Carpet As Sound Insulation?

I'm considering buying cheap carpet slabs and putting them all over the room...

How well do you reckon this will work?

The room i record in sounds awful

That should work. The point is to stop the bouncing around and anything that absorbs sound should do the trick.

Carpet will work...we had a medium sized room with old shag on the walls and ceiling a few years ago. DO NOT smoke inside the room and make sure it's got ventillation if it's in a basement. It will hoards smells... and not the good ones.

This method worked for me. My basement is unfinished, but I nailed carpet to the walls and then covered that with fabric, and it looks pretty good and keeps the acoustics acceptably tamed.

Thanks guys

I actually meant to post this in the recording forum... my bad

I'm gonna move my 'studio' to the room down stairs (there's a hard floor and carpet floor down there) and buy some cheap carpet tiles and perhaps staple them to the floor.

Should I put it on the ceiling too?

..and what do you guys reckon I should do for the corners of the room along with bass absorption?

Also, how do you guys tame the resonance of metallic items that tend to resonate?

Cheap, thin carpet tiles really don't do much for the acoustics, except in the ultra highs (and nothing for sound insulation). To get some real absorption you need deep pile, preferably on sponge underlay; not cheap unless you're tearing it out of somewhere.

Otherwise, for vocals, have a look at something like the SE reflexion filter (ugh, the spelling. I'm surprised they didn't call it a 'philtre', as a magic solution). It should be possible to bodge together something like this.

(Yeah, won't help with the drums much, but does guitars and flute quite nicely)

Ceiling is one of your main hard surfaces. If you can arrange it so it doesn't look parallel to the floor… no. not by collapsing one wall. Irregular shapes nailed to it; I suppose polycylindrics have a low WAF?

Looks out of window into studio Hm, corners. They seem to be traeted with unused mic stands and folding chairs, except for the inaccessible one behind the grand piano which has a roll of carpet, a guitar amp and a keyboard stand…

Years ago, I was about to do the carpet thing, until I found a huge pile of used acoustic ceiling tiles. They are lighter, cleaner, paintable, easier to work with, and seemed to work as well. The are also unlikely to be covered with old pet urine. Call a couple companies who do suspended ceilings, and ask if you can raid their dumpster.

oldMattB

Mmmm

I'm now looking at burlac and rockwool

Or maybe even proper sound proofing foam!

But that latter is so expensive -.-

Are you trying to make things sound better in the room, or keep sound from getting out of the room? The latter can be very involved, so I'm assuming that you're talking about the former.

In that case, you don't want to cover all surfaces with carpet. You won't do much to attenuate the bass frequencies, but you'll end up with a room that sounds very dead and "creepy" in the higher frequencies. It's best to cover some (but not all) surfaces with a thick, dense material that absorbs a wide range of frequencies. When I remodeled my studio, I built these acoustic panel/guitar hangers out of some wood, chicken wire, and fabric, and filled them with Roxul Rockboard 80.

They've done a decent job of balancing out the room's frequency response, and weren't too difficult or expensive to build. I managed to build 8 2'x4'x3" panels and 2 2'x4'x6" corner bass traps for about $200. I'm pretty confident that I got better results than I would have if I had spent the $ on any commercial acoustic products. I also picked up a few squares of conventional studio foam second hand on eBay. I noticed a little bit of a difference when I installed them, but when I installed the homemade panels, it was night and day.

Here's a website that was very helpful for me:

http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html

Really short hair carpet is the cheapest most effective way to absorb and deaden sound in general.