Room materials?

SHIBbYinc

New Metal Member
Sep 2, 2009
17
0
1
I have a stucco ceiling in my soon to be recording studio, Will this be an adequate ceiling with their be too much of either reflection or deflection? I have searched the internet for a while now trying to find any engineers opinion of stucco ceilings in a recording room (mostly drums are recorded here).
 
It depends on what is going on with the other surfaces in the room.
What's on the floor? walls?

I'm a fan of semi live sounding drum rooms, but one thing that's good to avoid is comb filtering or flutter echo. This happens a lot with parallel walls or hard surfaces that are adjacent to each other.

An easy way to test for comb filtering is to clap your hands in the space, if you hear a very fast repeating echo, that might not be so good. A way to fix it is to hang clouds on the ceiling that break up the flat hard surface and/or carpet and padding on the floor...basically you want to break up an first order reflections, if the acoustics aren't to your liking.
 
I am building it right now, but when it is finished it will unfortunately consist of 4 parallel walls (which I cannot do anything with as it is my basement) and that is just horizontally 1 way and vertically 1 way. However the room is a very large rectangle so I am not so worried about the long side too much right now. I have calculated the nodes however so I don't really worry too much about that. The walls are cedar, the floor is crappy mushed down carpet (which I built a birch plywood drum riser to keep it from muffling the kick drum's resonance.) and the ceiling is stucco. So is a stucco ceiling beneficial or detrimental on average to a rooms sound?
 
Stucco is usually just a thin layer of joint compound. So it's most likely covering a dry wall ceiling.

I wouldn't sweat it to much until you get some drums and mics set up and run some test.

If it's any kind of a problem you can hang some clouds from the ceiling. Having the ceder or wood walls is usually a plus. There's always ways to get around acoustic issues, but it might be best to see how things sound first. It's not like your going to tear the ceiling down and replace it to soon is it?