home studio acoustic treatment for less - help

Awie Day

New member
i looked into some auralex acoustic treatment and they are too expensive for me. my budget for an acoustic treatment will just be around $300 as my budget is very limited(bills, etc) i was wondering if it's possible to do that for vocals, tracking and mixing. i don't have a real amp which i'm guessing that i'm not going to bombard my room with so much acoustics. i'll be using amp and cab sims so basically sound will be coming from a studio monitor or tracking through a headphone. i'm don't have the specific measurements of my room but i'm guessing it's 6-7 ft wide and 12-15 ft long. i'm not sure if that's the correct measuring of any room as i don't know how to get it by sqm. here's a visual representation of my room.

room.jpg
 
Most of the recording stuff you're talking about will eliminate the room by the way you're doing the capture. Acoustic treatment will still help a lot for monitoring in that small a space, or anything you capture with a microphone in that space.

If you can get a hold of some Roxul rockboard or Owens Corning 703 rigid fiberglass, things like bass traps, acoustic panels, corner chunks and clouds are fairly easy to make. You need a fabric of your choice that you can easily breathe through, a wooden frame, either the rockboard or the rigid fiberglass and a staple gun.
 
Don't know where you are located (you can add that to your profile info) but look into building some 'bass' traps (4" thick rockwool or compressed fiberglass). You can hang them on hooks to move them around as needed to make the best of your situation (doing voice, you might put two in front of you in a V, but mixing, have them in the corners.) You can find youtubes on how to make them, look through the older threads in this section of the forum.
 
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Back to what Snow Lizard stated, don't confuse tracking and mixing. If you mic in certain ways, and get the sound you want then that is the sound.

Now, if you want to mic and get a certain room sound, then treating the room or "tuning" the room is your goal. Some people like to record in hallways or bathrooms for vocals, they like that heavy reflective sound.

Treating a room, at least in my head, is for mixing to get the room neutral. For tracking, it is more tuning a room to capture a particular room sound. (My one cent worth).
 
As others have posted, the requirements for the various parts of creating a finished recording can actually require some different kinds of room treatment, but for the majority of us doing all this at home in a single, less-than-ideal space, it's a matter of compromising and doing what is appropriate for most of the room's use cases.

Now, that is often mixing, and that is really the bigger challenge because all of the surfaces in the room can contribute to problems in mixing with monitors (vs. headphones). In your case, with your budget, I'd want to first locate your desk and mixing spot where it will be fighting less with the room, and that looks like placing it centrally at the narrow wall at the top of your picture. Then, you treat early reflection points at the sides and overhead and also behind your monitors if they have rear-facing ports. Get heavy drapes for the windows. By building your own treatment panels (lots of examples here and on YouTube videos) you can probably stay within your budget, but not a lot more will be possible, IMO/IME. You'd ideally add bass traps (floor to ceiling, 2x+ deep treatment panels), but just the materials for those are going to chew up some $ unless you can find scraps for free. And, frame building does require access to a miter or table saw for the best results.

For vocal tracking, you will just have to test areas of your room, or possibly resort to tracking in a closet (I've never done this, but I have heard decent results, honestly) so you minimize room reflection. If your narrow end of the room by the desk is well treated for mixing, you might find that it works reasonably well for vocals, too, depending on the singer, mic, and what else is in the room. Diffusion at the back wall is something that will help, and you can accomplish that with bookcases - you might already have some things you can use there. You might be able to simply open the door while tracking if it doesn't add noise in the room that intrudes, since that will remove that reflection point.

Good luck.

P.S. Rockboard and Owens may be hard to source locally and shipping for those materials will just kill your budget. I've been able to find Roxul Safe'n'Sound - a "rock wool" product that is not rigid and slightly thicker (designed for between stud placement inside those "hollow" walls) for the same density, and it works well, at the expense of some additional thickness and it does require framing.
 
On a budget.

Curtains,wall hangings,tapestries,area rugs,throw pillows etc... using airspace to your advantage.

Furniture,couches,bookcases etc.. will provide some diffusion.
Sound waves won't know the difference.
Hit the second hand shops.

G
 
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