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i've started renting a big room for our band to practice and for me to have all my recording gear. it's great, but a bit expensive. it's now more expensive than i'd thought it was gonna be, cos the other band that was gonna be sharing with us have decided that they are gonna just keep going to their same old practice space rather and paying per hour rather than joining us (even though it'd be cheaper for them to share our room....)
i'm not sure how big the room is cos i haven't got round to measuring the length, but it's about 4m wide by 12m long. brick walls. 7 windows one side, 3 the other. no windows either end. all windows are about the same size. the glass space is about a quarter of the wall on the side with 7 windows. the floor is carpetted with thin carpet tiles.

we've had a couple of practices. as you'd probably expect from my description of the room it is very bright. painfully bright in fact.
so, i want to reduce the reflections. as the rent is now more than i expected i need to do that on a tight budget ie as close to nothing as possible (i know that ain't gonna happen).
there are loads of sound improvement products out there and i know how to build bass traps and use insultation boards to absord high frequencies.

my question is, does anyone have experience of trying to improve this kind of situation quickly and cheaply in a way that works? i know that whatever i do on a small budget will be less than perfect.

woolly blankets and cardboard egg trays. get thee to an egg farm.

The best thing is rigid insulation (Owens-Corning 703 or the equivalent) or rockwool--something that has fairly even sound absorption across the spectrum. The problem with blankets and the like is they tend to just abosorb the highs; leaving the sound muddy and boomy. Unfortunately those insulation products are fairly spendy. Ethan Winer's forum is a pretty good place to check for local availability of products; as well as general information on sound absorption. Most rooms need some high end reflection taming along with loads of bass trapping.

http://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbthread ... t/Board/24

Yeah. I wouldn't bother with egg boxes cos they don't work. carpets/blankets cause other problems. I've read winers stuff. Just wanted to know if anyone had done this kind of thing. I'm still trying to do the sums and work out if the rockwool approach works out cheaper than buying foam - especially when effort and time is taken in to account cos rockwool works out pretty expensive.

Ugh, we're dealing with this right now. Fucking sucks. I wish i woudl find a huge pile of old boards to put up. We used to practice in a room covered with wood panels, and it osunded pretty fuckin good.

Damiera rented out an old biology room in a closed down highschool. big room. lots of windows. they covered every inch of the walls with big huge scraps of carpet that people had thrown out to the curb around town.


free = awesome.


sounded good too. they recorded thier first album in there using pro tools by them selves and it sounded better than the second album after they got picked up by a big indie label and sent to NYC with a producer

Building material supply stores almost always have piles of broken shit. If it's not free than it's cheap. I work at a lumber yard and am getting ready to convert my garage into a studio so I've kind of been hoarding any old nasty shit that might help.

aen wrote:Ugh, we're dealing with this right now. Fucking sucks. I wish i woudl find a huge pile of old boards to put up. We used to practice in a room covered with wood panels, and it osunded pretty fuckin good.

wood sounds way better than brick and glass. if i had the money to build my own studio i'd have some nice wood walls and floors.

robroe wrote:Damiera rented out an old biology room in a closed down highschool. big room. lots of windows. they covered every inch of the walls with big huge scraps of carpet that people had thrown out to the curb around town.


free = awesome.


sounded good too. they recorded thier first album in there using pro tools by them selves and it sounded better than the second album after they got picked up by a big indie label and sent to NYC with a producer

i hadn't heard of them before so i googled. i didn't like the songs on their myspace.
i have some carpet and underlay in the room in my house that i used to use as my recording studio that we are gonna take up soon, cos we are turning that room into a dining room. I had thought of nailing the whole lot on the end wall of our new practice studio (just behind the drums). Now i think i should go back to that idea. i went off it cos i know there are better sounding things to do and we will be doing some recording there, but now i think about it, for our purposes (mainly practicing and wanting to stop the trebly ear damage) free is more immediately relevant and important that better sounding.

Yep. I did my whole studio in rockwool and OC 703; but it cost a boat load. You might try just treating a couple of walls or portions there of with carpet or something to deaden the highs and see how it goes. You can always take an incremental approach--put some treatments up, check the results; then add on as necessary. In general I wouldn't buy any traps from Aurelex or the like as they'll definitely be more expensive than what you can construct for yourself.