How to Make Bass Traps, Acoustic Filling for DIY Bass Trap

What are Bass Traps and what do they do?
To put it in simple and understandable terms, Bass Traps are usually large objects to change the volume of certain spots, mostly the corners, of a musical room, such as a Hifi listening room and music- or recording studios. Bass Traps are used to keep low frequencies in music controllable and to optimise the room acoustics. Bass Traps avoid standing waves that otherwise dominate the whole space and the music that is been recorded or played back.

Most people that work with or produce music have the ability to hear when they enter a room or studio if there is a need for bass trapping. In a room with dominant basses you can hear that mid- and low frequencies are not defined, in some cases the pressure is really present. Poor room acoustics can be the reason why your Hifi set sounds terrible or why your recordings keep failing. So Bass Traps are really an important part of the acoustics in a room.
We can offer multiple solutions and products to improve the room acoustics in your Hifi room, studio or practice room and to build your own bass traps.

How to make Bass Traps? DIY Bass Trapping
Again, simple and understandable terms! The size of the Bass Traps, because you need at least two of them, depends on how low the frequencies are that are causing problems. Most of the time you can calculate this by the size of the room, but to exactly know low the frequencies are and which dimensions the bass traps should have, you need to do an acoustical measuring. This might be expensive and technical, we like to keep it simple for now. So we advise to make bass traps that are somewhat mobile. This way you can experiment with them and place them strategically in the corners of your room.

If you want to make your own bass traps we recommend to make two of them, about the same height as your ceiling and at least 50 cm deep, measured from the corner of the room to the front of the bass trap. This size bass trap will “trap” frequencies of about 200 Hz. Frequencies from 250 Hz and up can be dampened with acoustic panels. Bass traps can be made as wooden frame, with some Acoustic Cotton Wool filling (at least one layer on the inside of the bass trap walls). This frame should have a triangle shape seen from above and closed up with plywood, these are the walls. It is not always necessary to apply sound absorbing materials on the outside of the bass trap. Only if you want to absorb mid- and higher frequencies. This is of course a very brief and simplified description, but it might give you some insight about building bass traps.

Products to build DIY Bass Traps