DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Ok, this ought to be fun... 
I've been frustrated with how hard it is to really get a feeling for the low end in my mixes for a while now, and have been thinking of doing some acoustic treatment of my room. Since I was going to be redoing rather a lot anyway, and since I've never really cared for the color of my room, I figured I might as well repaint before I do anything else. I finished last night, and have begun reassembling my room.
The current layout looks like the attached image, something I put together for another board I run when the bass response was first starting to bug me. It's not perfectly to scale, but let's say the room's about 12' by 20' (I can measure tonight) I have a queen sized bed, and given the layout of the windows, heater, and doors, the only two places it can really be in are along the wall it's on now, or along the back wall - for logistical reasons, it's at the most practical place (more ground space, plus I have three guitars hanging on that wall and I'd rather they have something padded under them in case they ever fall.
). The back wall, incidently, is vertical to about 4', and then slopes towards the center of the room at maybe a 30 degree angle, enough to lop off maybe 4-5 feet from the top - I'm right under the roof.
The first thing I'm wondering here is, obviously mixing off center in a room like this is less than ideal for the way it screws with the stereo image. However, my desk would JUST fit along the shorter wall it's next to, where that book case currently is. All else equal, am I better off having the longest part of the room behind me while mixing, or is it pretty much a moot point if I'm so off center anyway? And hypothetically, would I maybe be better off mounting the speakers in the corner, one on each wall, angled appropriately, so the room (from the speaker's perspective) was more of a lopsided diamond than a square?
Second is really my problem here is one of acoustic treatment. I can't really put bass traps in the corners (the sloping wall in one side would get in the way, on the vertical wall I'll run into problems with that heater, and putting a single bass trap in the remaining corner, next to or behind my speakers, seems kind of pointless - it'd be a tight fit, nontheless). Wallmounting would be tough, too- for instance, the one window in my room is over my amp. Furthermore, I'm just renting this apartment, and while I've been there about four years, I don't know how much longer I'll be staying there - at least until August, but probably no longer than a year past that. So, whatever I do has to be pretty reversable.
So, what I've been thinking is, maybe rather than trying to treat the room I'd be better off making freestanding bass traps that I could move around, and use a trio of them to try to isolate myself from the room - one immediately behind me, and then the other two right in front of the speakers, angled inward, like so: \_/ Idea being that this would at least give me a small acoustic space with minimal reflection. One, would this work even relatively well? And two, if I were to do something like this, how much would the layout of the rest of my room matter?
Budget-wise, if need be I'm ok with dropping a couple hundred on this.
So, it's sort of a perfect storm - small space; also needs to serve as a bedroom and I don't own it so whatever I do has to be either mobile so I can get it out of the way when not recording/mixing or unobtrusive, and there's no way for me to center myself in the room so the stereo image is going to be a battle. There's no other room I could record or mix in in my apartment - on a temporary basis I could probably set up in our living room, but I have three other roommates, and while they're all musicians (me, an instrumental guitarist, plus a bluegrass banjo/fiddle player, a classically trained vocalist, and a roommate who just loves bashing out drunken Weezer or Led Zep covers (which to be fair is kind of a lot of fun)), I doubt they'd be ok with giving up our living room for a recording studio.
I realize I'm probably in an impossible situation, but I figured it didn't hurt to ask. I can take pictures or give better measurements tonight.
I've been frustrated with how hard it is to really get a feeling for the low end in my mixes for a while now, and have been thinking of doing some acoustic treatment of my room. Since I was going to be redoing rather a lot anyway, and since I've never really cared for the color of my room, I figured I might as well repaint before I do anything else. I finished last night, and have begun reassembling my room.
The current layout looks like the attached image, something I put together for another board I run when the bass response was first starting to bug me. It's not perfectly to scale, but let's say the room's about 12' by 20' (I can measure tonight) I have a queen sized bed, and given the layout of the windows, heater, and doors, the only two places it can really be in are along the wall it's on now, or along the back wall - for logistical reasons, it's at the most practical place (more ground space, plus I have three guitars hanging on that wall and I'd rather they have something padded under them in case they ever fall.
). The back wall, incidently, is vertical to about 4', and then slopes towards the center of the room at maybe a 30 degree angle, enough to lop off maybe 4-5 feet from the top - I'm right under the roof. The first thing I'm wondering here is, obviously mixing off center in a room like this is less than ideal for the way it screws with the stereo image. However, my desk would JUST fit along the shorter wall it's next to, where that book case currently is. All else equal, am I better off having the longest part of the room behind me while mixing, or is it pretty much a moot point if I'm so off center anyway? And hypothetically, would I maybe be better off mounting the speakers in the corner, one on each wall, angled appropriately, so the room (from the speaker's perspective) was more of a lopsided diamond than a square?
Second is really my problem here is one of acoustic treatment. I can't really put bass traps in the corners (the sloping wall in one side would get in the way, on the vertical wall I'll run into problems with that heater, and putting a single bass trap in the remaining corner, next to or behind my speakers, seems kind of pointless - it'd be a tight fit, nontheless). Wallmounting would be tough, too- for instance, the one window in my room is over my amp. Furthermore, I'm just renting this apartment, and while I've been there about four years, I don't know how much longer I'll be staying there - at least until August, but probably no longer than a year past that. So, whatever I do has to be pretty reversable.
So, what I've been thinking is, maybe rather than trying to treat the room I'd be better off making freestanding bass traps that I could move around, and use a trio of them to try to isolate myself from the room - one immediately behind me, and then the other two right in front of the speakers, angled inward, like so: \_/ Idea being that this would at least give me a small acoustic space with minimal reflection. One, would this work even relatively well? And two, if I were to do something like this, how much would the layout of the rest of my room matter?
Budget-wise, if need be I'm ok with dropping a couple hundred on this.
So, it's sort of a perfect storm - small space; also needs to serve as a bedroom and I don't own it so whatever I do has to be either mobile so I can get it out of the way when not recording/mixing or unobtrusive, and there's no way for me to center myself in the room so the stereo image is going to be a battle. There's no other room I could record or mix in in my apartment - on a temporary basis I could probably set up in our living room, but I have three other roommates, and while they're all musicians (me, an instrumental guitarist, plus a bluegrass banjo/fiddle player, a classically trained vocalist, and a roommate who just loves bashing out drunken Weezer or Led Zep covers (which to be fair is kind of a lot of fun)), I doubt they'd be ok with giving up our living room for a recording studio.
I realize I'm probably in an impossible situation, but I figured it didn't hurt to ask. I can take pictures or give better measurements tonight.
), a pair of Tascam VL-X5's, which ought to be better than my Behringer 2031A's, just to see how much of my problems are shitty monitors and not my room. Thoughts to come...