The Mud Guard along with the other ones have mic stand mounting hardware designed into them ... that is something that may be meaningful to you.

I don't have a good singing voice but do sing for the purposes of arranging parts.  I have the $99 Mud Guard and it Kinda' gives everything everything I do a Bryan Adams effect.

Large shipping blankets are about $25 - $30 at Lowes and I find them helpful for my home studio but I don't simply hang mine on the wall ... I will use one to help isolate the mics around a drum kit.

Monique is also sitting on a leather couch, which probably isn't helping! 

I think she looks good sitting on that couch.


  

Blankets are not heavy enough, but carpets and rugs are. If you throw a heavy carpet over a 2x2 lath thus leaving 2 inches airspace between the layers, and put a 2 inch rockwool or dense foam rubber plate between there and hang it from the ceiling, you have quite an efective reflection absorber which looks ok if the carpet looks ok. Making that structure of U-shape (or three separate narrow ones) you can create different spaces.

BitFlipper: Your comment concerning the leather couch caught my eye. I've thought such a piece of furniture absorbs quite a wide range of frequencies. Is it not so?

I agree with Bit,

It's pretty easy to figure out what frequencies will be "treated" by various materials.

Almost none of the materials sold and used for room treatment will absorb the most problematic frequency resonance in a small or medium size room.

All they absorb are the mids and higher frequencies, which makes it easy for you to hear that you have made a change... the curious thing is that the change you are making is not helping tame any of the problematic resonant frequencies in the room, you are simply EQ'ing your wonderful voice in some arbitrary and novel way.

If doing that makes you think you sound better... who can argue?


If the Reflexion devices came with mirrors attached... I think they would sell even more of them.

There will be, however, the matter of those problem frequencies that still need to be dealt with.

You can hear the room tone in the intro to the video where Monique is singing and the camera mic is picking it up. It is the low frequency echo you hear under the entire interview. You can also hear that she has a wonderful and beautiful voice.

Close mic'ing and low cut filtering are probably all she needs to sound good. She even mentioned that sometimes the practice tracks make it to final mix... more proof that her voice is simply that nice to work with. :-)



 best regards,
mike

mike_mccue


 


If the Reflexion devices came with mirrors attached... I think they would sell even more of them.



best regards,
mike

Oooh...I hadn't thought of that.  I'm gonna give that a try.  Singing to someone I love.
 
But seriously, I think folks tend to get "room acoustics" and "mic acoustics" cornfused now and again.  At least in my business we would much prefer a totally dead space surrounding our vocal mics.  We want no room tone at all.  We add whatever ambience we need in post.  So perhaps my 25 years in voiceover have tainted my musical side but, as I stated above, the Reflexion filter goes a long way to "deadening" the space.  When I'm laying down a vocal I'm simply interested in getting rid of all the room tone I can.  Not recreating OceanWay studio A.  YMMV.