Microphone Isolation & Acoustic Treatment

A duvet is actually less than a matress- it's a comforter, or down-filled blanket.

Those ideas will all work to reduce room ambience, as will any of a thousand other homemade solutions.

But if you are serious about recording, there are two suggestions I would make. The first is to walk around the spaces that are currently available for you to record in, and speak into a microphone, describing where you are standing and what direction you are facing, and then play back the recording using some kind of volume level-matching technique. The odds that some places in your house sound a lot better than others are 100 out of 100. The odds that some of the best-sounding spaces are ones you would have overlooked are about 97 out of 100.

Another thing is that if recordings made in your primary recording space sound bad, then it's probably not the best place to make mixing decisions. There are fairly easy and inexpensive solutions to most small residential acoustical problems that focus on broadband absoprbers called bass traps. A quick search will turn up a number of places to buy them and a variety of simple DIY recipes that can dramatically tighten up the acoustics of a room in Ssaturday afternoon.

Cheers.

Yep: Thanks for the tip, I'll be sure to do this soon, especially since I just moved, and will now be recording in what's actually part of a dining room / living room...! :)

Cryophonik: Good to hear that the Reflexion is working well for you. Quite a nice set up you have there; I sure wish Reflexion would take your advice and knock $100 off the price...

Thanks for your comments, gents.

-Mike