recording drums in small square rooms/room tricks to get a big drum sound.

i am like most people that record at home. i have 1 room that all of my gear is in and it is a square bedroom around 11x12 give or take. i am shure that many of you can relate. i have heard that the worst thing you can have room wise is a room with walls that are parallel like this(for drums) do any of you have any tips for setting up a room like this? mabyee photos of your setup? how about those acoustic foam pieces to glue to the walls?
sorry if this thread shouldnt be here..forgive me.
 
how many mics are you using? If you're stuck with what you've got and this room is it you'll have to experiment with mic placement to see what sound you can get. It dosen't sound like you're going for pro sound so you should be able to get something useable.

If you've got a couple mics use one for the snare, one for the kick and two overheads. From there depending on what you're looking for you'll just have to work with someone and experiment with placement..
 
i use mics on kick, snare.tom1,floor tom than overheads.
i am going for a semi pro sound. i would love to hear from people that are in a similar situation with a small room and what they have done and the resulsts.

is it possable to get a big drum sound in a average size bedroom?
 
I've got exactly the same situation. I'm getting a pretty good drum sound with a set of Pearl Exports. The heads aren't too good and the kit probably needs tuning, but it sounds better than I expected it to. Here's my setup: 2 Behringer ECM8000s overhead, one over the snare-one over the floor tom. SM57 on snare. SM57 inside the kick. Behringer B2 about 2 feet out from the kick placed inside a tunnel made out of a blanket. Running through a mixer. High pass switched in on OHs and snare, off on 2 kicks. Sometimes run the snare through a reverb using the insert. Pan the overheads left and right 9:00 & 3:00, kick mics straight up and snare a little to the left or right of the middle. Stereo signal goes through a Behringer Denoiser via the main output inserts. Sending the stereo mix into the recorder. I haven't really played with the settings much. I think I could probably improve on the sound some but for what I'm doing it sounds good enough. One of the hardest things is to get enough whump on the kick. The wind tunnel helps. I really have no idea if this is how you're supposed to do it; it's just what I do with some success. Good Luck!
 
i am looking more for ways one can take a small room and treat it to make it sound better for drums.or what people have done to better their room sound. i think a lot of people in here would like to hear that too. i know there are more of us recording in bedrooms than we would like to admit that are going for a semi pro sound.
 
Diffusion- diffuse the entire area over the drums, and directly behind it, and maybe even to the sides. Treat any flutter echo with the proper absorption, and maybe toss some bass traps in the room to make sure the botom is big and tight. If you are gonna have the whole band in there, the bass traps are a must. You can never have too much diffusion in a real small room in my opinion. Put it directly over the drums and watch your overhead sound open up some.
Get the room right any you are halfway there.
 
I agree with Tubedude on treating a small room. On a average kit (two rack toms, floor tom, kick & snare) I usually use 7 mics. One in the kick, one on the snare, one between the rack toms, one on the floor tom and one out in front of the kick out about 3'. Then I like to also a sub mix of the drums minus the overheads and the front mic as a stereo pair to a compressor and bring that back to the board and push it up under the drum mix. Sounds big to me.
 
we put wood under the drums in our rehearsal space. If that is a possible option, try it. Sounds much better than carpet on concrete.

David.
 
I agree - diffuse - specifically......

I am with Tubedude on this. Here is specifically what I would do.

totally deaden (textured foam, blankets, whatever you have) the entire wall BEHIND the kit, and make sure you include the corners of that wall.
Let the walls to the sides of the kit stay bare.

If your ceiling is below 10 feet (I am assuming it is) then treat the ceiling area directly above the kit the same way - DEAD.

put the kit on a decently thick rug, with carpet padding under it, only enough so that the the whole kit has rug under it.

Deaden the other two corners of the room (basically use foam or something so you "round out" the angular corners) - go from floor to ceiling with the foam - basically you are "eliminating" a corner by doing this.

If you have good overheads, place them as high above the kit as you can get them. I don't suggest an X-Y stereo setup for this.

I have had good luck with this as long as the drums are decent, and TUNED good, and I have decent mics.

Have Fun and good luck!

T
 
Easy. As you know on your Mackie, there are buttons to assign a channel to the stereo buss or any group of the 8 aux busses. Make your drum mix with the drum tracks/channels assigned to the main buss as you would normally (along with with all the other instruments/tracks) and then what I do is also assign the kick, snare and tom channels to a pair of aux busses too. I route that out to a compressor and step on it pretty hard and bring the back to either a pair of aux returns or preferably two mixer channels if I have a couple open. Push this up under your drum mix you already have going and feel free to tweak to taste. I don't send the overheads to the compressor as when the compressor is working as hard as I set it, it does nasty things to cymbals. I find this works good for me to get a real aggressive, forward drum mix this way.
 
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ok track rat guide me through this one.
1. assign kick, snare ,tom's(or whatever) in a stereo set to bus 1 and 2 (by pressing the 1-2 button on each channel)and have em panned the way i want em.
2. this should bring those signals up on bus faders 1 and 2(not shure what buttons above the bus faders i should press at this point)
3. this is where i am unshure. where do i patch in the comp? submaster inserts 1 and 2? than back into line in on 2 open channels and that should be it right?
thanks!!
 
Find the 8 subgroup outputs (the ones controlled by the 8 sub group faders). This is where you want to feed the compressor from. As I said, then you can bring the compressor back to the mixer either through two mixer channels or a couple of aux returns.
Now this is important, the drums should be assigned to the main stereo output AND the pair of subgroup outs.
 
Now, diffusion and absorption are two different animals. I say you can kill one wall with absorption, diffuse the opposite wall maybe, but I think you should diffuse the area over the drums instead of killing it. Bass traps work wonders sometimes.
 
Trackrat...

Your suggestion sounds very interesting...

Like Maskedman, I also have a mackie 8 bus console. I'm trying to think, however, what the best way to implement your technique would be for me given the fact that I use channel direct outs into my Echol Layla. As a consequence, there is no real "mix" when I'm tracking. The only mix I have is the monitor mix using Mix B.

Would it make more sense to implement this technique at the mixing stage, i.e. in Cubase after I've tracked using VST Plugins? Or, how else do you suggest I track to accomodate the technique?

My typical drum setup is:

Beta 52 - Kick
SM57 - Snare
Sm57 (sometimes Audix D2's) on rack/floor toms
MC012 - OH

Tama Rockstar Custom.

And now that I've got your attention (hopefully), do you think Tubedude's 3 mic setup is ideal when utilizing more than three mics? (Feel free to chime in tubedude :) )

BTW - I have a picture of your 3 mic setup; I'll post it for illustrative purposes tonight....
 
ok track rat im gonna try this as soon as i can and i will get back as to what happened. ps if i wanted to do the same thing with kick and snare only ,couldnt i just feed the comp from the direct outs and bring them back on 2 seperate channels?

as far as difusion and sound treating goes what is wrong with hanging blankets from the wall?
 
If you only want to treat the kick and snare, connect them up through the channel inserts. That's pretty much what they were designed for anyway.
 
ok i just assigned the kick,snare and toms to bus 1-2 than i put that into the 2 mix and i put a comp into #1 and 2 of the bus inserts. than i could do as you said and push the comped signal under the drums to taste. i havent tried doing that before so i will have to play with it. thanks track rat!!!!!!!

as far as comping just the kick and snare through the channel inserts wouldnt i lose the ability to control the amount of comped signal? it would be 100% wet.
i think your way fattens it up best.

thanks again mr track rat
 
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