I used some contact adhesive to stick some cardboard to the back of the panels, makes them much easier to use with command strips
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and your point is?
plenty of people don’t have all the gear, treated room etc but still make great tunes… they either just are really good at what they do or know what their room/speakers are doing and mix accordingly.
i know someone who used radioshack speakers and one had a blown tweeter. it’s not something i could do. i need all the help i can get.
anyway, if that guy’s only using NS10s for monitors it’s not like there’s any bass traps needed in the room… those things have no bass and to me, are the worst sounding speakers i’ve ever heard but if someone can make music sound good on them when mixing then there’s a pretty good chance those mixes will translate to any set up. i didn’t watch the full video but does he mix in that room or work with other engineers etc? a lot of artists at that level are hiring people to mix for them or they go to another place to mix since they have the $$$$ to do it etc.
anyway, lot’s of music has been made in shitty rooms… a good song can survive anything.
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not sure if this is what you’re looking for but the GIK Acoustics panels I have (which are 2’x4’ in size) I’ve hung with just a single nail each. basically what you would use to hang a medium-sized piece of framed art. they literally hang up like framed art as well, with either a wire stretched from one side to the other on the back, or a “sawtooth” hanger mounted to the top. they’re by far the least destructive option I could find. most others needed screws into the wall, and sometimes as much as eight screws per panel. screw that (lol). one nail per panel, I can patch and paint that pretty easily if I ever decide to take them down (or just hang something else there). they’re not DIY but they start at about $70 each and just a handful of them really made a difference for me in a space similar to what you describe.
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This is all very helpful and thank you all so much for your input. I can literally hear the money draining out of my pockets but hopefully some acoustic insulation will deaden the sound enough so that I’m no longer aware of it 
I’ve actually started to picture some budget ways to implement some of these practices and trying to calculate how much space I will actually need for my desk, my gear, and some air to breathe without it turning into a Panic Room kind of situation…
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Haha yeah it can seem intimidating - but keep in mind you don’t have to build a house in a day, just lay one brick at a time (to paraphrase Brian Eno/Oblique Strategies). Making music is the goal, so have fun doing that and build a good room as you go. Plan for the long term. If you go DIY there are lots of plans online for free for acoustic panels and traps - and materials can generally be found cheaply (and a lumber store will usually cut to dimensions if you ask). There’s no “you must do it this way” with this - especially since every room is different - but there’s a lot of info out there on what will generally help.
I made a list of good resources/YouTube channels for myself when I was determining what I wanted to do with my room. These are pretty good resources to dive deeper (and they mostly don’t hard sell stuff, it’s just how-to):
Acoustics Insider - Jesco rules. Tons of theory and debunking, user questions, etc. He has a free PDF guide he’ll email you if you sign up.
https://www.youtube.com/@AcousticsInsider
These are good resources too:
Present Day Production: - a little gimmicky but good nonetheless. One video has a guy going through his house to make panels for free with stuff he has lying around.
https://www.youtube.com/@PresentDayProduction
GIK Acoustics: These guys are great and they’ll give you a free layout of your room showing you where to treat if you contact them (along with a quote for how much it’ll cost from them, of course).
https://www.youtube.com/@GlennKuras
ADAM Audio – and Music City Acoustics - this channel goes through a lot of theory and building paneling in a DIY fashion, even hanging multiple panels from a ceiling is covered. It’s great. You can also get PDFs of their plans. You won’t find a better “how to use room EQ wizard” walkthrough than on Music City Acoustics’ channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@ADAMAudioBerlin
https://www.youtube.com/@MusicCityAcoustics
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Somewhere between the “air space between the walls” and “book shelves make great diffusers” I’ve started counting my large bookshelves around the house and there’s like 5 or 6 of them…
I’m not sure how many I can fit in that room but…
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I use them to hang the framed pictures on my wall which weigh a lot more than foam - they’re surprisingly effective and don’t leave anything behind. I’m a total command-strip stan.
