Modtraps review Originally published in TapeOp, 2007. A crappy-sounding room is probably the commonest project studio problem, and the hardest one to fix. If you're stuck in a basement or attic, a good room sound is out of the question, and you're going to need some kind of treatment. In my case, I've put convoluted foam everywhere, but it only goes so far, especially since I'm always moving things around and messing up the careful balance I'm always trying to maintain. That's why I was interested to learn about Modtraps, a repositionable room treatment system being made by an independent manufacturer in Minnesota. I asked for a few to experiment with, and they arrived promptly. The Modtraps are sturdy but fairly lightweight panels covered in black fabric and equipped with an adjustable swivel bracket. I tested one 36” square panel, and two 18”x36”, and had them attached to some mic stands with the provided hardware. A caveat here: you ought to have some pretty sturdy mic stands. Mine are the cheapest money can buy, and were constantly threatening to tip over. The Modtraps can also be attached to walls or other surfaces. I tried them with three things that I have problems with: vocals, guitar micing, and monitoring. For vocals, I made myself a little booth, with the big panel in the middle and the two small ones at an angle at the sides. I faced this as I sang, with the mic in the middle. While my isolation was by no means total, a good deal of the lousy reflections I usually get while singing vanished, and I had a nice dry vocal to work with. The same technique worked well with acoustic guitar. I tried micing an amp, too, and found that it was useful to get the traps in very close behind my 57—I actually made a little 45-degree shelter out of the two smaller panels, creating a triangular space out of their two surfaces and the grille of the amp (this is a small amp!), with the mic in the middle. Again, a usefully uncolored sound. My room is really tiny, and by necessity my monitors—a little pair of Tapco actives—are close to the wall. This tends to give them a hollow, constricted sound at anything over very low volume. Putting Modtraps behind them definitely gave me a flatter response without having to change my setup, and I could crank my mixes a bit. The only problem I could find with the Modtraps is that you need several of them to get really good results in some circumstances, and if you have them on mic stands, things can get a little crowded—especially if you're using the boom to counterbalance them. But their portability and repositionability is a huge advantage. The brackets are really strong, the hardware is heavy and solid, and they just feel well-made. A creative recordist will find all sorts of other uses for them, too—bass trapping, for instance—and they lend themselves extremely well to this kind of experimentation. c2007 by J. Robert Lennon.