If you had to choose...

guitaristic

guitaristic

prophet of Dave
...between a 10'x14' room with 8' ceilings, carpet and drywall, and 2 windows, or a 14'x20' room with concrete floors, cinder block walls, 1 window against the far wall, and open ceiling (you know...8' but with just the support beams and stuff showing)...for recording and mixing purposes.


Which would you pick and why? I'm personally leaning towards the bigger concrete room because 1) bigger 2) open ceilings 3) landlord doesn't care if I screw bass traps into the beams. But am I making the correct assumption?
 
I'd take the bigger room....because it's bigger, and because a concrete floor is way better than a carpeted floor.
 
RAMI said:
I'd take the bigger room....because it's bigger, and because a concrete floor is way better than a carpeted floor.
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Ahh ok. I always see people say wood floors are great for reflections and such, but I assumed concrete would cause too much bounce.
 
Nah, many studios are actually using concrete floors now. Any reflective surface on the floor is better than carpet, generally speaking.
 
The exposed joists will also allow you to jam pink fluffy stuff up in there. This will give you all kinds of broadband absorption happening as well as making your ceiling seem like it's infinitely high. Plus, it's bigger. Still too small for "ideal", but much better and easier to treat.
 
To add to his question. If you already had the carpeted room. Would you rip it out and put in wood/laminate/vinyl? My room in question is a 12x12 square with a 6x6 walk in closet that I am hoping to turn into a completely dead isolation booth.
 
polarity said:
To add to his question. If you already had the carpeted room. Would you rip it out and put in wood/laminate/vinyl? My room in question is a 12x12 square with a 6x6 walk in closet that I am hoping to turn into a completely dead isolation booth.
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If it was up to me and feasible, I would remove the carpet and put in a hard wood floor.

Man, both your rooms are square dimensions, not ideal unfortunately. You'll have to trap the hell out of the 12X12 room. I wouldn't do what I think you want to do with the 6x6 room. Actually, I should ask you first: What do you want to use the 6x6 room for?
 
The idea was a completely dead room where I could track very quiet acoustic guitar or vocals. Also I was thinking I could run an amp in it fairly loud and get a clear recording without the echo of a normal room.

I have enough material outside right now (except the wood, stupid home depot.. long story) to make 12 traps 6" deep. I was going to go with 4 but everything I've read says that thicker is better and while I will lose 2' of my room if it makes the sound awesome, it's worth it.

Picking up more materials wouldn't be a problem if I needed more. I was originally going to do 24 3" traps but after doing more reading decided that was a crappy idea and I should go with bigger.
 
The room is fairly small. It is upstairs and I have 2 rooms to work with. Unfortuntaly both are 12x12 and both have the same closet space. I wanted to knock out some walls but the wife killed that idea really quickly. There is a TINY crawl space I was considering paying a 12 year old to run some cables and use both the rooms, one for recording one for mixing but with no line of sight and now needing to properly treat 2 rooms (or 4 if the closet was a good idea) it seemed like I was spreading my budget across more area and I would end up with 2 meh rooms instead of 1 decent one.

That being said I don't know how many square feet of space 12x12 times 2 is but it can't be that much. It would maybe cost me $500 to put down new flooring up here if it will help that much.
 
Do you want it to look nice or sound good? Hardwood floors are not something that makes the room sound better. The exposed sub floor would sound as good. It is the fact that a reflective floor tends to be ideal-as opposed to a carpeted one. Wood floors do this and look good. Not because they add to the quality of sound...

Treating the ceiling with appropriate products is where you should spend that $500 IMO. The only reason we don't treat floors, is because we need to walk on them. Carpet tends to only absorb the frequencies that help with flutter echo and some inconsistent amounts of high end. Not something any room needs much help with when using proper bass traps and first reflection absorbers.
 
Well, I'm not an expert on this particular thing, so what I'm going to say is what I THINK is true, but might not be.

First off I'd say making so-called vocal booths in closets that size is not a good idea. Vocal booths in real studios are bigger than most home-recordists entire recording area, generally speaking. They're not "booths", even though that's what they're called. But at least you're going to bass trap the hell out of it, so at least you're on the right track. But my honest opinion is that you won't get a good sound. If you have 6" of trapping on each wall, your room is now going to be 5X5.

But one thing a room like might be good for is putting an amp in there and cranking it without shaking the whole house.

Anyway, the cool thing is, you already have the material, so treat that little room and see what happens. If you have a choice of treating only one of the 2 rooms, I'd say take care of the 12X12 and forget the small room for now.
 
jimmys69 said:
The only reason we don't treat floors, is because we need to walk on them.
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I think I've read, on more than one occasion, that floors should be reflective because we're used to hearing sound bounce off a floor or the ground as humans. You always have a floor beneath you, but you don't always have a ceiling above you. Could be total myth for all I know.
 
I can treat the big and the small room, but I am not sure if I could treat both 12x12 rooms. I guess I could it would just take a hell of a lot more materials and time to build all the traps. The materials are not expensive compared to the other gear I've been purchasing so I'm sure my wife would welcome the break for the bank account. Even if I treat both 12x12 rooms though I still don't have an efficient way to record in 1 and mix in the other with no line of sight (not to mention a lot of the time I am tracking myself and that would be a PITA).

Although I did just think of this, I could setup a touchscreen in the other room and remote control my PC from the other room to start/stop recordings. Then I could have different tracking and mixing rooms. Both rooms the same dimensions though so I am not sure it would really help much.
 
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