Having to record in a less than ideal drum room

[onetruth]

Hi guys,

I'm recording a band this weekend at a friends studio which is in a great location....right next to a forest in the countryside with no surrounding houses. sweet! my friend is letting me rent it mega cheap which is awesome and he's got some good gear (expensive mics, great mic pre's etc). Only problem is, the building was originally built as just a rehearsal space...but then developed into a studio setup. And so the room sizes and acoustic treatment of the space is not ideal at all.

The studio looks a bit like this.....

Apologies for the crummy drawing.....but hopefully you can see that, first of all, the drum room is square. Not good right?? Also, the entire room is covered in carpet - floor, walls and ceiling. This is not good for a drum room is it?! I was reading through glenn's thread about recording drums and it seems that ideally, the walls should not be parrallel. Obviously I can't do anything about the walls as such, but Glenn does mention in his thread that a few sheets of plywood leant up against a couple of the walls will eliminate standing waves? So which walls in the drum room will be best to lean the boards up against? I'm thinking the left and the top walls (as your looking at the plan drawing) as the bottom wall has a glass window in to see into the control room and the right wall has the entrance door. What do you guys think?

Also in glenns thread, he suggests putting a couple of sheets of ply on the floor and putting the drums on top. do you guys think this will help with the drum sound in this sized room?

my next issue is room mics.....the room is so small that i'm not sure where I could put room mics to get a good sound? any ideas guys? I was thinking of possibly putting stereo paired mics in the guitar/vocal room and having the door to the drum room open? do you guys think that might be cool? and if so, any advice on exactly where those mics should be placed to get the best stereo spread?

The guitar/vocal room is also carpeted throughout which I'm a little concerned about for when it comes to recording guitars (not so much vocals). I'm worried that the guitars are going to sound a bit dead. When i see pics of guitar rooms at big studios, they usually have wooden floors and wood on the walls. Would it be a good idea for me to move the plywood from the drum room into the guitar/vocal room once i've finished tracking drums and do the same kind of thing? (wood on the floor and wood on a couple of the walls to reduce standing waves?).

Any advice you guys can give me is much appreciated. Also a big thanks to glenn for his amazing thread about recording drums which has helped me out loads already!

Cheers
Jim

 

[::XeS::]

The plywood should be lean (looking at the draw) on the left and the upper walls.
The room mics...put them equidistant from the drums, one on the left and one on the right....or in the 2 corners.

 

[onetruth]

Hi ::XeS::
Are you suggesting I put the room mics in the drum room or the guitar/vocal room? If I put them in the 2 corners of the drum room, equidistant from the kit, how high should I have the mics and should the mics be facing the kit or away from the kit?

 

[Wisheraser]

There is a bit of a misunderstanding of terminology here. Standing waves are related to room modes. It is a (surprisingly widespread) internet myth that plywood will treat standing waves. Angled plywood will only help treat comb filtering, nothing more. The room modes will be disgusting in that room not only because it is small, but because the length and width are of the same size. This means they will be reinforcing the same modes, which is a shitty situation. How tall is the ceiling? If it's about 8 feet, then sorry to say, but acoustically that room is nearly unusable.

It is also good to keep in mind that symmetry is important. If the wall to the drummers right is angled, but the one to the left is flat, you're going to have very odd sounding overheads. Just like in Xes's thread, pretty much your only option for a room this small is to make it as dead as possible across the widest frequency range possible with thick absorbers. This still won't get you the same results as recording in a bigger room, but from the sounds of it this isn't possible in your situation.

Also, small room ambiance is rarely pleasing sounding, so I would forget about the room mics for now. If you want, you can "reamp" the drums through the studio monitors and mic the control room, which from your drawing looks at least somewhat better acoustically than the drum room (unless the width is double the length).

 

[onetruth]

Hi Wisheraser, thankyou very much for your advice. i'm glad you've pointed out my misunderstanding of plywood treating standing waves.....i was about to head to a DIY store to pickup some wood so you've saved me some time and money there! thanks!

