Studio Acoustics

Fusion251

Hey, I have my studio almost done, I need to get some Eggcrate Foam for the walls to deaden to sound as I'm gettin some bad reverb off my mic. Anyone know where I can get some around the Dublin area? Or have any other suggestions for this?

Fusion
:cool:

dabhoys

Eggcartons are worth a **** chief. Check out this site.

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html

If you can afford it its worth buying some absorbers/ Diffusers for your room. It will make a massive difference to your vocals.

musician.ie

Depends on what's wrong with the room. Might need high frequency dampers/diffusors to kill your early reflections/flutter echoes. Might need bass traps. You should analyse the room's freq response. There are software pakages that will do this with a flat response condensor mic. Try [URL=http://]http://www.audionet.de/english/carma_v2.html[/URL] (first I found in google - don't know if it's good). You can't correct the sound till you know EXACTLY whats wrong. Forget the egg cartons though, they absorb badly and at a small freq range.

DrummerBoy

Try this
or
this one

No idea if they'll help but it's a start....
A

bonzai bob

if all you want is to deaden the sound then put curtains up around the walls.

daram

There's a company in Dublin called Acoustic and Thermal Insulations Limited (http://www.atil.ie) I think. They sell that pyramid foam stuff thats used for walls and ceilings but its expensive. I do recall seeing cheaper stuff on ebay that looked like it would do a similar job but you cant ever really be certain with ebay.

A temporary solution is just getting as much material into the room as possible, curtains, furniture etc

BeardyGit

It might help to get a description on what your room dimensions are, what monitoring solution (speaker brands etc.) you're using and what type of instruments/mic's you're running.

You can make a big difference to a room by adding a couch behind your monitoring position, hanging a cheap duvet behind your vocal mic seating position etc. If you can give us an idea about what you're doing I'm sure we can recommend something that's effective and much more economical for a home studio setup.

Also, what kind of music are you recording/mixing/mastering?

Cheers,

Gil

Fusion251

Gil_Dub wrote:

It might help to get a description on what your room dimensions are, what monitoring solution (speaker brands etc.) you're using and what type of instruments/mic's you're running.

You can make a big difference to a room by adding a couch behind your monitoring position, hanging a cheap duvet behind your vocal mic seating position etc. If you can give us an idea about what you're doing I'm sure we can recommend something that's effective and much more economical for a home studio setup.

Also, what kind of music are you recording/mixing/mastering?

Cheers,

Gil

Hey, yeah that'd be great.


The room dimensions are 10ft x 8ft , I'll be using a Large Membrane Studio condenser mainly for vocals and possibly acoustic guitar or violin.

I'll be recording tunes using Reason & Cubase and adding bass, guitars and vox to the mix. So alot of the recording will be internal on the pc itself.

Main problem is that the mic is picking up a bad reverb in the room, essentially all I need is to dampen this sound. I don't know wether I should section off an area for vox and dampen a certain area of the room. Or pad out the whole room.

Hope this makes it a bit clearer.

Fusion

bonzai bob

I think people are getting ahead of themselves a little. It really is simple, all you need is some good thick drapes etc. Put them up around the room and hey presto. If you want to section off an area then go ahead, that's just personal preference. Either way will work.

Einstein

bonzai bob wrote:

I think people are getting ahead of themselves a little. It really is simple, all you need is some good thick drapes etc. Put them up around the room and hey presto. If you want to section off an area then go ahead, that's just personal preference. Either way will work.

They're not getting ahead of themselves if it's an actual studio that's being set up, heavy drapes for bedroom music recording- yes...for studio? no.

musician.ie

The drapes will probably be a good start, but they won't help if you have issues in the low frequency area. Also, you don't necessarily want to kill all reflections - it can make recordings lifeless, and covering tracks in artificial 'verb after is a poor substitute for a good sounding room. Ideally you could have the drapes on a rail, and use these to expose sections of the wall, so you could tweak how "live" the room sounds. Of course, it's going to be hard to get a nice sound from an 8*10 room anyway...

bonzai bob

Divers wrote:

They're not getting ahead of themselves if it's an actual studio that's being set up, heavy drapes for bedroom music recording- yes...for studio? no.

do you think anyone setting up and actual studio would think about getting egg crates? Or be in a room only 10ftX8ft? Or even ask people on the internet about how to dampen the sound? no.

It is plainly obvious that Fusion251 just has a room in his house that he wants to record in, and he wants to dampen the room. Drapes are the answer.

BeardyGit

Just one point to make.....

It's nearly impossible to produce a professionally mastered 'rock' album in a project studio - This is primarily down to the room acoustics for monitoring etc. but you'll find even the most accomplished commercial acts use their own studios to track their albums and give the raw recordings to a producer/engineer to master in *their* studio.

Just because someone is working without a seperate live room, vocal booth and control room doesn't mean they're not working in a studio. My project "studio" at home is a spare bedroom where I spend several hours each evening and most of the weekend working on projects - Radio commercials & voice-over work, instrument & vocal tracking etc.

Getting back to the matter at hand I'd recommend the following reading resources:

http://www.theprojectstudiohandbook.com/articles15.htm
Great articles on everything to do with a home studio setup and use.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul98/articles/acoustics1.html
A series of 5 online articles about room acoustics for recording from Sound on Sound - Quite a good magazine.

Read up on what you're trying to do first, decide what you need to spend and then maybe you'll let us know how you get on with your project?

Gil