Doubled up panels, on top of a frame which had some space built into it as well. Later on today I’ll take some photos to show you.
They are incredibly easy to make if you can use a power drill. I made 8 panels in about 2 hours, including time to chat with my friend! If you want I can dig up the plan I followed and upload it here.
That’d be awesome. Can’t wait to see your pics too. Thanks!
I mix in the studio when a client is attending, on cans in my kitchen when I have the choice (AKG K701).
I have no experience of Grado but a lot depends on the model. Did you do your research? Is the model you are using recommended by others for mixing?
So either your cans or your mixes are lacking. As you say, post the mixes on BTR if you want to learn more.
Highly unlikely. I’ll be straight with you because I believe you are about to spend a considerable amount of time and money to no effect. Don’t do it. Until you are producing mixes of some sort of quality that you are reasonably satisfied with, no amount of room treatment is going to help you. Focus on improving your mixes first. BTR is free - use it, you will learn a lot.
Here are some pictures of my panels. You can see that they look rather like single mattresses hanging up on the wall! The are in totals, 6 and half inches thick. I’ve made sure that they don’t sit flush up against any wall, as to give room behind them to allow sound to travel and get trapped.
I’m also attaching a PDF set of instructions that I followed. It’s really easy to get them made, and I calculated that 8 panels cost me a total of around €60, factoring in wood, cotton, rockwool and screws.
DIY-BASS-TRAPS-MADE-EASY.pdf (395.3 KB)
Wonderful. Thnx!
TB
Yeah. The Grados are highly touted. Very nice sounding phones. I think they sound great, but I suspect are too bright for mixing. I might check out the AKGs.
Thanks for your candor. I’ll get some of my mixes up.
yep, I would do the madpsychot DIY thing, or just get some dull (flat) cans for balance.
In my last real studio, I had full ‘double wide’ rolls of insulation (still in the wrapper) standing in the corners and wall to ceilings, covered with 1/4 " ply … obviously you can get creative with a cool design arrangement of hole - saw cuts in the ply after that - but that worked really well. It was ambient but the bass was almost totally absorbed.
Or go crazy with the art thing…
Thanks, Cristina. I spoke with Mike again today and he was very helpful. Did some tweaking in his rx’s to make it closer to do-able for me. He also had some helpful suggestions for some DIY work I can do, which is also what madpsychot suggested.
I’m probably going do that and maybe pick up some cans with a flatter frequency profile, like Vaughan and AJ suggested. Will be a step up and more versatile than what I have now.
… and I need to start posting some more stuff to be bashed!
I’ve decided to follow the advice above and get some better cans for mixing. Looking at the AKG’s or maybe Sennheiser HD 600’s. Not sure yet.
Another question though: apart from room treatment for mixing is treatment for recording.
So if I got some decent headphones for the mixing process, is there a less expensive route to go for acoustic treatment for recording just guitar and vocals. Would I do better to treat the full room with sound-absorbing panels, which is very doable (thanks MadPsychot, for the plans), or just get or make some free-standing panels to create some sound absorption around/behind my recording space?
So, e.g., GIK sells what they call portable isolation booths and also “gobos” (no idea what that stands for!), which are basically free-standing acoustic panels. (more info here)
Would love to hear people’s thoughts. Especially, if anyone has any experience with anything similar to this. Would that be adequate for me?
The good news is that acoustic treatment for tracking is way less complicated than acoustics for mixing. First step is to break up any parallel walls. Anything is better than nothing. You can usually hear the problem spots by just walking around your room clapping and listening to where it keeps ringing.
You can make or buy panels to put on the wall, hang blankets on a mic stand, hang guitars on the wall. Really anything that breaks up those nasty reflections is going to be moving in the right direction.
Just to show the difference that even crappy Styrofoam diffusers make in a room, here’s an A/B of an impulse made in a room before and after these 1 inch thick styrofoam diffusers.
Before:
After:
And here’s a spectrograph of the two.
@Tesgin - I was just reading this thread because I desperately need to treat my room and saw that you’re looking for headphones. Looks like it’s your lucky day! 
Wow. That’s striking (the difference).
The origin of the term “gobo” is obscure, but is most likely short for “go-between.”
Definitely consider aesthetics and ease of use here, in addition to sound quality. I considered getting gobos or something similar, but I am SO glad I went with the wall treatments. It looks fantastic and is completely out of my way. I never have to set anything up or move anything around and they don’t take up much space. And definitely don’t forget ceiling panels over your recording area–they make a big difference. If you’re going the DIY route with panels it won’t even be that expensive to make a whole bunch.
Excellent. Thank you, Cristina. Makes absolute sense. Very practical.
In a home environment, you’re never going to get an actively great-sounding room, you’re almost always trying to eliminate the reflections and stop it from being a bad-sounding room. Basically, if you can imagine singing with a duvet (comforter) over your head, that’s they type of effect you should aim for. With zero reflections to deal with, you can mix on a level playing field, and add your own reflections, rather than having to spend half your time trying to mitigate room reflections on a recording.
For guitar, construct a simple tunnel. For vocals - any crude frame type setup with a couple of of duvets draped around it will work better than any acoustically treated room.
We made our own. You can see them all here (sorry, film clip is all I have of my old room) fairly clearly. We did all of those on the wall, roof and some portables for under what would be $1000 USD.
If you need any guidance as to how (it was not hard and I’m NOT a handy man by any stretch) I’d be happy to share but it looks like you have loads of advice already.
Hi,
I have recently completed an online 10-hour training on acoustic treatment and taking this course is probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in my audio engineering journey. I wish I could recommend it to you but it is in French so probably useless to most of you here.
Anyway, my advice would be to get Room EQ wizard, spend a couple hours learning how to use it and analyse your room’s frequency response first. Buying or building acoustic treatment just for the sake of it doesn’t give the best results. You need to be aware of what exactly are the issues in your room and since every room is different, every solution should be too.
When you know exactly what are your room nodes and what issues to address (frequency peaks and dips, reverb time, flutter, problem reflections…) in which proportion, you can achieve a great result by spending the right amount.
Good luck!
Off topic: Another killer song Daniel!
Now back to the topic. 
Ha!! Yeah, my intended purpose was not to spruke my band. But I’m glad you liked it.
I have been super impressed with how effective the baffles are.
To be honest, I was really hung up and into acoustics a few years ago but once I made them and concentrated more on mixing and knowing the deficiencies in both myself and my room, I sort of forgot about all that and got more music done.
