room acoustics? control vs. tracking

[contramark]

so i recently moved to a new place and spent some time acousticly treating the room to deaden the sound. I made 6 foam sheets with rigid fiberglass and burlap and placed them in corners and walls. I carpeted the place and put in a big couch to help as well. so i got a dead sound, but almost to dead for my liking. It sounds very controlled and great for mixing but loses some of the magic of ambient micing and room sound.

Now i am given a new room at the studio i work part time to use and dont want to fall in the same trap. Especially for the sake of drum sounds. It will serve as an all purpose room and i would like to keep it controlled but still roomy. any suggestions?? The room as of now is about 20 feet by 30 feet with 10 foot high celiing and hard tile floors. Walls are harder type drywall. It sound very big but there is a bit of flutter type echo going on.

So any ideas for carpet/no carpet? Panels? Corner Traps?

[nukmusic]

you need THIS

[Glenn Kuras]

Originally Posted by contramark

so i recently moved to a new place and spent some time acousticly treating the room to deaden the sound. I made 6 foam sheets with rigid fiberglass and burlap and placed them in corners and walls. I carpeted the place and put in a big couch to help as well. so i got a dead sound, but almost to dead for my liking. It sounds very controlled and great for mixing but loses some of the magic of ambient micing and room sound.

Now i am given a new room at the studio i work part time to use and dont want to fall in the same trap. Especially for the sake of drum sounds. It will serve as an all purpose room and i would like to keep it controlled but still roomy. any suggestions?? The room as of now is about 20 feet by 30 feet with 10 foot high celiing and hard tile floors. Walls are harder type drywall. It sound very big but there is a bit of flutter type echo going on.

So any ideas for carpet/no carpet? Panels? Corner Traps?

There is a lot of different roads you could travel down on a room like that. Diffusers may just work in a room that size but just be careful not to have mics to close to them. It may cause a comb filtering. But for bass traps if you don't want to suck the high end out of the room, you may want to cover the faces with FRK so that they absorb the low end but reflect some of the high end. The FRK will also work as a limp membrane which will help pick up more of the low end.
If you do have low ceilings (under 15 feet) you may want to just cover the ceiling above the drums with 2” panels. It is also best to space the panel 2” off the ceiling.

Hope that helps and good luck on the room.

Glenn

[Ethan Winer]

mark,

> i would like to keep it controlled but still roomy. any suggestions?? The room as of now is about 20 feet by 30 feet with 10 foot high celiing and hard tile floors. Walls are harder type drywall. It sound very big but there is a bit of flutter type echo going on. <

For a room like that you want bass trapping in all the corners, including those where the walls meet the ceiling. You also need some amount of absorption on the ceiling to reduce floor-ceiling flutter echo, and some amount of absorption on the side walls for the same reason. It's common to put a heavy stage curtain along one entire wall to be able to vary the amount of liveness. But if you go with a curtain it should be very thick and heavy, so its absorption will extend down to a suitably low frequency.

--Ethan