"Re-Roomed" my drum tracks in a huge nice room. Clips inside!

[if6was9]

I tracked the drums for this E.P I was working on in a medium sized room with a very dry, dead sound. We were happy with the drums but the room mics weren't great. We'd access to an old unused church but unfortunately only after the drums were done. We were tracking church organ in there anyway so I figured I'd try "re-rooming" the drums. Play the drums out through a speaker and mic up the resulting room sound. Same as an old studio would use an echo chamber.


Here's the room on another session I did in there.

I used an Ev sx200 Pa speaker with a small powered mixer, it had basic EQ so I played with it for a few minutes to get a nice clear sound. I sent out of my Fireface mix of kick, snare and toms and used the unprocessed drums instead of gated, comped etc... to get a more natural room sound.

I miced it with a spaced pair of Oktava mc012s. Moved them around till I was happy.

I did it on an E.P I was working on last month so got the go ahead from the band to put some clips online. This was for a doom metal band from Limerick, Ireland called No Mans Land. ( Full E.P here http://nomanslandireland.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-monolith-e-p)

Clips
Drums with no room mic https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1547445/Reddit/Drum Room Clips/Drum Room no room.wav

Drums with original room mic
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1547445/Reddit/Drum Room Clips/Drum Room Original .wav

Drums with re roomed track.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1547445/Reddit/Drum Room Clips/Drum Room church.wav

Original room mic solo'd
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1547445/Reddit/Drum Room Clips/Drum Room only original.wav

Re roomed mic solo'd

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1547445/Reddit/Drum Room Clips/Drum Room only church .wav

 

[Mago]

Great thing to do in such a nice place, but honestly it doesn't have the effect it would be cool for I think....I guess you'd may get similar results if you'd just throw some reverb on the original room mics.

I also don't know if a room that huge would be beneficial for most metal drums, but for doom I can imagine it to work pretty nice!

 

[Wisheraser]

Yeah, I don't think re-rooming the close mics sounds very realistic. I'm in a similar situation at the moment, though my plan is to play back the raw original room and the overheads with a subtle low pass. Gotta have that sound of distance in the original signal to have any chance of making it passable as a real room.

 

[nialldoran]

awesome, this is the friary or something right? i saw the live session you did in there on recording ireland on FB, amazing sounding room,

 

[if6was9]

Yeah it's the friary. It's a great place to use. They run a rehearsal place upstairs in some of the smaller rooms. That's where the drums were recorded.

I'd been wanting to try this for a good while and was pretty happy with the results. Very easy to set up and doesn't have to be that loud either to get the desired effect. I think it'll get better with a bit more experimentation, I probably had too much toms in the mix I used.

 

[nialldoran]

out of curiosity ciaran is this for new weedpreist stuff? you worked with them before right?

 

[if6was9]

out of curiosity ciaran is this for new weedpreist stuff? you worked with them before right?

Nope it's for No Man's Land. They're a fairly new band from Limerick, the full E.P is available for free on the bandcamp. http://nomanslandireland.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-monolith-e-p

If you dig stoner/ doom stuff check out Rites. They just put out an E.P that I did with them also. http://ritesgalway.bandcamp.com/

 

[if6was9]

I actually still had the bus I made to send out to the speaker still set up when I brought my stuff home to mix. I tried to emulate the church tracks on that bus with reverb plugins and couldn't get anywhere close.

 

[nialldoran]

Nope it's for No Man's Land. They're a fairly new band from Limerick, the full E.P is available for free on the bandcamp. http://nomanslandireland.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-monolith-e-p

If you dig stoner/ doom stuff check out Rites. They just put out an E.P that I did with them also. http://ritesgalway.bandcamp.com/

yeah heard the rites stuff, brilliant, have to check out no mans land, great amount of doom kicking around on the island these days, not to hijack your thread but i did an album earlier in the year with a doom band from Belfast called nomadics rituals

http://nomadicrituals.bandcamp.com/

re-roomed the vocals through a PA into a 4 floor concrete stairwell, just suits doom so well