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that the ceiling is around 8feet. I had a feeling that the room size was pretty bad for a drum room.

So if I was to try and make the room as dead as possible as per your suggestion....would I need to fit some acoustic foam onto the walls? And if so, would something like this do the trick?
http://www.xlprosystems.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=491

Ok cool, i'll forget the room mics. maybe I should just re-trigger the whole drum kit when it comes to mixing? and send all the triggered drums to a room verb channel to create some sort of virtual room mics?

 

[Wisheraser]

No prob. Probably the best way to get that place to sound good would be to tear down the interior walls and make a one room mixing/tracking space in a live end-dead end setup, but good luck convincing your friend to do that!

That acoustic foam won't be doing much except eating up the highs and some mid frequencies, which will result in really dull and boomy tracks. Try looking around for insulation suppliers in your area that carry any of the insulation that has been tested over here:

http://bobgolds.com/AbsorptionCoefficients.htm

Pick something that has an absorption coefficient of 1 all the way down to 125 Hz, has a density in the 40-60 kg/m3 range, and is cheap. For example, I used Roxul RHT 40 for the 6" and 4" absorber panels in my home studio.


EDIT: Shit, I just read that you plan on tracking this weekend! Maybe just buy 8 bags of that fluffy pink insulation (something like roxul safe and sound), stack each pair on top of each other, and shove them into the corners (ie: leave it in the bags). It's definitely a quick n' dirty method, but it should help the room sound more balanced.


EDIT2: Actually, is there any way you can postpone tracking for a week or two so you can set the room(s) up properly? Or barring that, simply record somewhere else? You'll probably get much better results tracking in a decent sized room on average gear than you would in a tiny room with expensive gear.

 

[jimwilbourne]

I'm sorry. I'm reading this and for some reason acoustic treatment NEVER makes sense to me.
maybe I'm slow (cuz it took me months to start hearing how a multi-band compressor helps).

I'm gonna take measurements of the studio now I'm working in on sunday. but I've never tracked drums in it and I'm afraid of the results I'm going to get because I KNOW it's not perfectly acoustically treated. the guy who built the studio isn't an trained engineer or and doesn't know a great deal about acoustics (although he did make a really professional small dead room).

is there any way that you guys can talk more about exactly what to do to treat a live room.
everything I read seems to go over my head. I feel like I need someone to spell it out for me.

 

[Wisheraser]

Live rooms are pretty open to interpretation, so there really is no "exact" way to treat one. Specific methods of treatment depend on the size of the room and on its dimensions. In general, the bigger, the better. Larger rooms need proportionally less bass trapping than smaller rooms, but regardless of size, it's almost always a good idea to bass trap as many corners as possible (including the wall-ceiling corners if the room is still emphasizing certain bass frequencies). This will help the room sound much tighter.

The main concern with really big live rooms is controlling the amount of echo in the room. This is called the RT60, which is a measurement of the amount of time it takes for the initial sound to dissipate by 60dB. For example, the amount of time it takes for a single hand clap to decay. In general, you want your RT60 to be about 0.6-1.0 seconds across the frequency spectrum (especially in the mid range) and have very little time difference between neighbouring frequency ranges.

This is probably getting a bit confusing, so I'll simplify. As a rule of thumb, you should never let untreated surfaces face each other. Some combination of diffusion and absorption would be great, but you can get by with just absorption. One simple way to do this is to build some broadband absorber panels and then hang them on all the walls, alternating between hanging a panel and having an equivalent amount of bare wall, then do the opposite on the wall it faces. Like this:

Panel space panel space panel space
space panel space panel space panel

If you can throw some type of diffusors between the panels instead of empty spaces (Polys, QRDs, PRDs, whatever), the room will sound even more even (and more professional) regardless of where you're standing.