I won’t deny this reality as I assume you speak from experience, but my office gets to over 30c (around 40c last summer 
) in the summer and I’ve never had a failure myself - so might depend on exactly how hot we’re talking 
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This topic was covered in some great depth on the REAPER forums a while back:
https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.php?p=257810&postcount=22
I’d skip down to post 21-23, where user yep goes into broadband absorption, what it is and various ways to accomplish it on various budgets. Post 23 is called “How to treat a typical residential space for less than $100 in a single day.” It calls for 2’x4’ Rigid fiberglass/rockwool insulation panels (AKA Owens-Corning 703 or 705), some canvas or burlap, zip ties, some washers, eye-hooks and a glue gun.
I’m not so sure about the “done in a day” part, but it’ll give you a pretty good sense of the downest and dirtiest version of what you need to do and the fundamentals behind it, and you can work from there. And if you’re a fan of the how-to manual by-way-of-Hunter-Thompson-style-semi-foulmouthed-screed (as I clearly am), it’s a pretty entertaining read. YMMV.
I also second getting Jesco’s “Bass Traps” guide and trying his “bass hunter” technique, where you basically roll around your room trying to find the worst possible sound, and work backwards from there.
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I usedbasotect, layerd with active coal over a picture frame, which had a hole plate behind it for further air dispersion. So far it is lightweight, hangs like a picture, and was cheap to build. I did hang about 8 frames in critical areas, it improved the waterfall plot a bit, but didnt remove the room modes obviously, i would do it again, and imoroved my rhearsal room aswell.
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Anyone using rigid/semi-rigid insulation or rockwool:
Use breathing protection.
Those fibers are carcenogenic AND lighter than air.
Translation: little invisible fibers floating around that you breathe in without knowing it. They end up in your lungs changing the way your dna replicates itself and growing little tumors.
PLENTY of online resources do not mention this reality of working with these materials.
Out of curiosity, when you record in your space with mics, what is missing or what are you getting to much of that you can’t mitigate with microphone choice?
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deep pockets.
How you figure that?
“Microphone choice” only = “deep pockets” to “gear snob”…
my opinion certainly, but doesn’t $400 go a lot further in solving room sound issues via microphone choice than various decorations on walls?
Not to mention that the mics will work in other places down the road.
This is starting to feel like an rtfm lecture so I’m not willing to go too deep down this rabbit hole but if you are saying an untreated room with hardwood floors can be mitigated by putting the money into a specific mic, I agree to the extent that I bought an sm7b instead of a more expensive condenser mic because the off axis rejection and reflection factor is much lower. But it’s also a sacrifice because for some aspects, it’s just not going to get the sound I’m looking for. I did settle for a cheap condenser mic to try and get a bit of what I want but the noise floor is high and the rejection pattern is poor. I have an sm57 that is fine for guitar but will fail at any kind of vocal or wind instrument recording.
You call it wall decorations if you want and I appreciate the advice about not breathing in carcinogens but I don’t have a lot of money and I have what I have as far as mics and workspace, so outside of what I have, I’m looking for the best way to utilize what is at my disposal. Telling me what I have is worthless when compared to making better choices is less than productive.
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Yeah probably similar temps. I think it might have to do with surface texture, too. Still, having something drop unexpectedly after a few years soured me on the whole thing a bit, so I don’t use them anymore.
With all due respect, a nice mic in a bad room will just give you a more accurate recording of how bad your room sounds.
Regarding rockwool/fiberglass—YES, ABSOLUTELY wear breathing protection while working with it.
To that end, I’d also suggest adding a thin layer of plastic between whatever insulation you use and whatever fabric you use to wrap it in, to avoid any fibers escaping over time and making their way into your body. Especially if you’re planning on hanging anything overhead.
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A couple of things, mr./mrs. @shigginpit:
I never said what you have is worthless, or implied it in any way.
I floated the idea that $400 would go further in solving “room sound” issues picked up by microphones by choosing different microphones rather than putting it into traps/diffusion/scattering/absorption.
