Get Out of the Box:
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| Studio Plan: Before (Click image for larger view) |
Avoid recording any source right smack in the center of the room. If you move the source off the center — even a bit — frequencies will arrive to the walls at a different rate of speed — some faster to the closest wall and others slower to its opposite wall — so when the "early reflections" come bouncing back, they'll do so at different rates and speeds and won't collide in the same way they would have had they originated from the center of the room. [an error occurred while processing this directive] Alter the texture of opposite wall surfaces in the room. A rule of thumb in basic acoustic design is live-end/dead-end. If you look around your room and all the walls have hard, live surfaces — that's going to contribute greatly to a "boxy" sound. Pick a wall, whatever you might call the "front wall" and put absorbing material on at least 50% of the wall — especially in the middle section. The "material" could be anything from blankets to egg cartons to mattresses to carpet padding to bed padding to acoustical foam. One option I'd recommend is something like Sonex Classic. You can buy 2" x 2' x 4' Panels. They come eight sheets to the box for $169, which covers 64 square feet. Check on the Markertek website. They carry a lot of stuff with good prices. There's also a store in Texas owned by some very nice folks that sells padding very cheap, called The Foam Store.
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| Studio Plan: After (Click image for larger view) |
So, you've now got a front wall that's more dead and a back wall with some diffusion. Next, you'd have the left and right walls. As long as those two walls have some sort of opposing texture on them, you're OK. It can be as simple as drapes hung on a window on one of the walls. In my last studio, I had drapes on the right side and a large mirror on the left side.
The whole idea in all this is to stagger the texture of opposite surfaces in the room so that you have a lot of acoustic asymmetry. Other things that can aid in this are plants, bookshelves, curtains, window, blankets hung on walls and mirrors.
In a studio I've been designing, before the Sonex came in, we just hung collapsed cardboard boxes — measuring 4' X 8" behind the monitors. It worked fine and gave us an idea of how much Sonex to order and roughly where we were going to hang it. If it's just in a basement for acoustical treatment, the boxes would work perfectly.
If you've done that, all you might have to worry about would be the low frequencies accumulating in the room and making it sound boomy. None of the treatments I've listed so far will slow down frequencies lower than 120Hz or so. That's where something called a bass trap can really help — and here's the definitive link for building your own bass traps.
Also, lots of great info on studio acoustics can be found at studiocovers.com.
If you're somehow in a recording room that's really small and you want a bigger sound, you're better off deadening the whole thing and then applying "room" sound with reverb.
All this takes a little bit of money and a bit of time and tweaking, but considering that the room is really the most important source of how everything recorded in it will sound — it's worth spending a couple of hundred bucks [or less] and part of a day to get a good-sounding room.
Dan Richards is a Contributing Editor for Digital Pro Sound. This article is an excerpt from his upcoming book, "The Project Studio Handbook."
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