Forum

Yo, y’all!

I have a small, one-room recording/mixing studio (as indicated by the topic title!) and I’ve got a fair bit of broadband absorption in the room. I’m thinking about how to make sure my situation isn’t too dead but also doesn’t have flutter echo or any other big problems. My question is in the last paragraph but you need a bit of a list of the fixtures and build of the room before anything will make sense. Sorry for the long post, I’m long-winded in most aspects of my life.

The space is basically a rectangle that shakes out to be around 14.5’X20’X7.5′ (2,200-ish cubic ft in volume) – there are a couple angles and a closet on one end to break it up a little but it averages to be around those dimensions. All surfaces are drywall besides the floor (which is cement for now but will eventually have vinyl flooring again). Directly behind the drywall on three sides of the vertical walls is thin insulation then cement block foundation. The other walls and ceiling have wood and various other house materials behind them. The floor has a thin 11’X9′ rug on it. Basically, without my current treatment, it’s a flutter echo nightmare.

Most of my absorption is DIY with Roxul Saf N Sound or Roxul AFB framed in wood and covered with muslin. The only exceptions are for two GIK 244 panels over the mix position. I decided to make everything movable/freestanding so I could change the acoustics in my room depending on whether I was tracking or mixing. I wanted adequate tightness when tracking vocals and guitar, a different amount of ambience for drums, and the ability to have a sufficiently tight but not weirdly dead sweet spot when mixing.

Here’s the list of absorption in my room:
Two GIK 244 (24″X48″) traps in a “cloud” above the mix position
Four 72″X15″X6″ bass traps (one in each vertical corner)
Four 72″X48″X2″ panels (basically, each of those four panels is made of two 6’X2’X2″ panels hinged together to be free-standing wide “V” shapes)
Two 48″X36″X6″ panels to the left and right of my mix position (lifted 18inches off the ground on some sketchy wooden legs)
One 48″X48″X6″ panel behind the mix position (or at the back of the room) on 12″ tall legs
Three 48″X30″X3″ panels arranged in varying parts of the room
One 90″X72″X3″ “cloud” hanging 5-ish inches from the ceiling in the middle of the room – it makes for a decent-ish drum-tracking area and really tightens up the room for vocals

Looking at it all written out, it looks like a ton of stuff.

If I step out from underneath the cloud, I’m hearing flutter between the floor and the ceiling (which is why I went so large on that middle-of-the-room cloud in the first place). I’m not sure how to handle that because I don’t know if I should keep covering the ceiling with more panels…it’s probably not great for the ceiling plus it’s soooooo much absorption . Maybe? the answer is in fabrics strung up on the ceiling outside of the large middle panel?

I want to make sure it’s not dead in there to the point of harming the sound. What sorts of things could I do to make sure I’m not doing damage to the acoustics? Any thoughts on the setup? What about that area outside of the large cloud – what’s the best way to deal with that?

Thanks for any info/thoughts/ideas/words you cats might be able to lend! Have a good one!