Temp Studio Idea ...Maybe Crazy.

[JerryD]

When I was single I used to do crazy stuff to record music. For instance I purchased thin inexpensive blankets and nailed them to the ceiling where there were studs. When you're single and drunk you can do that.

My idea was what if you created a circular railing that had a thin fabric that could be put on this rail and create a room within a room just to record. Then you could take it down when you are not recording.

1. What would the sound be like. I mean would this work for recording?

2. Is this new or has someone come up with something similar?

 

[Chili]

When I was single I used to do crazy stuff to record music. For instance I purchased thin inexpensive blankets and nailed them to the ceiling where there were studs. When you're single and drunk you can do that.

My idea was what if you created a circular railing that had a thin fabric that could be put on this rail and create a room within a room just to record. Then you could take it down when you are not recording.

1. What would the sound be like. I mean would this work for recording?

2. Is this new or has someone come up with something similar?

First off, the short and long answer is, No, that wouldn't work.

But the question is now, What are you hoping to gain by doing that?? When we talk about sound treatment, there are two completely different modes (for lack of a better word). Sound Isolation and Room Response. In either case, "Thin" anything would be a little or no use. Even using heavy carpets or moving blankets would have little benefit.

Sound Isolation comes about from structural methods and has to be planned into the room befre it's built. It's difficult and expensive to isolate sound (or minimize transmission loss) in an existing room. Especially in a residential dwelling.

Room Response is how the room responds to sound. Reverb, flutter, standing waves, peaks and nulls. This is more easily controlled and doesn't cost a fortune. But again, "Thin" anything doesn't help.

Tons of info in the Studio Build section. There are also links to other sites dedicated to building a studio. Do some browsing, do some searching, but read read read. There's a lot to learn before setting your expectations.

 

[tvaillan]

Silly suggestion.

This guy I know once told me that to make vocals more intimate in a 'bad' room, that he puts an open hard-shell guitar case behind the mic stand and it seems to work.

I took this idea a bit further and gutted a hard shell guitar case and added carpeting and acoustic foam inside it. It behaves much better.

[ keeping in mind that sound bounces around, so you need something to absorb behind/above/left/right of you as well.]

Personally, I use foam tiles on my walls and foam rolls in the corners.
I mounted the foam tiles using small finishing nails. It's not secure, but it's just foam, not a 10lbs picture.

[ i mount the foam in a checkerboard pattern, you don't need the stuff everywhere, but it's good to do most of your walls at least ]

Cost me 100$ or so. I used foambymail.com

Keep in mind that this is good for dampening all the treble that bounces in the room, but it doesn't do anything for bass and noise.

[ this won't do anything for your room acoustics, but at least vocals and acoustic guitars won't sound like you're in a garage.]
.. and it doesn't look that ugly.

 

[tvaillan]

Another suggestion that's like the original post ..

That same guy once told me that he was thinking about setting up a room so that he could have "blankets" fall from the ceiling , perhaps initially rolled on the ceiling and held there with some sort of clip.

The idea is that these 'blankets' would be normally stored on the ceiling until you want to record.

The blankets of course need to be much more than just blankets. You'd probably have to have many layers, including a 'foam' layer to dampen out some frequencies. The thickness of the foam is important. That is why regular blankets don't do much.
Anyways, it's a nutty idea, and not perfect, but it COULD sound better than just singing in a plain room.

Not as convenient as your original idea, but it could work.

 

[JIMBOdrummer]

you just don't want sound to come back at u. you don't need to "absorb" it. just deflect it. ne one who says something to the tune of "room treatment is NUMBER ONE!!!!" is just blowing their knowledge up your ass. at the level most home studios are the room treatment can be taken care of pretty easily. and not with oceans of foam.

idk y but every one thinks foam and blankets absorb sound like water into towels.

Foam is used as a treatment because:
-its relatively cheap
-it can be cut into angled surfaces
-it absorbs some lower ends and reflects higher ends semi EQing low sounds out.

sound still bounces. big money studios don't have a lot of foam cause they can afford wooden baffling to collect and disperse sound in different directions. they can also afford to construct the room in a shape ideal for mixing.

BOTTOM LINE. you could record in a bedroom. there's enough furnishings, drapery, and misc. objects to bounce sound in different directions.

 

[RAMI]

Good thing this thread is in the newbie forum, because, besides Chili, you guys have a hell of a lot to learn about room treatment. "This guy once told me this...and this guy once told me that....". Gimme a break. Educate yourselves already.

 

[Creamyapples1]

While I can't stress enough that proper treatment is very, very, very important. To say that hanging blankets will do "nothing" isn't quite fair. Comparing it to treatment of any form is a bit premature though.

I'll give you two examples.

1) For the longest time, I just had a spare bedroom to record in. I was picking up PC noise when I mic'd a guitar amp so I used blankets to make a cavity in front of my guitar amp and placed a mic inside of it. It didn't change the sound of my amplifier, but it was just enough to kill the sound of my PC fans just enough to get them below the noticable level (not eliminate it)

2) In the past, I've used hanging blankets to change the "feel" of a room while recording an acoustic guitar. The spare bedroom that I used had hardwood floors, bare walls, not much furniture, etc so with nothing it gave an airy, open vibe, which works sometimes. Hanging my ghetto blankets draped over mic stands made it a bit smaller.



