cluttered basement - need advice!

[bluelonestar]

i am currently working out of a basement with concrete floors and walls...the ceiling is beams and pipes. there is also a large amount of clutter on each side of the drum kit and about 5 feet in front of it.

what is the best way to enhance the acoustics of this room? My two overhead mics are going to pick up crazy reflections off all the clutter. i've read that blankets can be used to block noise and absorb sounds. is this ideally what I want? should i hang them all around the kit?

one more question, should I even consider recording vocals in a basement like this? I was considering using the bathroom. Thanks in advance.

[raerae28]

Can you not clean any of it up?

Also, if its a small area, look into a drop ceiling, preferably a tile that will absorb the sound and not bounce it. Also remember if you go this route that the tiles need to be footed in the frame with felt or something noiseless, so that you won't get rattle from the supporting frame that holds the tiles up. This may not be possible depending on how low the pipes run.

Another option is to paint the ceiling in that area, completely black, this kinda of gives you that movie theatre look.

Maybe you need a bookshelf to help organize misc items that are cluttering the studio.

R.

[bluelonestar]

r,
thank you. this basement was a mess! i wish i had a scanner b/c I would post some pictures. i'll be getting one soon. we just moved in this house and everything got flung into the basement! So just recently it got cleaned up to the point where I set up my studio. Theres cardboard boxes filled with junk(dont ask me what) along the sides of the walls on each side of my kit. Theres a concrete wall directly in back of it. and about 5 ft in front of the kit is my DAW(desk, reference monitors, cp screen, etc.) On the right of me is the furnace. It's a very lage basement with a nice high ceiling...which is great. But we're not putting in a drop ceiling for quite some time so I was kind of looking for a temporary solution. And anyway, where the studio is set up theres these pipes and other garbage that hangs much lower than the rest of the basement...someone told me it would be wise to tile around it...b/c the ceiling would wind up being far too low if we tiled under it.

A friend of mine put in a drop ceiling..but he had a problem with rattling noises like you mentioned. it took him a while to figure out where it was coming from but he eventually solved the problem. you can hear it in a lot of his recordings!

I was thinking of putting blankets on the ceiling above the kit and on the concrete wall behind it. I might even hang some from the ceiling in front and on each side too. Would this eliminate unwanted noise and help control the reverberation of the room? I don't know if it's worth all the trouble...i'm scared to death the sound will be horrifying! maybe it will be better if I just leave everything the way it is.

Thanks again for your help.

[raerae28]

My thread about my studio, you can see in the first picture that I have the same thing going on in my basement, but its just until I finish building everything out.

I am constantly shifting boxes and such.

even got a cement wall that has to be sheetrocked too.

I had one time bought 4 moving quilts and hung them from the ceiling to make a square iso booth, just put hooks into the joists above, and used the eyelets in each quilt to hang it and make a sqaure.

Work pretty well.

Rae

[darrin_h2000]

You should shift those boxes so theres all kinds of angles facing you and turn them into diffusers.

Or turn lemmons into lemonaide.