School me on sound treating my room.

micwalt

micwalt

Too Controversial To Have An Athleisure Line
My music room/studio is really small. I do all my tracking and most of my mixing at reasonably low levels. But you gotta crank it for a while to really get the final mix right. It's killing my ears. Didn't have this problem in the last two houses we had, as the rooms were both larger. What do I need to do for sound absorption?
 
There's a guy on the local CL selling a ton of convoluted foam sound panels for $70. Get some.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk
 
Here's a trick I have used.
Not sophisticated, but believe it or not, it works.

Got buy some carpet. I don't care what color it is, etc...but it should be rather thick. Any Colour You Like, as it were.

Nail up 2X4's around the edge of your walls, right at the ceiling.
Cut peices of carpet so they cover the walls, but overlap the corners. They will hang 1.5" off the wall, leaving a dead air space between the carpet, and the wall.
The thicker the carpet, the better.
Nail or screw the carpet to the 2X4's with washers around the nail/screw, letting them hang freely all the way to the floor. Again, overlap the corners.

Basically, you've just sound insulated/isolated your studio for about $150 total (Depending on how much carpet you need).

(I've never done the ceiling, but I guess you could. I've always wanted to try that).

Those acoustic foam tiles look like shit (not that carpet hanging on your walls won't....), but they get EXPENSIVE quick.

Believe it or not, the carpet trick works quite well........not what you would use in a professional studio, but it is easy to put up, easy to take down, easy to change (if you don't like the color), and CHEAP.

Cut slits for the doorway (don't cut the doorway completely out, though).
 
Coralkong said:
Here's a trick I have used.
Not sophisticated, but believe it or not, it works.

Got buy some carpet. I don't care what color it is, etc...but it should be rather thick. Any Colour You Like, as it were.

Nail up 2X4's around the edge of your walls, right at the ceiling.
Cut peices of carpet so they cover the walls, but overlap the corners. They will hang 1.5" off the wall, leaving a dead air space between the carpet, and the wall.
The thicker the carpet, the better.
Nail or screw the carpet to the 2X4's with washers around the nail/screw, letting them hang freely all the way to the floor. Again, overlap the corners.

Basically, you've just sound insulated/isolated your studio for about $150 total (Depending on how much carpet you need).

(I've never done the ceiling, but I guess you could. I've always wanted to try that).

Those acoustic foam tiles look like shit (not that carpet hanging on your walls won't....), but they get EXPENSIVE quick.

Believe it or not, the carpet trick works quite well........not what you would use in a professional studio, but it is easy to put up, easy to take down, easy to change (if you don't like the color), and CHEAP.

Cut slits for the doorway (don't cut the doorway completely out, though).
Click to expand...

Inexpensive bass traps (especially if you DIY them) would be far more effective. I'm incredibly skeptical that you're seeing that much improvement; there will certainly be an effect, but I think it's more about taming high end reflections and flutter than what is the real killer of small rooms; bass.

You don't need studio foam. Most rooms aren't so reflective that it's a necessity. A couple of diffusers and a few bass traps would give you a much better result than foam here and there and cost about the same if you go DIY.
 
baimun said:
kill your neighbors. :embarrassed:
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Neighbors are a non-issue. On one side, they're too far away from the room in question to hear anything. On the other side, it's a bunch of Alzheimer's patients, so they won't remember I had the music up too loud anyway.

Kerouac said:
I already did that. Treating the room is about me.
:embarrassed:
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Exactly! It's about my ears. And it really seems to be mostly about the high and high-mid reflections.
 
OGG said:
There's a guy on the local CL selling a ton of convoluted foam sound panels for $70. Get some.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
I can't seem to find the listing.
:(
 
Hope I'm not hi-jacking, but I'm in a somewhat similar situation. We're finishing our basement in the next year, and I'm carving out a small room to use as a studio. After reading this thread, I was thinking I could get it framed in, unroll some insulation between the studs, and leave it like that (I'd probably drape some light fabric ceiling to floor for cosmetics). Is there something that would work better (and not cost much more) if I'm starting from scratch? A bonus of my plan is considerable sound insulation form the rest of the house.
 
Chicken Man said:
Hope I'm not hi-jacking, but I'm in a somewhat similar situation. We're finishing our basement in the next year, and I'm carving out a small room to use as a studio. After reading this thread, I was thinking I could get it framed in, unroll some insulation between the studs, and leave it like that (I'd probably drape some light fabric ceiling to floor for cosmetics). Is there something that would work better (and not cost much more) if I'm starting from scratch? A bonus of my plan is considerable sound insulation form the rest of the house.
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Regular insulation doesn't really do the job. You need either OC703/705 or Roxul 60/120.
 
I've seen similar panels at previous times I was considering setting up a real studio for myself. I think the wall insulation would still help with soundproofing, but I might was well drywall it up, finish the space, and then mount some bass panels.
 
Chicken Man said:
I've seen similar panels at previous times I was considering setting up a real studio for myself. I think the wall insulation would still help with soundproofing, but I might was well drywall it up, finish the space, and then mount some bass panels.
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Soundproofing is 100% an impossibility unless you're willing to float a room, use tons of high density insulation and lead liners, have an $$$ HVAC installed and find a way to seal doors really tightly. Foam will take out your high end, bass traps will help tune the lows, but they won't do shit for volume.
 
"Soundproofing" was not the word I'm looking for. But I'd like to be able to sing my balls off without the whole house hearing me, or have the creaking of the baby's swing showing up on my track.
 
Chicken Man said:
"Soundproofing" was not the word I'm looking for. But I'd like to be able to sing my balls off without the whole house hearing me, or have the creaking of the baby's swing showing up on my track.
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Get a closet and line it with as many moving blankets as you can. It will be really dead in there, but boxy, so a reflection filter on the actual mic wouldn't be a bad idea.

And it's still going to be a lot louder than you're going to want.
 
Chicken Man said:
"Soundproofing" was not the word I'm looking for. But I'd like to be able to sing my balls off without the whole house hearing me, or have the creaking of the baby's swing showing up on my track.
Click to expand...

Some of my favorite moments in my recordings are inadvertent bleed from the real life that is going on around me. YMMV.
 
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