I know first hand what it's like not to have the ability (because I rent rather than own) to do a full out makeover of a room, as well as being inable to bare the burden financially. There are a million little things you can do to change things up a bit but none of it will come close to comparing to what it sounds like to record in a room that has proper treatment or moderate treatment.

Currently, a friend and I have lucked into some spare commercial space and picked up 7 huge panels from the music room at a local school auction for a dollar and we've invested in a few cases of 703 rigid fiberglass. Our space isn't "perfect" but it's leaps and bounds better recording there than in a spare bedroom with blankets!

+1 for proper treatment
+1 for ghetto room adjustments with anything available

 

[tvaillan]

education

Yes education is key, but action speaks louder than words. Take simple steps to reduce reflections, then go for broke and track your heart out.

JIMBOdrummer is right, it's all about catching those reflections.

I use foam tiles in key places in my room. I have factual evidence in the form of recordings that my budget treatments work. Clap your hands in your room. If you hear a big echo, you've got problems. Your recordings will sound distant. If you put too much foam (or whatever) , then you will suck the life out of your room. (You essentially cut the mids and treble of the room and are left with a dull sound)

Placement/balance is key. You'll find a nice place to lay down your guitar tracks. Maybe vocals will be behind a bookshelf, hey maybe under the desk. Who cares.

Take a recording of you hitting the side of something with a drumstick.
Go put your foam or whatever, then do a second identical recording.

If the echo starts dissipating, you're on the right track. Simple physics, not elitist bs. It's simple and fun, and precisely the spirit of home recording.

I'll take the flack / flames on this one, you just go record something.

Just dampen those reflections with whatever you have and make yer recordings.

If there's a big problem with your recordings, then oops, sorry, try again.

Just like everything else in life.

Rock on dude.

 

[RAMI]

Foam is not the best thing, or even close. It will do almost nothing for your low frequencies, which is where mst of the problems lie, usually. You need broad-band absorption, which rockwool or rigid fibreglass can do, but regular foam can't. It's not just about clapping your hands and not hearing an eho. There are standing waves, nulls, peaks, etc... that foam won't remedy, and might even make worse by cutting mids and highs but doing nothing for bass trapping. You need at least 4" thickfibreglass in the corners.

It's more of a science than just throwing cheap foam around the room.

 

[tvaillan]

Yes.

Yes and if you read the post, you can see that I said the same thing.

The quest ultimately leads to treatment, but it's a self discovery. It's an informed purchase. You don't need to treat a room completely for doing basic recording. Basic, as in acoustic guitar and vocals. You can get AMAZING results that way, but you do have some limitations. It is NOT so good when mixing an album or recording things like drums , Bruce Dickinson, choirs and stuff. (Yes sorry, your mixes won't translate well to other people's stereos. Do your recording, try to mix it .. and if you love your music and think it deserves more, hire a mixing engineer at the end of the process)

If you want to mix everything and go-for-pro, then well, time to shell out the big bucks.

Treatment is essential for Mixing , Mastering , and High SPL situations.
Treatment is not so essential for basic yet high quality home recording.

Yes the bass will bounce around. Yes you can kill the highs and mids if you're not carefull. That's exactly what I said in the above posts.

Yes clap your hands and try to place your foam so as to reduce some of that echo of your, i assume, relatively small space. Don't let anybody tell you this isn't a good place to start. The room will feel warmer. It will take on a different feel then the rest of the house. This is good. Don't overdo it.

Inspect the spectrum of the resulting sound (look up "Impulse Response") if you're really adventurous and you'll see that there are peaks and valleys in the spectrum. That's constructive and destructive interference aka "room modes".

(Voxengo SPAN is a free spectrum analyzer. They also have some impulse capture tools i think. )

Just use your ears.

This is precisely why you'll read about people saying that the sound is better behind the couch, or near the window, or behind a book case, little to the left of the recording desk ... experiement and have fun.

It's not so much about the dapening of echos in the room, but more about the location's effect on the tone of your sound (the spectrum).

Dampening the echos "or reflections" is critical for vocals though.

 

[Weasel9992]

JIMBOdrummer is right, it's all about catching those reflections.

Mmmmm...not quite true. That's *part* of the issue, but it's a good deal more complex than that. It's not just a matter of addressing issues in the frequency domain; you also have to address the time domain as well, and that's where foam...especially the stuff from foambymail, which is closed cell and not useful for treatment...falls short. What happens is that you reduce the high frequency decay times while doing nothing below 500Hz or so. What you end up with is a room that sounds "dead" when you clap your hands, but is actually muddy as hell to record or mix in.

...you just don't want sound to come back at u. you don't need to "absorb" it. just deflect it.

