Packing blankets in a practice space

[cale w]

Hello all,

I'm recording drums for my band's next album in our practice room. It's a typical box: carpeted concrete floors, drywall walls with short industrial carpet covering about 5/6 of the height from the floor, drywall ceiling. I forget the actual dimensions but it's something like 16ftx22ft with 7 1/2ft ceilings. There's a load bearing column about 3ftx3ftx that breaks the room up so the bigger side is mostly square.

The drums are in a corner on the bigger side facing out. I have the ceiling over the kit and one near wall (closest to the hihat) done up with Auralex. There's also a great big bamboo curtain on the other near wall, floor tom side. It's ragged and wacky and I thought that might create a little diffusion.

Anyway, we want super dry drums and the room sounds gross. I picked up some packing blankets (http://moverssupplies.com/Sound-Blanket ... rs-Choice/) to hang floor to ceiling in front of the kit to essentially make a booth around it with the close walls and blankets. The room grossness is all centered around the 200hz - 400hz range and it all pretty much corresponds to the room mode calculations, and I'm thinking there's no way the blankets will have much effect on keeping that out of the mics. The short carpet on the walls keeps the really high high-end flutter down but I think the blankets will tame more of that.

Realistically, how low, frequency-wise, can I expect the blankets to attenuate room noise? Would I probably be better off trapping the corners to mellow out the room modes causing the low-mid junk? The corners are typical practice space corners and jammed with amps, shelves, and bullshit so I don't really have the real estate to put superchunks or the like in there. I guess my ultimate question is, will I really be gaining anything by making a blanket fortress around the kit?

Here's a recording featuring the kit in the described setting, sans any blankets:
https://soundcloud.com/calewilcox/tourn ... -your-name
Sorry for the long-winded post!

[Brett Siler]

The blankets will attenuate high midrange and high end (probably something like 1khz-20khz), but the low mids and low end will still build up in that room. You would need to either build or buy some bass traps which attenuate more of the frequency spectrum. Real Traps, GIK, Primacoustics, are a few brands I can think of off the top of my head that make bass traps you can buy. If you wanna DIY, you can get get Owens 703 or 705 fiberglass insulation, Rockwool or mineral wool; or if you aren't into having extra fiberglass in your space you can use Ultratouch which is made from recycled jeans. I went with Ultratouch for health and environmental reasons and they work great!

[Drone]

Do you know how they recycle the jeans? Can we get our own jeans and recycle them?

[Marc Alan Goodman]

Do you know how they recycle the jeans? Can we get our own jeans and recycle them?

I think it takes a lot of jeans to make ultratouch. A single package is probably a hundred pairs or more. Stuff works great though, and all you get blue snot instead of the dreaded fiberglass cough.

[digitaldrummer]

I've used the Ultratouch (or actually another similar equivalent - it was called Insulcot) and it was really easy to work with.

You could probably also collect dryer lint from all your neighbors and in 10-20 years make your own roll...

Mike

[roscoenyc]

Put some of those blankets on the ceiling. The ugliest sounding acoustic bounce/smear comes from there.

[Drone]

I went with Ultratouch for health and environmental reasons and they work great!

How thick was the Ultratouch you went with? My local Menards is carrying it in 3.5, 5.5 and 8.5" thick.