hello friends,

i was looking for tips on how to properly determine and effectively use the natural acoustics of a room. my band and i are going to start recording shortly, and we have a variety of options as far as rooms go. the first is a somewhat large office with walls that are textured with large rocks (sounds kind of bizarre, i know) and natural wood. additionally, we have access to 2 large warehouse/garages, including washrooms that are generally somewhat longer with high ceilings that are, naturally, lined with concrete (which i imagine might be a nightmare to work with).

if anybody has any tips on figuring our ways to effectively exploit or work with either one of these environments, i'd love to hear it.

thanks!

which room sounds the best?

glumble, are you recording live, together. Or are you going to track each player separately?

I suppose the office room sounds better, as its carpeted and the walls have an interesting texture, although I will admit that the concrete walls of the warehouse have a certain amount of charm to them- everything sounds much bigger and uncontrollable.

Also, we will be tracking 1 player at a time, so I think that this is mostly a major concern for drums, as we have a little more freedom with the guitar and bass amps.

i've always wanted to track drums in a parking garage. I think if you close mic'd everything, and then mixed in a signal from a mic a good 50' or 100' away, it could sound cool.

i'd probably use the office room if I was tracking anything that was supposed to sound different than My Bloody Valentine vocals. if your instruments are not supposed to sound like My Bloody Valentine's vocals, then the office is probably gonna be the way to go.

and whichever room you use, you might wanna stick to mostly close micing.

clap your hands and listen to the decay. that's what's gonna happen to all your sound sources.

thanks scott, i think we might try the parking garage thing in addition to the office. it might be nice to change it up a bit and see what kind of drum sounds we can get out of just about everywhere. i'll let you know what results we get with your dream set up

i read this thing a while ago where to find the best place to put the drums you walk around the room dragging the floor tom hitting it.
when you find the place where it resonates the most/sounds best leave it there and set the rest of the kit up around it.

since then I've done this for every recording and even when we move into a new practice room. works great and is really quick and easy.

h8 m0dems wrote:i read this thing a while ago where to find the best place to put the drums you walk around the room dragging the floor tom hitting it.
when you find the place where it resonates the most/sounds best leave it there and set the rest of the kit up around it.

since then I've done this for every recording and even when we move into a new practice room. works great and is really quick and easy.

i've heard the same suggestion, but with the snare instead of floor tom. while the snare won't have as big and clear a resonance as a floor tom will, the snare drum will be thwacked probably a hundred times more often than the floor tom, so it's arguable that finding the spot with the best floor tom sound isn't as critical as the best snare sound. depends on the actual kit and the style of music, I suppose.

and glumble, one thing I'd expect to find with cavernous rooms like parking garages or whatnot is that you may want to either delay the distant mic, or if you're digital, try dragging it ahead or behind the close mics by however many milliseconds... it wouldn't surprise me if the distant mic needed to be un-delayed by a bit to take that awesome washy sound and bring it closer to the actual transients from the drums being hit. if you're 100' away, the speed of sound is really going to become an issue, but one that I would expect could be pretty easily remedied by messing with the time offset of the distant mic relative to all the close mics. i've never actually done it, but it's what I would expect to find if I had the chance to.

good luck!

Thanks for the heads up- I'll definitely post the results. We're buying our last three mics right now (2 overheads and a snare), and upgrading our mixers. We're working digitally, so messing with the timing shouldn't be too difficult. I think we may end doing a mish-mash of both methods, possibly within the confines of a song, to see what kind of sounds we can pull from everywhere. It will be quite the experiment.

scott wrote:i've always wanted to track drums in a parking garage. I think if you close mic'd everything, and then mixed in a signal from a mic a good 50' or 100' away, it could sound cool.

I've tried something like this before and if you set the mics too far away you will eventually have an unusable delay. It's better in my opinion to put the room mics by the kit but facing away.