Considering that you don’t want to modify the structure…
It’s like “my arm is broken. What should I do to fix it, other than a splint and time for it to heal?”
You went there with the flippant comment “deep pockets”, implying that you know exactly, quantitatively what the physical, reproducible frequency problem is that you need to correct or account for, you have a budget to address that problem, that the budget is out-of-reach and are reviving this necro-thread to crowdsource potential solutions.
English is my mother tongue, so apologies if I’m, you know, reading.
An SM57 not suitable for voice recording or guitar or wind instruments? Ok.
Consider if you can’t quantitatively describe in physical, frequency terms what the issue is, you might be looking for a $400 panacea.
can confirm.
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You’re getting @shigginpit confused with the OP.
OP declared a budget of $400. As far as I can see, @shigginpit hasn’t declared a budget, but has given the distinct impression their budget is a lot smaller than that.
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he mixes in that room and in other rooms as well, anyway your whole post was basically my point
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I have to say, I was using an SM57 for a while on my voice and wasn’t that happy with it, so I went on a bit of a journey, which like all good Hollywood stories ended with me going back to the SM57 for a lot of my mic duties, but adding a some EQ and compression before and after the fact to clean it up.
Cue self-involved yammering . . . here
First I tried a condenser mic. Everyone on the Internet says if you’re recording vocals you need a condenser, so I did some research and got a decent one from the 90s ($400ish, found on craigslist). And… it sounds great on my piano, which is in the biggest room in the house. But it made everything in my little music room sound tiny and boxy. And suddenly my iffy vocal technique was more obviously iffier.
And of course, without a fancy-pants preamp, your condenser only gets you so far. And I have no money for some fancy preamp—I barely had money for the mic.
So then I tried a better dynamic mic—the good old Sennheiser 421. The mic everyone says is the “good” version of the SM57. So maybe that’s all I needed.
Did it sound better? It sounded different. The signal had pretty much all the same problems as the SM57, but it rounded certain things off and added more attack (“bite”) elsewhere that made those harsher sonic qualities seem more intentional.
It sounded cool, but not the sound I was looking for.
Did I need another mic? Maybe an NT1? Or a ribbon mic might get me that sound I’m chasing? Or do that trick where you boil an SM57 to turn it into a SM7B? All I could think about was how so many of the great songs I love, throughout history, were recorded on garbage equipment.
So I started thinking about what I was hearing that I actually wanted to get rid of, in the first place. Why did my stuff sound different? What characteristic was it that I found so grating in my recordings that I needed to fix?
I finally determined that my issue was certain problem frequencies (a combination of the room, the mic and my voice). And me just moving around too much when I sing.
The first I could address with more careful EQing (I found listening at low volumes helps). The second I could work on with compression, more practice with the mic (not just practicing singing out loud but singing into a mic), and wrapping my mic stand and music stand in foam because I’m incapable of not handling the mic stand no matter how hard I try.
Long story short…ish… after messing around with some plugins and pedals—all stuff I already had lying around my studio or in my DAW—I found that I could get a pretty good recording from that SM57 if I shelved off some low end and put some light compression as an insert on the way in (i.e. before the ADAT), and then do a bit more polishing while mixing by sending it back through the comp & EQ (this time comp before EQ). Sometimes it takes me a few passes through the EQ, but it’s all treatable.
The specific order might be better swapped around for your room, or voice, or even a certain song or music style. But my point is that with some tweaking, I ended up liking the sound of the SM57 better than a lot of other (pricier) mics I tried. And all I ended up having to use were the same EQ and comps I already use for my instruments.
This is yet another reason why a patchbay is the best gear you can buy—it makes all that tweaking and swapping and listening relatively quick and painless—even kind of fun.
I’ve figured out a “tracking patch” and a “mixing patch” that I can move between pretty easily that uses the same gear. Without the patchbay, it would all be a nightmare.
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