 'holes'. using thicker paint fills these holes, and will prevent lights and sound passing through. The dye based colour can be brushed on or sprayed on, and even stencilled on - but it simply colours the strands in the fabric - so won't give you really solid colour, in the way thicker paint does.
 
Rob - that's a great suggestion. If I go with a lighter color burlap or loose weave canvas, I could probably do something pretty cool with just black dye. That's a really good idea.
 
Any cloth canvas type covering on a bass trap wont affect the bass trap efficiency, however it will affect the high end absorption, that is way some bass trap designs have a thin solid covering so that the highs can be retained. Painting the canvas won't affect the bass trapping but will change the high end slightly.

Alan.
 
witzendoz said:
Any cloth canvas type covering on a bass trap wont affect the bass trap efficiency, however it will affect the high end absorption, that is way some bass trap designs have a thin solid covering so that the highs can be retained. Painting the canvas won't affect the bass trapping but will change the high end slightly.

Alan.
Click to expand...

+1 - However as a professional company we would use dye sublimation printing. So if you can use something like that it would work really well and should not effect the acoustic transparency of the material
 
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