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DIY Acoustics

Or if you have a limited budget ha ha yeah, we just talked about the craziest thing you could possibly do the vocal booth but if you do all that stuff you have the perfect most awesome vocal booth so if you're at that level awesome do that um so what I want to do is live on the air we're gonna build a pot filter really quick now some people uh this is really really simple if they had always materials here some of them have been stolen but that's okay um a wire coat hanger and panty hose this comes in really handy. So uh actually I'll just show you the basic thing I have one finished here for you but you would just I know some of you got when I when I first started out in my bedroom uh I had no money I was in high school I don't know to do and I know some of you people are watching right now and you just you have no money. I mean you're you're high school students so what you want to dio is basically uh kind of strain it out hopes just kind of wind that around there straightening out ki...

nd of make a circle here you know make it as as round as you can um that's the basic shape there and this is really easy I I use this for years with great results just take your pantyhose sure you have pantyhose laying around everyone uh or you go to the store and it looks like a weirdo and you buy pantyhose so what we have here is the basic pop culture and what what you'd want to do is just put a little uh twist tires of tire on that uh a perfected one here earlier. So er it's nice nice around circle but, uh what's awesome about this is it's two layers um so you get a lot of uh it blocks it blocks a lot of the, uh the plo shins were they called peas and tease and bees and all that stuff um so and it's pretty transparent material now you might not like the way this sounds and you also still you might be picky and you might be poor beggars can't be choosers but sometimes you can uh you can use thin t shirt material I just used some gaff tape you could sew this on if you want to get fancy with it. Um and this basically just will go over the uh the microphone. So that's the it's just one layer of t shirt material but you want that to be thin so it's not changing sound of it so let's also because we're talking to d I y guys right now let's go over here and talk about this vocal shield um now this is I really liked this design because it's really simple most people have pillows maybe you don't have mike stands maybe fashion something out of wood that will hold these up but it's basically just three pillows on mike stands with clips on the top and uh you don't want any kind of fabric that's really tight um and if you s o it khun b acoustically transparent and if you want it to look better maybe you could throw something over it some kind of cool looking material or whatever but that's basically free you know for anybody that doesn't have anything so let's say you are at home on your laptop in your room and you need you can't build a vocal booth what's going to happen is these air so thick you know was that eight inches or something at the thickest point um a lot of the frequencies that we talked about earlier that are probably be problem frequencies in the size room that you're most likely recording in are going to be absorbed by these pillows so when you sing into the microphone then you would you'd have your little cool cool little pop filter that they make different colors okay right we got black here they make black so you khun look more professional you could even cut this weird little extra skin off uh so um this is going to be absorbing all of the problem frequencies that you're gonna be encountering while you're tracking a vocal uh they do make other vocal shields and you might think about building it yourself out of wood or something like that, but you got to keep a few things in mind depends on how far you want to take this. So uh, if you do have wood behind this, you have to keep in mind that whatever goes through there is going to hit the wood and kind of bounce back a little bit if you have, like, the lower frequencies or if you have thin pillows or if your materials that think enough, they make some professional vocal shields and we'll show that in a little bit where the back is completely solid and it's actually causing a problem for the vocal sound to bounce back into the microphone and boost weird frequencies and give you problems. Uh, when you're mixing the vocal so what this does the sound goes through it and then by the time maybe you have sound absorption on your wall, I don't know uh, it bounces back and his by that time definitely absorbed so that's the basic concept of ah of this vocal shield, so as long as you're right up to it, you know, singing your sound is basically going this way into the pill's getting absorbed and you want to make sure that you have some kind of plush carpet or something, which is also comfortable while you're doing vocals to absorb sound going down, if you could do the ceiling, do the ceiling, but if not this, we should do, huh? Pretty good job for practically free. So there you go, susan. I think that's, that's all I have, I think that's great, andrew, we actually have a question from taylor. Maid