I tried to treat my very small home studio; I’m now looking for advice to make it better as I think I’ve over done it.

[Clockworkcreep]

Like the title says, I went pretty far treating my tiny home studio with every wall covered in acoustic foam and the ceilings with moving blankets. I have grown tired of it and feel I could make better use of the space. It’s very small and is used for drums, bass, guitar, maybe some vocals, so there’s a lot going on in there. I’ve read other forums about treatment and pretty much went against the advice I was hearing about foam. The idea for me was to get a sound as “dry” as possible and then add any ambience with effects after the recording. I think it might have made it a little too constricted in terms of sound but also the feeling of being surrounded by padded walls plays a role too, I think. I’m pretty much stuck in this small room unless it’s impossible to get it to an acceptable place where I enjoy recording, playing, & mixing in there. Is there any advice on what I could do to treat this room better with it being a multi-purpose room? I’d appreciate any help with this.

 

[Papanate]

Well first thing you should move your desk to the Cross Corner - opposite the drums and across the corner - the complete damping of your room I don’t really know -
how big is the room? - is it comfortable or not sound wise? I would think with your small space - you did the right thing - but maybe open up parts of the wall - like 2 x 2 openings at different heights.

 

[Steenamaroo]

The issue with foam, which I guess is the advice you got before, is that it's only really useful across a small range of frequencies.
Relatively higher frequencies.

That means if you walk in there and clap your hands or hit a cymbal or snare you're going to feel like the room is dead, and that's great,
but the treatment isn't really doing anything good for lower frequencies.

Does that tie in with your experience? Are you finding that the low end sounds muddy or badly defined?

It's pretty common to see people making their own 4" thick rockwool panels.
Often around 2' x 4'.

For mixing environments they'd be placing them at the monitor first reflection points - The point on your walls
left and right of the speakers where you could see the speakers if there was a mirror.

Some people go farther with dense corner bass traps.

 

[rob aylestone]

I've worked in lots of spaces where the owners have gone mad with foam tiles - and they are all very tiring to work in. The foam sucks the life out of the acoustics and don't stop all the nasty low frequency humps and bumps in the response. Those tiles can work well to remove HF reflections, so if your monitors bounce off the wall behind you and the cymbals sizzle horribly, they can tame those, but they're pretty nasty to the general acoustic because in the real world, that kind of acoustic doesn't exist. If you run pink noise through your monitors and look at the spectral content on your flattest response mic, what do you see? I bet it's loads of peaks and troughs up to 3K or so then a much flatter line. Or worse a steadily decending line above 5K or so. It really bu**ers up your brain and makes recording very tiring when you have to be in there for a long time.