Help me treat my room (specifics included)

H

hiphop24360

New member
Ok, I record and mix in this same room.

The room Im using (sorry no pics, I'll describe though), it's 10 ' x 12 ' x 7 ft ht. . . So the ceiling is very low. On one side of the room the top 3 ft of the wall goes back an additional 4 or 5 ft across the whole ten foot span......... So picture a wall with an empty shelf built back into the top part of the wall, thats what your looking at. In one Corner there is a closet I can open and its about 3 ft of additional depth ceiling to floor... So thats 3 corners with additional depth, one of them from ceiling to floor (maybe Ideal for bass traps without decreasing my already too small dimensions ?).

I plan to treat the room using 2" thick, some parts 4" inch thick, roxul rockboard 60 (similar properties to OC705 but half the price) wrapped in some kind of fabric and with a wooden built frame. (plenty of plans on the internet)

I also plan on buiding between 6 bass traps, *probably between 4 and 6" r60, 4 of them for corners and 2 for the back wall. (does that sound about right?)

my questions are, Say my vocals are coming from one corner facing outward toward the room, where are the optimal places to put the 2" inch think panels and where to put the 4" ones? Should I leave the rest of the room (the non paneled part) bare and reflective? Any Idea's on the ceiling considering its low height? I heard about a program, and a device used to measure problem area's in your room, how does this program work?

Oh if it matters the floor is cement and the ceiling is wood panneled, the walls are wood panneled to.
 
there is no set way to set out your 2" panels from your 4" ones that i can or anyone will be able to tell you just by reading that, i doubt it anyway.

every room is different and just cause someone says that you should put this one here and that one there it doesnt mean that your not going get reflections off a window that no one knew about, because nobody could see what your room looks like.

take some pics! that will help people to help you out. nobody wants to "picture" what your room looks like when cameras are readily availble to do that much better then any of us will be able to. if you dont have a camera, make a basic blueprint in paint, or draw it on paper. its just lazy to expect people do to that much of the work for you i think.

now back to your questions

4 inch corner bass traps sounds fine to me, i would do some 2 inch and 4 inch panels around the room, like people say "you can never have to many bass traps". not to mention that these panels are all extremely portable, just dont hang them up permantly and find the best place for them.

place some 2 inch panels on the 1st reflection points, as you usually need to tackle the mid-high frequencys there.

its also fine if you only build 6 or so panels to begin with, if you feel like you need more room treatment after that build some more.

now about the floors and roof, i would put some carpet over the concrete floors, ive never liked the sound of vocals recorded standing on concrete, but you might so its up to you. you can treat the roof with some ceiling clouds, but this may lower your roof to much if its only 7ft high, it may cause comb filtering, but you would have to ask someone else about that.
 
^ Thanks for the help, I saw a pretty cool google program for drawing out rooms, I will try and find it and get a sketch up, your probably right, its asking people alot to try and picture the room.

Hmm, I actually had carpet on the floor for a bit and I thought it sounded better, than I read this article saying you should never record with carpet on the floor blah blah blah, so I took it off....than had horrible problems with reflections between the floor and ceiling.

So in general I have the right Idea about bass traps and panels, thats a good thing.

Im still a little confused as where to put the panels in relation to the microphone for the best accoustics for recording. I need to create a Reflection Free Zone by placing 2 inch panels at first reflection points.

First reflection points are the first places on the wall that my voice (in this case) would bounce off right?

all the info I read is about where to put the panels for your control room/mixing position instead of for recording.
 
im no expert in acoustics but i will help you with what i can.

carpet is def not ideal for recording, but i personally like the sound of vocals recorded over carpet rather then concrete. those articles you read are usually written for people building studios from scratch rather then working with an existing room. carpet works fine for me.

keyword here is reflection, i try to picture the sound moving when im thinking about placement of panels, which is nearly impossible, but the plan is to best place to the panels where you think the sound is going to bounce next.

for example, if you record your vocals in a corner, bass trap the corner, then i would cover nearly the whole wall behind and to the sides of where the mic is in panels, spaced pretty thinly apart from eachother.
and if possible the wall behind where the vocalist is too.

that way everywhere where the voice hits the walls it ABSORBS the sound rather then REFLECT it back to where your sitting, or back into the room.

its important to remember that sound bounces, sounds simple enough but really its not.

the first reflection points is actually a kind of echo of the sound being made by your speakers from what i can tell. it is the first sound you hear after hearing the direct sound or song being played from your moniters/speakers. its important to absorb sound at the 1st reflection point because if left untreated it can confuse you to hear the direct song, then hear the 1st reflection bouncing back off the untreated wall.

i hope i explained that okay, im no expert as i said so if i mucked that up and any one wants to correct me on this or anything else written here, feel free im only going off hours and hours of internet research.

are you recording/mixing in the same room?

if you are i would work on treating the space more for the microphone to sound good than to have a good desk and moniter/speaker setup like what your saying how all plans are for a control room.

all i can offer as advice there is:

set up the desk were your comfortable, the speakers still sound good for mixing but it doesnt interfere with the microphone recording to much.

treat the room based on making your mic sound its best, get your mixing done elsewere if you can.

hope this helps
 
^Thanks a ton man, that was alot of valuable info.

Yes I am recording and mixing in the same room. I am treating the room for the microphone not the monitors, I now realize that should have been made crystal clear.

Okay from what I gather, wood is better than carpet is better than concrete as far as flooring goes.. I added a couple small carpets from the bathroom but not enough to completely cover the cement floor. I think it sounds better than it did all cement and less dead than full carpeting... or maybe my ears are hearing what my brain thinks they should. haha.

Yea I record my vocals in a corner, facing outward toward the room. Would it be completely redicolous to ask how to best treat a room for the mic and recording vocals? (which, in my defense, was my completely unclear question from the beggining)
 
its fine, i was trying to do something similar myself, i think sometimes when you look on the net and see what has worked for other peoples studios, you tend to get a bit overexcited on one idea then you get stuck into trying to make that idea work, when another simple solution is all you need.

as long as your microphone sounds good, you can always work with that later down the track. its quite hard to make a bad recording sound good through a good speaker setup though.

most people like wooden floors for there studio because it adds some nice "colorization" to their recordings, some find it too much and end up adding some spaced out rugs and carpets anyway (in the right places)

so wood is not always perfect, but gives you more control over the sound bouncing then concrete i think. you have the right idea with the carpets, if you prefer to have some of cement still exposed thats completly up to you, you have to let your ears decide that.

i recorded on concrete for years with great success, i had one rug that covered about 3/4 of the room and a smaller rug for the microphone to sit on. but again thats up to you!


well a quick solution would be to build a kind of sound baffle or some portable bass traps/ broadband absorbers, then place them to make a portable wall that you put in front of your microphone. ive done this in my early days of recording, and its a good start to designing and building some basic sound treatments, & also learning how to place them to reduce room noise.

like i said in my first post, without some pics and a room layout i cant help you with actually placing the panels.

some walls in your studio may require more or less treatment or a different kind of treatment altogether, for EXAMPLE to the right of your desk in the next room you might have parents or a room mate who works nights and sleeps while your recording, if you just put a 2 inch panel over that wall, its not going to block out the lower frequencys and your sub is going to annoy the hell out of them everytime you have a beat going.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top