General advice for people wishing to set up home project studio?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dags
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Dags said:
*Putting large panels of dense foam (or carpet) on the walls and possibly the ceiling
*Suspending wires between ceiling and floor about 3 inches from the wall and packing the space with pillows/doonas
*Standing wire-sprung mattresses up to create a 'dead' space for putting the mic in when recording
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why do all that work? just stack rolls of r11 or r13 insulation ($100) into the corners to act as bass traps and polycylindrical diffusers. you can cover with cloth if you like) then buy some rigid insulation panels (say 6 @ $50) and some cloth (another $50 + $10 for fire retardent) and build some absorbers. hang them 1 in front, 1 on each side, 1 overhead, and 2 behind.

its safer than hanging foam and carpet (a fire hazard) and way more effective than mattresses. use picture wire to hang the absorbers.

if you need mobility, put the absorbers on mic stands ($20 ea) so you can form a corner with them to create an adhoc booth.

so for less than about $250 and some work, you can create a very effective (and mostly pro looking) environment without much risk. if you want it deader, the carpet and drapes will help in the high end but most rooms sound crappy due to low end problems and reflection point interference with mics and mixing.

use bookshelves as diffusers by stacking the books to create random depths on the shelves (sorry if you're neat...)

read everything you can on acoustic treatments at Ethan Winer's site and in the many fine books out there :-) ignorance is not bliss and getting a decent sound will take you further than not...
 
EDAN said:
I agree.

You said carpet on the walls does almost nothing. That's not true, Carpet is a great absorber of high and high-mid frequencies and by far the cheapest way to go for a DIY'er.
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This is from the Carpet and Rug Institute:

Regarding the placement of carpet on walls:

“Carpet is manufactured for use as a floor covering, and installation on other surfaces, such as walls, is not recommended. Many carpet manufacturers will not assume any liability, real or implied, when carpet is applied on surfaces other than floors.”
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And the best absorption you get from carpet is in the mid to upper mid range - it does very little for high frequency transmissions.

The best you can expect for carpet is an NRC (Noise Reduction Coefficient) of 0.55 using a cut wool fabric in a cut pile carpet......

Compare this to 701 plain 2" thickness NRC 0.90
.......................703 plain 2" thickness NRC 1.00

Sorry - seeing as the manufacturers of the carpet say - don't do it........ and even 701 beats it hands down - I am having a hard time with your statement that "Carpet is a great absorber of high and high-mid frequencies and by far the cheapest way to go for a DIY'er."

Sincerely,

Rod
 
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Who would want to suck the the highs and mids out of a mix, other than techno fags?
 
Who would want to suck the the highs and mids out of a mix, other than techno fags?
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Techno fags? Is that the best you can muster ez? Your "cave" technique only illustrates your lack of understanding WHY absorption is used. Maybe if you climbed out from under that rock in the cave and spent some time reading "techno" information about studio acoustics, you might learn something. On the otherhand, why don't you go crawl back under that rock in the cave and waste some more bandwidth with your useless drivel.
Your fellow cavedwellers await your brilliant cesspool filler.
 
BTW, do a search on "translation". You might discover something.
 
RICK FITZPATRICK said:
Techno fags? Is that the best you can muster ez? Your "cave" technique only illustrates your lack of understanding WHY absorption is used. Maybe if you climbed out from under that rock in the cave and spent some time reading "techno" information about studio acoustics, you might learn something. On the otherhand, why don't you go crawl back under that rock in the cave and waste some more bandwidth with your useless drivel.
Your fellow cavedwellers await your brilliant cesspool filler.
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Oooo, getting fiersty, aren't we? :D
 
RICK FITZPATRICK said:
Techno fags? Is that the best you can muster ez? Your "cave" technique only illustrates your lack of understanding WHY absorption is used. Maybe if you climbed out from under that rock in the cave and spent some time reading "techno" information about studio acoustics, you might learn something. On the otherhand, why don't you go crawl back under that rock in the cave and waste some more bandwidth with your useless drivel.
Your fellow cavedwellers await your brilliant cesspool filler.
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No, dumbass, I meant "techno", as in ecstacy eating, bass drum pumping, faggy club kidz chewing on pacifiers and sucking on balloons type of techno.

Haven't you got a sasquatch to feed?
 
ez_willis said:
No, dumbass, I meant "techno", as in ecstacy eating, bass drum pumping, faggy club kidz chewing on pacifiers and sucking on balloons type of techno.

Haven't you got a sasquatch to feed?
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Only absorbing highs wouldn't help them anyway, unless they only wanted it to sound bassy in their room. Anywhere else it'd probably lack bass, or not be what they wanted/heard in their room.
 
