My band has been playing in a basement for a while now and I can't stand it anymore. The tone is horrible!!! What kind of acoustics are best for home use and are not very expensive? And how much should be used? Is there a certain layout that proves to be best and is there such thing as too much?

RecordMusic18 wrote:

My band has been playing in a basement for a while now and I can't stand it anymore. The tone is horrible!!! What kind of acoustics are best for home use and are not very expensive? And how much should be used? Is there a certain layout that proves to be best and is there such thing as too much?

Maybe you could explain what your basement is actually like, windows, ceiling heights, widths, lots of glass etc.. metal... reflective surfaces?

Generally you would need highly absorbant materials, if on a tight pot of money you could do a lot worse than a ton of second hand materesses around the walls.. .. not fire friendly mind you.

If you have money it's different..
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Recording Studio Suntans

The room where we practice is about 16' X 18' X 8'. It is all concrete walls, concrete floors, with only a couple rugs that cover about half of the area and two windows that are about 1' X 2'.
Thanks

RecordMusic18 wrote:

The room where we practice is about 16' X 18' X 8'. It is all concrete walls, concrete floors, with only a couple rugs that cover about half of the area and two windows that are about 1' X 2'. Thanks

Yeah that's gonna take some settling down, the problem is reflection and not enough soaking up of the sound waves. You got a large space with nothing to help absorb the reflected sound.

I'm not an acoustics expert but I'll see if we can get someone on the case here. There are some good posters around, maybe Blue Bear has some thoughts on this.
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Recording Studio Suntans

AC's right -- some treatment on the walls and particularly the ceiling would be a good idea.... a quick check to see if you have reflection problems is a handclap.... walk around the room clapping your hands slowly -- if you hear a pinging from the clap, then there are issues.

First step is the ceiling -- I would go and get some Owens Corning fibreglass (the stiff kind, not the same as what you;d use in walls), glue a plastic backing on it, wrap the whole thing in cheap cotton (your choice of color), and suspend them with hooks on the ceiling. This alone will seriously cut-down on many damaging reflections. After you've got the panels up, try the clap test again - you should notice any pinging to have dimished quite a bit.

You can then do the same thing on the walls, again using the clap test to locate partiicularly problem areas. You don't want to put too much high-freq absorbing material in the room as this will cause the room to sound dark and muddy. You may also want to consider a couple of RealTraps for bass trapping, once you've got a handle on the mid/high-freqs...!
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Bruce Valeriani - Mix Engineer

I actually am an Acoustic Consultant. A cheap, yet very effective product would be Echo Absorber Natural, made by American Micro Industries. They are actually currently offering free shipping on it as well. What you want to do is find the total surface area of the room (floor, ceiling, and walls) and then cover about 15-20% of that. In your case I would go closer to 20% because the absorptive properties of your surface area is so poor. You can space them out around the walls because that is the target for most of the sound you produce. Avoid having two large spaces directly across from each other, and you should be in good shape.

http://www.soundprooffoam.com/echo-absorber-natural.html