Do you get complaints about your delayed sound? Do you need to reduce echo for a podcast or a vocal recording? If you don’t have tons of money to turn your room into a studio booth, will just a blanket work? You can make an acoustic treatment, which is adding or adjusting materials in the room to make sound reflection, absorption, and diffusion more balanced. With this budget method, you can effectively improve your sound quality. So, in this guide, let's explore how to make an acoustic treatment on a budget.
Why We Need Acoustic Treatment
Before we get into that, let’s find out why reverb happens. When you speak into a microphone, no matter how close you get to the mouth, there’s still some of the sound that goes past and hits the wall. And because sound travels so fast, it will bounce around the room and will be picked up by the microphone a few times. But the only sound we want a mic to pick up is straight out of our mouths. That's where acoustic treatment comes in.
How Acoustic Treatment Works
There are two ways to get started.
Absorption: Literally, it absorbs some of the sound that hits the wall, working by decoupling the strength of reflected sound. That’s why blanket will work just fine.
Diffusion: The sound that hits the wall will be scattered, and a smaller amount of sound is too weak to be picked up clearly by the microphone. You will set up your room mainly with diffusion material, in which case you don’t want a completely dead room, especially if you’re recording a choir.
Making An Acoustic Treatment in Your Room
Absorption
So, how to DIY your own room? It’s a case-by-case study, but what we introduce is the basic theory. And because diffusion material will be costly, we will focus on absorption, which will be able to make a great difference.
Setting up a makeshift vocal studio is not that difficult.
1️⃣ Use the moving blanket, carpet, or towels, which only do the job of absorption. But different blankets have various effects. Here's the difference guide.
2️⃣ Hang or clamp the thickest blanket from the ceiling, and drape it around your workshop. The bouncing-around sound will be blocked out by heavy fabric, and that echo will get down.
3️⃣ An upgrade but slightly more expensive way is to buy some acoustic foam to decorate your room, and thus it will make your studio look more professional.
Note: In case it may turn out to be useless and wasteful, the height of the foam wedge should be at least 2 inches. And it’s always the thicker the better. Because the first reflection point is usually side to side, then front to back. To get rid of primary noise, these two places are where you must paste the foam.
4️⃣ If neither of the above two methods can work for you, a closet could be your last choice. Open closet doors and put in the microphone, which will also work pretty well, though it may suffer from some inconvenience if you’re not using a laptop.
Diffusion
Diffusion material should be at least 3 inches thick and be placed 6-10 feet away to be effective. People intend to put furniture over as a diffuser, but they actually work well as a sound-absorbing material. You may not be able to afford a proper diffusion panel, but it’s never a bad idea to put in some bookshelves. Nothing in the room is one of the worst recording environments.