Back to the thread

ahem...yes, anyway, back to our original topic.....
On Ethan Winer's excellent page on acoustics: http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html (which apl also supplied, I noticed, and I love the treatment he has done to his own space) there's a tip about not completely deadening a room as it sounds spooky.
I managed to pretty much achieve that in my first converted room (through my thinking that deader is better) and although there was almost zero reverberation which did sound kind of weird, it did make for crystal clear vocal recordings as there was no room echo at all that could be recorded.
Playback was similarly not affected by mid or high reverberations, and there was enough furniture in the room to absorb the lows.
I'm just wondering if, in the absence of an 'ideally' sounding reverberant room for recording, is creating an acoustically 'dead' area (or covering every wall in the room in its entirety) a better idea for the beginner than trying to build 'sweet spots' for recording and playback?
For most beginners, they will most likely have one room available for both recording and mixing.
Is aiming to create an almost completely dead room going to serve them better than placing acoustic panelling over 1/3 of the walls' total area and trying to place the mic and setting up the listening area so as to avoid conflicting reverberations?

Gulfo has some cool tips and the bookshelf idea is a monty! Especially as empty in-built shelves will act as resonators themselves and need to be filled with something in order to prevent low mid muddy reverb.

Interesting comments about the carpet because I have seen it being used in every rehearsal room I have ever been in - maybe it had some sort of cushioning behind it to assist.
Could it be that yes it does work, but not as effectively as properly constructed acoustic panels? And for the home studio enthusiast on a startup budget, could it be regarded as a 'better than nothing at all' option to begin with?
[not trying to throw any fire on the flames, but just curious as to other peoples' experiences]
re: the comments about fire risk - I haven't really thought about it except to recognise that I can't place a heater anywhere near a foam panel for that very reason.

Some cool observations so far, everyone!

Dags
 
I spent a majority of my weekend ripping the foam off of, then mudding/taping the ceiling in my studio because when I built my room, I put the kind of foam that's at the bottom of the picture below on my ceiling to deaden the room, because it's so small.

It took about two years to start drying up enough to coat my drums and lungs after an hour or two of playing. Took another year or so for me to actually do anything about it.
 

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if you want to go further with th bookshelf idea, you could create a QRD template to arrange them... :-)
 

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Or you could quit worrying so much about treatment and just play music.
Call me primitive but a lot of recordings now considered classic rock were recorded in environments less than ideal, using equipment that was not quite state of the art, such as:
Music From Big Pink by the Band--recorded in a basement using a 4-track and mixer (no fx).
McCartney by Macca--recorded in a farmhouse living room using a 4-track, no mixer and no FX.
Sgt. Pepper--recorded at Abbey Road using a 4-track. Most of the studios in the US were using 8-track and a few had moved to 16-track. EMI would not invest in 8-track recorders until the next year.
Abbey Road--recorded using 8-track in the summer of '69. By this time studios in the US had progressed to 16-track and Wally Heider was building the first 24-track studio in San Francisco.

Conversely a lot of musical drivel is being recorded in state-of-the-art studios: Madonna, Britney, HilaryDuff, Hannah Montana, Kelly Clarkson, Amy Grant--in other words, all the pop-tart crap by wannabe prostitutes.

All the technical perfection in the world is not going to make a crappy song into a good one. A good song performed with real passion is going to stand on its own regardless of the regarding environment and whether or not the equipment is state of the art.
 
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YeshuasFan said:
Or you could quit worrying so much about treatment and just play music.
Call me primitive but a lot of recordings now considered classic rock were recorded in environments less than ideal, using equipment that was not quite state of the art, such as:
Music From Big Pink by the Band--recorded in a basement using a 4-track and mixer (no fx).
McCartney by Macca--recorded in a farmhouse living room using a 4-track, no mixer and no FX.
Sgt. Pepper--recorded at Abbey Road using a 4-track. Most of the studios in the US were using 8-track and a few had moved to 16-track. EMI would not invest in 8-track recorders until the next year.
Abbey Road--recorded using 8-track in the summer of '69. By this time studios in the US had progressed to 16-track and Wally Heider was building the first 24-track studio in San Francisco.

Conversely a lot of musical drivel is being recorded in state-of-the-art studios: Madonna, Britney, HilaryDuff, Hannah Montana, Kelly Clarkson, Amy Grant--in other words, all the pop-tart crap by wannabe prostitutes.

All the technical perfection in the world is not going to make a crappy song into a good one. A good song performed with real passion is going to stand on its own regardless of the regarding environment and whether or not the equipment is state of the art.
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Yeah, but if they had the oppurtunity of working with the equipment available nowadays, i'm quite sure they would have. Budget, and technology was the limiting factors in that. Yes a lot of the best songs were recorded in less than ideal situations, but who's to say it wouldn't be even better recorded nowadays.

Yes, pop music is shit now, but that's no reason to put down the equipment. If you have a good song, then recording it in a great studio will help to bring it out, not hinder it. I used to be in a band, we played decent music, but the recording quality/our playing always let us down when we recorded with a 4-track. We're gonna re-record it when my studio is setup, and i guarantee it'll sound a hell of a lot better.
 
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