Recording Room Acoustics

Jonathan Curtis

Silver Member
My drum "studio" is really rather small, and hemmed in on three sides by bare walls in close proximity. My kit is well tuned and I have a lovely set of Audix mics, but our recordings always have a nasty tinny acoustic resonance from the prozimty of the bare walls.

I can't really afford any of the professional sound dampening things. Even the foam pads that look like egg trays are something like £15 a square meter. Does anyone have any home solutions for this sort of thing, from pinning some old towels to the wall to home-made egg box blankets?

Volume isn't the issue really, I'm not trying to keep sound in or out in that sense, but rather the tinny resonance that bounces off the walls.

Any advice?

Thanks
 
That's such an easy fix. First off, you don't need professional room treatments. You can get the same results by draping blankets on your walls. Try to get rid of 90 degree wall angles and corners by whatever means possible (a piece of wood, tall enough to reach from floor to ceiling and placed in the corner on a 45 degree angle in relation to one of the walls, covered in something soft, will work. Do this in every corner if possible. Put your drums on a wood riser (with space underneath) for a natural subwoofer effect. Stuff foam where the walls and ceiling make a corner, get rid off as many 90 degree angles as you can. Basically soften the room cheaply. Get the amps off the floor, put them on crates. Decouple the sound sources from the floor and walls. Be aware of fire hazards with the room treatments, don't forget the common sense.

You should be able to do this for next to no cost, using things you have in your house already.
 
Start with the corners. That is where that nasty ringy fluttery sound comes from. Then do something soft on one of the long walls (the shortest distance from one parallel wall to the other). The floor to ceiling is often the shortest distance. I'm assuming you have carpet on the floor. A simple frame full of fiberglass insulation and covered with fabric set across the corner will work wonders. 1x3 wood frame, chicken wire holding the insulation in, and cotton fabric over it.

You want some degree of reflection or it will sound unnaturally stuffy. Use the surfaces furthest apart for that.

Packing blankets are ugly but work well. You can get them for $5 each at Harbor Freight. If you are that bereft of funds, you can fold these up and hang them across the corners.

I see that Larry has preempted my standard caution about the flammability of most things people hang on their walls to get cheap "soundproofing". That is one of the reasons that the real stuff costs as much as it does.

You can get acoustic ceiling tiles, the 2 x 4 kind that go into dropped ceilings, and glue some to the walls. That is safe and helps that flutter echo quite a bit. You don't need to cover the wall with them. You're just trying to break up the shower stall syndrome a bit. They won't be as dead as packing blankets but you can mix and match some. Put some on your ceiling and one long wall, with blankets on the other long wall. Leave the two short walls alone or maybe just put a bit up on one short wall.

As you add stuff you'll see how much it's deadening the room. Then you can strike a balance between live and dead that works for you.
 
Aeolian brings up a great point. You don't want the room too dead. You have to "tune" the room with just the right combo of absorbant and reflective surfaces.
 
I for one like a recording environment fairly non reflective. It;'s a lot easier to add a touch of reflectance or reverberation than it is to try to eliminate it after the fact. The easiest way to do this is to just add a room mic. Having a microphone at a predetermined distance from the kit you can very the sound of the room and kit with just a touch of a fader. If you have the means, an effects processor could turn your tracking room into just about anything you may want.

Dennis
 
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