Sort of, yes. Diffusion is fine, but not usually up close because it works along the time domain as well as the frequency domain, so it requires a certain distance to work. Also, in a small room deflecting energy simply adds complexity to the problems because all of the hard boundary surfaces are close enough to cause problems. That's why broad band absorption is usually the right solution for smaller rooms.

ne one who says something to the tune of "room treatment is NUMBER ONE!!!!" is just blowing their knowledge up your ass.

...and anyone who says that it's utterly unimportant is talking out of his.

...at the level most home studios are the room treatment can be taken care of pretty easily. and not with oceans of foam.

Here's where we agree. For a person who does this for fun with his buddies, some blankets, duvets or whatever hung from the ceiling or the walls is just fine. Definitely no more need to spend $1,000 on acoustic treatment than there would be to spend $1,500 on a preamp or a mic. If simple flutter echo or long-ish high frequency decay times are the issue, then you can usually make significant improvements with little or no investment.

Frank

 

[RAMI]

I think everyone in this thread, except for Weisel, should go visit Ethan Winer's site and learn something. There's so much bullshit and stupidity in this thread, that it's just not fair for a newbie to be exposed to it.

 

[Creamyapples1]

I think everyone in this thread, except for Weisel, should go visit Ethan Winer's site and learn something. There's so much bullshit and stupidity in this thread, that it's just not fair for a newbie to be exposed to it.

I've been through Ethan's site 23423 times, thanks. You should probably read some of these threads again. No one is saying that any of this takes the place of proper treatment. Believe it or not, some of the guys just starting out can't afford to, don't have the ability to, and don't know enough of what they need to know to be able to begin to understand Ethan's site, let alone follow any of the suggestions. So they do what they can. I'm sure they're sorry to be such an inconvenience to you for recording without proper treatment and all.

The Cave called, it wants its high-horse back.

 

[RAMI]

I've been through Ethan's site 23423 times, thanks. You should probably read some of these threads again. No one is saying that any of this takes the place of proper treatment. Believe it or not, some of the guys just starting out can't afford to, don't have the ability to, and don't know enough of what they need to know to be able to begin to understand Ethan's site, let alone follow any of the suggestions. So they do what they can. I'm sure they're sorry to be such an inconvenience to you for recording without proper treatment and all.

The Cave called, it wants its high-horse back.

Your earlier post made a lot of sense. I apologize for saying "everyone" should go to Ethan's site. I just skimmed through the posters' names before I posted my last post and missed yours.

 

[Creamyapples1]

Your earlier post made a lot of sense. I apologize for saying "everyone" should go to Ethan's site. I just skimmed through the posters' names before I posted my last post and missed yours.

I wasn't really lookin' for a confirm, just wanted to point out that everyone is reeeeeeaaaaaaaallllllllllllll quick to start screaming treatment and that's just not always an option.

I apologize for coming across so strongly before.

KT

 

[Dogbreath]

. ne one who says something to the tune of "room treatment is NUMBER ONE!!!!" is just blowing their knowledge up your ass.

WRONG. That wouldn't happen to be the guys with decades of experience and pumpin out quality tunes every time, would it?

In order of importance...

#1....ROOM
#2....Monitors
#3....Everything else.

If you can't hear it accurately...you can't mix it accurately.

The biggest battle with the room is the bass waves. Treat that first with bass traps or broadband.
Once you get the bass waves under control, move on to the diffusors and other higher frequency "foam".

I fought low end mud in my mixes for far too long til I finally put some $$$ in room treatment. When I got the room tuned, my mixes started coming together cuz I could really hear what was goin on.

Good luck man...do some reading on room treatment and get a good grasp on it before ya spend yer hard earned change. It'll be worth it and you'll notice a nice improvement to your mixes.

 

[RAMI]

WRONG. That wouldn't happen to be the guys with decades of experience and pumpin out quality tunes every time, would it?

In order of importance...

#1....ROOM

Thank you. Funny how the only people "blowing their knowledge up your ass" are the people with actual KNOWLEDGE. Why is that???

Room treatment is the one thing nobody wants to spend their money on, saying they can't afford it. Yet, they won't hesitate to spend that same money on gear that they can't monitor properly because of their room. Then they come here asking what plug-in they need to make their home recordings sound "pro".

Hilarious.

 

[Creamyapples1]

crap...maybe I'm the one that should start reading each thread.

 

[Chili]

Room treatment is the one thing nobody wants to spend their money on, saying they can't afford it.

Exactly, yet it's the best bang for the buck when you do it yourself. No other investment in your studio will yield as much improvement as treatment. I did my little studio for under $200!!!

 

[JIMBOdrummer]

Chilllll

Thank you. Funny how the only people "blowing their knowledge up your ass" are the people with actual KNOWLEDGE. Why is that???

lol sry i didn't think you could take something posted three days before you so personally.

look... this is the NEWBIES forum. not the INTIMIDATION forum. everyone chill.

this kid isn't gona spend a grand on room treatment. He just wants a couple tips. not people pissed off at other peoples posts.

Stop spamming threads with bullshit arguments. if your post isn't a help to the thread poster don't post.