But like I said, these are just generalities. And yeah, this acoustics stuff is confusing as all fuck as you get deeper into it. I've been studying it pretty intensely for over a year now while planning out my home studio treatment and there is still loads of stuff that goes WAY over my head. Just keep at it. It'll make sense soon enough.

 

[jimwilbourne]

so is it a better idea hire someone who knows exactly how to treat a room?
or is "simple" treatment like using absorption panels going to go a really long way in making a good controlled room?

also, should I be striving to make the room have character?
or should I be shooting for more of a dead low reflection kinda thing?
and if I go the route of the first, how do you go about making a live room with pleasing character?
is that close to impossible in a small/medium sized room?

sorry... lots of questions I have yet to find answers to without taking some classes haha.

 

[visceral]

I record drums in a similar sized room only my ceilings are 7ft. Sonar's audiosnap is my best friend. No matter what I try I always end up using the audio transients to trigger midi. Samples would probably be your best friend and they can sound very realistic.

 

[jimwilbourne]

I record drums in a similar sized room only my ceilings are 7ft. Sonar's audiosnap is my best friend. No matter what I try I always end up using the audio transients to trigger midi. Samples would probably be your best friend and they can sound very realistic.

so if I'm in a similar room, should I just screw the OH tracks and reconstruct them with samples like I already usually do?

that's what you're saying, no?

granted, I'll try to work with them to see if they're usable.
I'm drum tracking next weekend, so I don't have time to treat the room further or tell the owner to purchase what's needed.
I'm kinda nervous about this new space.

 

[Wisheraser]

Have you heard drum tracks that he's recorded in there before? Maybe the room is good enough as is.

 

[B36arin]

If you decide that you're going to sample everything before you start recording you should just do it with an electronic kit. It will save you soo many hours. But like Wisheraser said, have you any drum tracks coming from the studio? Rooms can be strange, even it's not perfect in theory it does not always mean that the drums will sound really bad recorded.

 

[jimwilbourne]

I've heard some of his stuff.
but like I described. he's not a very good engineer.
at least not good at making things fit into a mix. so it just sounds rather raw, and like most of us here, I'm not that kinda engineer.
but I don't know if he tweeked it out or if he didn't to anything to the kit's sounds or somewhere in between.
if he did tweek it out, I'm in a bit a trouble.
I haven't heard too much that's popped out of the studio either. it's mostly reggae and 70s & 80s style rock/metal.

as for the electronic drumset, there's actually one in the studio. so that may save me some headache in the future.

I'm gonna get to record a bit there today and see what's up with it.

 

[onetruth]

Hey Wisheraser,

Thanks for the advice you gave on putting insulation in the corners of the drum room.....i did, and it definitely helped a lot!! the recording session went really well and the drums came out sounding pretty cool considering it is such a small room. (NB: the room actually has a sloped ceiling and the walls aren't exactly parallel so the dimensions are possibly not as bad as i originally thought!)

i've been mixing the tracks this week and the although the drums sound pretty decent, i have used some samples for the toms and replaced them. the natural toms didn't have much attack (even after I had eq'd and compressed) so apptrigga came to the rescue. the drummer was playing mega fast beats and must have been tickling the toms on drum rolls. the natural snare sound is great so ive kept that pure. blended a kick sample with the natural kick which sounds great too.

i'll post up some samples of the tracks in the rate my mix section soon......i'm having some real problems getting the right bass tone though. I took a DI for the bass and now running it through pod farm to try and get a killer bass tone similar to a band called Breather Resist.......failing miserably so far!! found some tips while searching this forum earlier so guna try some new ideas tonight. my only worry is that the bassist was using a shit bass and i think the DI'd sound isn't as good as it should be. I made him use fresh strings and all that, and the DI box/mic-pre used was all good.....but he's a messy finger player and i'm just not digging the basic DI'd track. maybe some multiband compression will help things before it hits the amp model?

anyways, i'm rambling......thanks for all the advice, it really helped me out! cheers!