Kill the echo!!!!!!

entenow

New member
hi

following question:

my recording room is 4mx3mx2m, solid painted wall

i want to use this room for vocals and guitars,
now i need to know, which combination of materials should i use to prevent reverb.

it should be very simple,but highly-effective, because i dont have the room, the money and the knowledge! :-)

thanx in advance

entenow
 
The cheapest would be curtains from other parts of your home. Mattress padding and heavy burlap stapled to the wall and ceiling in a corregated pattern is pretty cheap too. Do want a permanent installation or temporary?
 
well im not that poor. and my family would be surprised if i took all their curtains. :-)

it will be a permanent installation. i can do with this room what i want. im just wondering about the optmial size for panel or helmholtz absorbers and the best materials to build them. and how to build them best.

maybe you have some advice

entenow
 
Heh Heh, I Hear the word cheap and I think free or other peoples money. If your going to be using the room for both guitars and vocals but not at the sametime, leave yourself some variability. One thing you can do that pretty effective but rarely done is too build 2 foot by 4 foot slotted panels. One side of the panel should be reflective and the other with acoustic foam, so packing companies sell budget foam which shares alot of the same properties. Figure out how many panel you need to do all the walls not hidden by equipment, then make hangers where you need to hang the panels. This allows you to hang your treatments in various configurations to gain the amount of reverb you need for your specific application. You can angle them in the corners of the room to act as bass traps as well. Since your hanging them, they will move or float as low frequency "diaphagm baffes". This works very well and was used at Momentum Recording Studios in Seattle Washington, we could change to room acoustic for drum, guitars and vocals within a few minutes. One trick Ive done for amps and will be building another one soon is an isolation cabinet for the speaker cabinet. I put the mic in the cabinet on a small desktop stand that requires little space, I can move it if needed with little effort within 3 or 4 inches in all directions.
If your trying "soundproof" that would have have to done prior to the room treatments.

If youve got the time and want to spend the money, you can use exotic wood for the panels and Auralex type colored foam to beautify your creations.

Hope this helps :0)

Peace,
Dennis
 
2 meter cielings are to low for me to stand up in. but my favorite way to elininate echo is to diffuse it with a bookshelf full of books to shoot the echo in many different directions. use the matress cover for the walls on the sides and put some more between the monitors on the wall in the controllend of the room. rolled up carpet remnants in the corners make great bass traps in a pinch.
 
thanx for the advice

i think a massive type of wood is best for being reflective, is it?
i read in a book called "creative recording" about panel absorbers.
so i thought a little about it and thats my plan:

reflective side

|--------------------| <- massive wood
|+++++++++++| <- rock wool
|--------------------| <- mat barrier, flexible membrane
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ <- acoustic foam

absorbant side

so, what do you think about it. I'm trying to keep the dimensions and the weight small so that i can move them and so can optimize my room.

but what is the best method to test my construction? my ears, of course. but any advice how to measure reverb time and freqeuncy modes? (it must be simple and cheap :-) )

thanx alot

entenow
 
The cheapest and simplest way to test your creation is to do some recording in the room and see if what ends up on tape is desirable. Since your going with panel style construction you can make changes if you don't like the sound pretty quick. Try to get different instruments to do the test, bass, kick drum and a screaming banshee should be enough. The wood I might suggest is oak plywood, its beautiful when stained and the sandwich contruction is less prone to wierd resonance, solid woods tend to be inconsistant in density over large areas, ply is cheaper too. One thing my microstudio has is oak cabinets on the wall that my Marshall 1/2 stack faces, reflective when closed, absorbant when open(books as someone previously noted by Darrin).

Measuring anything like reverb times for the various frequencies is usually done with expensive equipment and be helpful in balancing your monitors for best L/R position and depth from your seat. For nearfeild monitors I believe that you want to make sure your not getting reflections so fast that it gets to your ears almost the sametime as it left the monitor.

Take some pictures as you pregress to document changes you make, a catalog of what each configuration sounds like lessens the experimentation downstream.

Peace,
Dennis
 
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