When did you first treat your "Studio"/mixing room ?

[grimtraveller]

Quite often in the newbie section, when people are asking what they need to get started, someone usually advises them to treat their room.
I'd be interested to know if anyone here in HR, as a newbie, treated their space before they began the recording/mixing journey and if so, how did you know what sort of things to look/listen out for ?
And if no, at what point in the journey did the treatments begin ?

 

[Sky Blue Lou]

All the cool gear with lights and inputs that you can do shit with are way more sexy than room treatments. I'd bet the number of smart guys is quite low. I'm not one. I built my first DAW in 2001 and started acquiring gear. I was using a little bitty room (10X10). The only treatment was all the crap stuffed in there. Very soon after I joined a band and what little recording I did was live remote. Now that the band thing has run it's course I'm starting over in a new room twice the size and I'm doing treatment first. I learned. If it wasn't for the band diversion I would have done treatment long ago. Having a proper listening/mixing environment is key. You can record anywhere.


lou

 

[miroslav]

When did you first treat your "Studio"/mixing room ?

I took mine out for a drink last Tuesday.


Back in the day...way back when I was using a 4-track R2R..."treatment" was whatever you did to keep the noise down so people wouldn't complain (in whatever room you could find to use).
I also recorded stuff in our band practice rooms...which was everything from a basement below a restaurant...to a rented space in a daytime office building (we practiced at night)...to huge empty warehouse style halls...to a spare bedroom & foyer in my parents’ house that I used for about 2-3 years to just record in (after "THE" band went bust).

Then after that, I had a more "formal" recording space in another house...a couple of smaller rooms...but not much in the way of acoustic treatment. It was more about jamming the walls full with insulation to keep things quiet.

My current space I actually treated right from the git-go, with acoustics more in mind than soundproofing, since there's not as much worry about making too much noise for any neighbors. Though even doing acoustic treatment had a good deal of soundproofing effect.
I'm still planning to install 6-8 bass traps in addition to what I already have just to see if it will clean up the low end even more.

It does make a difference…but yeah, when you’re having trouble deciding on the $59 or $100 USB mic…and someone starts talking about all the acoustic treatment you need to do before worrying about the mics… ….it’s kinda hard for those newbs to get what they are being told.
I think everyone SHOULD go through some “progression” anyway…rather than just diving into a full-tilt pro-ish studio setup as a total newbie. There is a value in making some mistakes yourself and learning from that. You can’t always get that “learning” just by reading what others have already done.

I kinda hate when total newbs come and give a list of stuff they purchased and then they ask..what now?

Man...fuck with it!!!!
Experiment a little...don't always ask for someone to tell you what to do.

 

[buzzard bass]

Working on it right now, though I wish I joined this joint before buying stuff. Got some foam, yes foam, sue me, the cats like it. Also got hardware I aint likely to use, got the Fostex, then the Tascam, then discovered the Zoom R16 here, which does what I wanted in the first place. Should have joint here before I started getting gear mate.

 

[stainlessbrown]

I waited till I'd spend a few thousand dollars buying gear and plug-ins I thought for sure would solve my mixes which translated as pure mud outside of my 'space'

not as much fun as gear because the acoustic treatment doesn't have knobs, lights, controls or cords, but I refused to accept that my room was much of the problem, and while i did upgrade to some better gear, I bought a bunch of crap too, thinking "how much better can the expensive gear be?"

 

[diggy_dude]

I waited till I'd spend a few thousand dollars buying gear and plug-ins I thought for sure would solve my mixes which translated as pure mud outside of my 'space'

not as much fun as gear because the acoustic treatment doesn't have knobs, lights, controls or cords, but I refused to accept that my room was much of the problem, and while i did upgrade to some better gear, I bought a bunch of crap too, thinking "how much better can the expensive gear be?"

I was noticing the wall treatment in your photos, particularly the things that look like vertical wooden slats. Are those baffles? I used to read about them in audiophile magazines, long before I got into recording.

 

[stainlessbrown]

my variation on the Heimholtz resonator- I experimented with a few different spacings between the slats which are random widths, though mainly 1x3, 1x4 and 1x6- the xozis 4" thick behind with 4" of RFG covered with a piece of fabric (as I don't find "raw" RFG panels to be all that attractive), there's 2 in the room floor to ceiling,

and then I have some smaller boxes with 2" RGF, the wall mounts have 3/4" angled "cleats" on the back for hanging on cuts cut at the complimentary angle - a strip of 1" RFG on each sides keeps the box itself from contacting the wall around the perimeter as well as gives a 1" dead air space behind.

and then I have 2 25 1/2 x 49 hanging boxes 2" RGF with slats on both sides (and not spaced the same, which hang ~2" in front of a window and a door window

while probably not the optimum treatment, I' happy with the sound as well as the aesthetics

 

[RAMI]

I was lucky when I started out. My uncle gave me 5 beautiful 6'X4' rigid fibreglass office partitions. I still use them. Problem when I started was that I knew nothing about bass trapping/room treatment, so I just set them up in a semi-circle around my desk.

Now, I have them in corners and over my drums and mixing desk.

 

[Illogical_Mind]

I've never had a dedicated space until about 2 years ago. I'm working on treatments right now.

 

[Dogbreath]

It was probably around a year n a half (not sure...slept since then ) from when I first built my room til when I treated it.

Then a couple years went by and I rebuilt it cuz I screwed up the first time. Too small and ceiling too low. That's when I blew out one of the walls to make it a bit bigger and raised the roof to a 10' pitched roof.

Then a couple more years went by and I took out the smaller bass trapping, re-positioned em and then built some superchunks. And added a couple more from GIK.

The main reason I kept re-doing it is cuzza translation and the fact I'm anally retentive.
Stuff would sound good in my room. Not when I played it elsewhere. Bugged the shit outta me.
Now if I could just learn to play.

 

[bigtom]

For some reason I've always been aware of how different rooms sounded. I would never walk into the bathroom when talking on the phone because I was sure they could tell where I was by the sound of my voice. So when I built my studio ( basically a two stall garage with no garage doors ) the first thing I noticed was how bad it sounded in the room. I came to Home Rec looking for a way to fix the acoustics and stumbled on to a thread about how to build your own diffusers.

I made 10 2'x4'x4'' panels to hang in the corners. I made these one at a time and each time I carried a finished one into the room I could actually hear a difference. I was sold immediately and am always looking for ways to deaden the room more.

 

[drumslinger]

when i became fed up with over and under mixing, trial and error mixes, burning cd after cd after cd and testing the outcome only to go back and mix it again and again and again due to bad room acoustics. I did some googling and came across Ethan's website. Made some bass traps and panels....whoala!!!

 

[studiopa]

For me, it was one of the last things I did--after getting all the gear desirables. Like a lot of people, I realized after doing the room treatment(s) that it could have been much higher on the list. In general, I've found that a balanced approach to spending money on the studio works best. I'd rather have an affordable, but decent mic, preamp, and room treatment than the most expensive mic you can buy used with a really cheap preamp and no room treatment.