live vs dead room for guitar recordings

[Star Ark]

i have just turned my living room into a live room and now have a control room live room setup. The live room has high ceilings and also has an open plan kitchen which echos quite a lot. Just wondering if room treatment for the live room is necessary? This is only for loud electric gutars, everything i can do in the control room.

I dont do modern metal, more like tool, anathema, mastadon even.....but ultimately i want to sound like the black album, live but also tight.

cheers

 

[RedDog]

Treat every room. Including the live room. Every room needs treatment if you're recording with it. I'd be alright throwing the cab in the live room and running a line from the head in the control room.

 

[Star Ark]

thanks for the reply. I did a few test recordings and found even with a sm57 close miced i need treatment for any tight riffing. Cleans and ebows recorded with a condesor sounds great though. Now i just need to figure out a treatment system i can pull down so my living room doesnt look like a audio engineering student's dorm room.

 

[Nimvi]

Now i just need to figure out a treatment system i can pull down so my living room doesnt look like a audio engineering student's dorm room.

You say that like it's a bad thing :Smokedev:

 

[Nebulous]

When I had access to the same studio for a while we did some tests in the live room, as it was, well, pretty dead.
We found that having the cab either
- facing the live/ control room window, or
- facing slightly off axis but within a certain vicinity to the window

produced some slightly brighter, more desirable tones.
Completely dead, large rooms can be just as bad for guitars as it would be trying to record in a toilet.

Based on your test with tight riffing, I would say that a localised treatment would be useful. The effectiveness would likely come down to how close to the cab your treatment is.
To refer to your goal tone of the Balck album, they used U-haul blankets to creat a dead area around the cab, though when you look at the photos and footage of this, it's not a tiny cubby house made of blankets around the cab. It was a massive "dead room" created at a distance to the cab to allow some slight reflections to be present and not suck the life out of the tone.

 

[Notuern]

Yeah, putting blankets and stuff on all the hard surfaces around the cab will remove allot of the nasty reflections you're having problems with.. but you'll definitely need more than blankets to solve the issue completely.

 

[Star Ark]

cheers for all the responses. In particular I like the idea of the heavy blankets, I'll give that a go first. Also picked up a milk crate to put the cab on because of the hardwood floors. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but can i not upload photos to this forum, or can I only link the url? I took a few photos and thought that might help me explain the situation a bit better

 

[Nebulous]

Just upload them elsewhere and link them.
A crate would be a good idea for a home set up, since it can allow you to bring the cab off the floor and the mic further away from it too. Just try not to over do it with deadening the floor directly in front of the cab. That's when it can start to suck some of the life out of the tone.

 

[Ermz]

I like dead. Bear in mind that dead only works if you treat the frequency spectrum evenly. This means that building some kind of blanket fort around your amps is only going to make your tone muddy. I've tried this in open, live spaces. I've preferred the open tonality of the amp vs choking it up and having to C4 an extra 3dB in the mix.

 

[guitarguru777]

Im with Ermz, i like dead, but as he stated ,,,,,Bear in mind that dead only works if you treat the frequency spectrum evenly