Acoustic Pannelling

[rylanmartin]

I'm currently building a drum room/iso booth for my studio. I have a 10'X10' room for it. The way I plan it all to go down is this:

I originally planned to put up eggcrate foam on all 4 walls and the ceiling. I have interlocking foam tiles for flooring. I'm putting a window in the walled shared by my main open jamming room and this iso room. All I want is a dead room with no room noise for recording vocals, drums, guitar amps...etc.

I've finally decided to put up grey commercial carpet on all the walls ad ceiling and make some acoustic tiles and strategically place them around the room; deflecting sound in corners, bass traps, a few panels on the ceiling. I'm looking forward to when it's all said and done.

Any thoughts? Anyone done anything like this before?

(I'll post some pictures of the process, I think)

[wingsdad]

A completely dead room may not be the optimal environment. OTH, if you deaden the ceilings, floors and walls like that, you won't have to worry about reflections or deflections of sound waves, because there won't be any, so you can save on building things like bass traps. But you may have to build some reflective surfaces. Acoustic instruments will sound like mud, absent of high frequencies. Or, you could just record everything direct.

[bigG]

Some ideas:

The least expensive way to go for an "adaptive" recording space is to deaden two walls w eggcrate or Sonex tiles (I have approx 40 2' x 2' Sonex tiles from the 80s that I still use today for a "live end - dead end" room for audiophile music/home theater listening - they are expensive, but it's that stuff you see in recording booths and DJ booths - radio DJs, not hippity-hop). Also, these eggcrates/Sonex tiles DO NOT have to be adjoined in a complete surface. You can get away w a good 6" - 8" between them and the reflections will be totally deadened.

On the other two walls, and this is what makes the room adaptive from completely dead to somewhat live, is to hang curtain rods and mount some fairly thick curtains that can be closed to deaden these two walls and opened to a greater or lesser extent depending on the amount of "liveness" you want. (This is the way Columbia Records famous Studio One in NYC did it back in the late 60s and previous to that. It is one huge, voluminous room w 18' - 20' ceilings that can be closed off into "cubicles" w various curtain tracks mounted to the ceiling. Quite ingenious.) Make sure that when fully closed, the curtains still have a pronounced concave/convex roll to them - ie, not flat when closed.

Any fairly thick carpet w padding will do for the floor, and those interlocking tiles w the holes in 'em (like in school) work fine for the ceiling, although I've never found ceiling reflections to be a bother.

Also, if $ is tight, bass traps in corners are unnecessary w the eggcrate or Sonex tiles run directly to the corners, and bookcases loaded w various size books work fine for a good portion of the wall deadening, as do stuffed sofas, chairs, love seats, etc...

Hope this helps, rylan,
G