Any bed sheets thick enough to be used as sound proofing?
I am curious of anyone has any alternative ideas to standard/typical sound proofing. Currently I do not feel like constructing anything elaborate and I really can't do to much were I live. Noise isn't to much of a problem.. Mostly just soundproofing to remove echos from recording. You think a thick sheet maybe of fleece or something dense could act as a breakaway if I strung it up somewhere about 1-2 inches away from the wall. Do you think it would function to do this purpose?
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Just FYI, you're looking for sound treatment and not sound proofing. Sound proofing stops transmission in and out of the room while treatment is controlling the reflections inside.
Most material will work to simply tame reflections and deaden the room. As Alphonso said, the denser the material you get the more absorption you'll get and yeah a thin bed sheet might not help much. So the question is: how dead do you want it?
Also, you may want to look into selectively treating certain parts of the room if you are using this room for monitoring/mixing. For instance it's common to use bass traps in the corners to fix problems especially in smaller rooms. Check out "Foamily" sound treatment foam on Amazon for some cheaper options than Auralex.
Sheets will not be heavy weight enough. You are trying to stop pulses through air, so the denser the material the more effective it will be. It is the mass of the fabric you are looking for, not the thickness.
Heavy weight velvet curtain material such as you find in theaters can make a difference for high end reflections. Heavy satin can also work.
I recommend buying a mattress topper for cheap - the ones with the bumps like acoustic foam as they're cheap and work well.
This is a good site: johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php and John's recording manual is available free.
You can buy little enclosures (miniature screens on a stand) that sit to the front and sides of the microphone. They create a little 'studio' 600mmx600mmx600mm so you don't need to treat the whole room.
If you put sound treatment on one spot on a wall you can get away without using it in the corresponding place on the opposite wall. If you follow this principle you can save money by 'staggering' your foam panels.
Get some foam traps for the (four?) corners where walls meet the ceiling.
Many good suggestions already given, let me add one point I didn't see made yet: Absorbing lower frequencies requires more mass than higher frequencies.
In practice this means that if, for example, you hang light or medium-weight draping on the walls, the higher frequencies will be absorbed and won't bounce around so much, but the lower frequencies will continue to boom around.
This means that to have a good sounding room over the whole spectrum, one must use heavy absorbing objects. Think heavy stuffed chairs, sofas, heavy curtains -- which is what you often see in well designed concert halls, theaters, etc.
To get an idea of how important this is, and how much difference it makes, compare the sound of an orchestra or a film score when the hall is empty with when the hall is full of people. Even though the people only cover one small portion or the entire area of all the surfaces of the hall, the mass of all those bodies absorbs a lot of the sound that would be otherwise bouncing around, especially the lower frequencies, which are the hardest to stop.
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