Practice / Recording Room Acoustic Treatment

[Gorquin]

Hello everyone ! Here's my situation. I have a virgin practice room that I want to use for home recording. It's fairly rectangular and predictable. It's 14.5' wide X 29' long with one window on the short side, a window and door and one long side and one door on the other long side. The ceiling is about 12.5' high at the peak which slants down to walls that are just shy of 10' tall. The room is empty and has between 3.5"-5" of open cell foam in the walls covered with 1/2" drywall. The ceiling has 2"-3" of closed cell foam also covered with drywall. The room will have a ductless air conditioner in it so it would be difficult to have separate rooms. The floors will be 3/8" hardwood over 1/2" ply over cement. Right now the room sounds like an echo chamber because it's empty. Suggestions on how to proceed with testing and sound deadening is appreciated. Should glueing Acoustic Ceiling tiles to the ceiling be considered?

 

Thanks

[dboomer]

So are you trying to treat the sound inside the room or keep it from leaving the room. That's two different jobs The good news is you got a slanted ceiling.

[Gorquin]

I'm looking to treat the sound inside the room. The room is one of two in an outside building at least 200' from my nearest neighbor, I don't play loud, and there are no windows facing that direction so I'm not overly concerned about annoying anyone. The wall between the two rooms, which probably won't be used at the same time, is also insulated with open cell foam floor to ceiling.

[WRGKMC]

Sound quality treatment is less difficult than sound proofing which takes allot of major reconstruction

putting in multiple layers separated by air barriers.

 

For sound quality it basically comes down to your budget and how good you want it too look and sound.

The general consensus is you don't want to completely dampen the room. Covering two walls with acoustic foam,

putting in bass traps, and leaving two walls reflective is usually sufficient. You could also do a checkerboard treatment

on all walls, half reflective and half non reflective and get good results. Going beyond that really requires scientific testing

using reference mics and pro grade audio analyzer gear to completely tune the room.

 

I did my own using a program called RAL installed on a laptop and using Reference mics. In may case the room was soundproofed

and wound up being a dead room with no reflections. I actually had to add reflective panels back in to get the response flatter. I

also identified some areas of the room that collected bass reflection because I had a drop ceiling on one side. I was able to treat it with

90 degree bass traps and eliminate the issue for the most part. I did response tests set up on a grid of 1' squares and identified

the problem areas. To my surprise the room only had the one major area that had issues so I didn't have a whole lot of work getting

it to sound good.

 

I found my mixing desk worked best under the lower ceiling because I was normally sitting down when I mixed. The sound doesn't get compressed

when it travels out into the rest of the room that has a higher ceiling. Each room is unique. I'd start with the treatment I mentioned and take it from there.

Not sure if you'll be having a whole band in there. Isolation and bleed over can be a problem. I use office cubicle partitions for isolation. They absorb the

right amount of sound and I can set them up and move them around as needed. Around the drums I usually build a sand box type baffle that's that comes

up to chest height. When you record live you can still hear the drums as a guitarist by walking up to the sand box, but it blocks a good deal of

bleed over from guitar amps to drum mics and vice versa. I could make a drum booth as well but my drummer doesn't like using headphones.

 

I don't need a vocal booth either because the room is still very sound absorbent, so setting up a mic sounds good just about any place in the room.