says, andrew, I want to build a studio in my basement. I imagine a lot of people at home have extra space in their basement. That's a great spot to do it. I think my kitchen is just above the area where I want to put the studio. What do you recommend? Just soundproof the ceiling and minimize sound that's actually coming down from people walking around things like that? Uh, yeah, good question. Whatever you have like a two story studio now that's pretty advanced that's a pretty advanced question their foot if you don't have a super if you don't have us like a lot of basements kind of I'm from florida, so we don't have basements, but to my knowledge, a lot of basements don't have the highest ceilings, so the common yeah, so, um you do want to build your ceiling down, but you also wanna be able to walk around so let's say you have ah, really cool basement with a ceiling that's like as high as this. I don't know what twelve, fifteen feet, I don't know so you would you would definitely want to, uh, do the most advanced one, which is the, uh you would probably put up the acoustic barrier first, then put the studs on top of that, and then the drywall on top of that so it's not, but plus sound absorption material inside, they're like the rock war, the minute mineral wool or somebody that inside there and I mean that's really, really advanced construction uh, and depending depending on how your kitchen is actually built like it may or may not make that big of a difference. If it's just if it's poorly built to begin with, you're gonna have a lot of problems, but for the most part that would take care of the noises of walking around because those air like low frequencies that would be absorbed by thick mira wall. And then on top of that, you would also want to do sound absorption underneath what you just built, so you got your kitchen for you got your studs and then you have your sound absorption that it almost sounds like it may be easier for him to build like a little isso booth instead of trying to insulate the whole basement. Yeah, I mean, that would be ideal, right? But if yeah, if he's doing uh it's like this, this whole basement is tracking room, right? That's what you'd have to do and it's a huge undertaking, but yeah, you could just build a a smaller vocal room and keep in mind the sizes and frequencies that we talked about and and billed accordingly that and you want that to be airtight too, but then you have the air problem, therefore problem. So it depends on how much money you have, how much time you have and you know what? You won't invest into it. I actually had a similar situation at my last house. Um the ceilings in a lot of the basement's at least here in seattle or typically around seven feet you've already got it built down on guy also had pipes running across that because it was just unfinished basement, but ah, the studs from directly from the kitchen floor, which was like linoleum on top of wood so you could hear the refrigerator running and nothing um I think I went to home depot and spent maybe seventy dollars and I got the nine inch thick er attic insulation and I was able to puff it out and fill up the space in between the studs and that right there alone killed a tremendous amount of the sound those being transferred and since I couldn't hang drywall or anything because of the pipes and everything, all I did was I went online and got some one inch thick a great foam and I think I got three or four four by eight panels for under one hundred dollars shipped you just gotta look around online and there still is like that and I just stapled that so I ended up with a sealing that didn't really come down any further than the seven foot barriers because you already have the pipe. Yeah, it's just right there and it was nice because I was able to remove it all when I moved out so the landlord wasn't with anything but ended up killing almost all the sound that was leaking through the floor because my girlfriend would be upstairs, wait in the kitchen dishes, dad dancing basically I'm trying to mix so that's that's an inexpensive thing I know it treated the whole ceiling for under two hundred books. Yeah that's an awesome tip and it could be a case specific just like you said I mean, I don't know if that guy's pipes and, you know, running through that or whatever, but that sounds all so yeah, I think the the insulation helped a lot and puffing it up. A cz muchas possible made a big difference. Very cool. We have a question here from andrew from edmonton, who wanted to know if you ever take furniture in consideration when you're talking about soundproofing or fabric of it is r like that, yeah, absolutely. Um, if we're talking about studios, I mean, depending on the room and stuff like that for me in my tracking room, the kind of couch that I have I wouldn't really ever want a couch with, like, really tight material like leather, because that absorbs the high frequencies a lot. Um, so like breathable, more breathable material is is better for that kind of thing because and it's, almost like you have a huge sound panel, but it is a a couch, but in a vocal room, I mean, I don't have never really had furniture in a vocal room, so but but, yeah, that is something to take into consideration for sure, okay?