Dorm room acoustics

so THAT'S why i couldn't get into the forums earlier. it was being modified...

well, i've always wondered...does anybody have any bright ideas when it comes to recording in a dorm room or similar environment? acoustically and soundproofing-wise, i mean.

-Xeno

It really depends on the space you have. In a small area you are giong to want it as dead as possible. You can't really make any major changes to the construction of the room, so I would recommend thick duvet blankets hung from the ceiling--- leaving an airgap between the wall and the blankets.
You should also consider treating the ceiling as well. The general consensus is to have the ceiling dead and the floor somewhat live. If you already have a carpeted floor considering spending a few bucks on a sheet of plywood (cut it in half or even three) and you can lay it on the floor where you are recording, pick the peices up later and tuck them in a corner.
For make-shift bass traps, you could use those big bundles of insulation they have at hardware stores and stand them up (still wrapped in the plastic) in the corners of the room. Again I don't really know exactly how much space we are talking here, so this may not be an option.
Cheers,
Don

we're talkin' extremely small but i just want to know what i can do to make things better. hanging carpet from the ceiling sounds kool. the plywood i've never heard of before. so you want the floor live and the ceiling dead? i have the exact opposite. time to work something out.
in terms of bass traps, my long body pillow can be set in a corner to fix the bass up a bit....
well, i thought it was pretty kool...especially since i sleep on it and all....and....yeah.

-Xeno

You got the idea. Every little bit will help. A mixture of different absorbent materials will serve best.
Yes, deaden that ceiling. Even if it is only above where you monitor/record it will help a little.
BTW-- I like the idea of the pillow.

recording and mixing requirements are often different.

in recording, you often want a rather dead room so you don't have all of this reverb garbage on your tracks that you can't get rid of. You just bought a $1000 microphone, and now it's getting polluted by cheap drywall and concrete ehco... gross! so you want a dead room often.

in mixing, you want a "balanced" or "neutral" room. that way when you take your finished mixes into different rooms, cars, etc. it sounds good because you weren't making highly stylized mixing decisions based on your quirky room.

for you i would recommend a chameleon approach. be able to deaden the room substantially. then take some of the absorbtion panels off so you can get some life back into your room when your mixing (*some* life...not a bathroom!).

here's what you do (of course you can modify the ideas however you want):

-put padding on your floor and then carpet it.
-get a bunch of owens corning 705 pressed fiberglass boards. cover them with cloth and make them into "panels". attach these panels into 2x4 wooden frames. one side is the cloth covered 705. then there is some air in the middle. on the other side is thin plywood (1/4"). make like 16 of these and hang them on your walls and ceiling. Also get some Sonex or Auralex foam. Put a few sheets up of that stuff too. Try to tack it to your walls rather than glue it so you can reuse the stuff when you move out of your dorm.

if you can blow a few hundred, look into getting some bass traps. ASC is one good brand. Small rooms are really hard to get your bass from being to boomy. You want to tighten the bass up.

Then for mixing, take some of the owens cornings off the wall. you can keep the ceiling ones up. If your clever, you can design the backs of these 705 panels, so the flip side is a "dispersion panel". That means it will scatter any soundwaves that hit it. This is good for mixing. you want a mixture of absorbtion and dispersion. So your 705 panels can be "Transformers...more than meets the eye... Transformers, dispersions in disguise".

Do you have any closets? They make great isolation booths. You can stick a guitar amp in there, or if it's big enough, a vocalist. Pad the whole inside of the iso booth with Auralex or Sonex foam. Some people might get prissy and say this is too extreme, but in your circumstance, go for it.

Windows... can you board them up? Fill the whole window frame are with sandbags (or rice bags if you can't get sand). Then board up the window with the sandbags in-between your windows and the boards. Of course your college might consider any and all of this a fire hazzard!

Do an internet search on "sound absorption panels" "dispersion panels" "acoustic treatment". you see websites of companies showing off their client studios. check out what they do. then ghetto most of it yourself, and spend some cash in some areas (the bass traps).

if you don't know what dispersion is, go to the RPG company website. they sell a million of them. you can make your own, but you'll "see the light" after studying their website.

Actually, with respect to the owen's corning, this is one of the best things on the market right now for acoustic treatment. The 703 and 705 are awesome absorbent materials.
The bass traps can be made instead of bought. If someone wants to go as far as the owen's corning insulation and making one side reflective, you could just make panel absorbers with a plywood face. I just made a whole stack of these things, added them to my home studio. All I can say is wow! It really did make an audible difference to the room.
Check 'em out yourself at http://www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html
I can honestly say these homemade traps are far better than anything I have ever bought.