How do you know if your room sucks?

[Dethska]

So, I've been thinking about how important the room can be in your recording. And that treatment is usually required. But how do you know WHAT KIND of treatment to do where? How do you know how bad the sound is, and how to best situate your equipment to work around any problem areas? Is there a way for an untrained person to do this, or do I need golden ears and a spectrum analyzer? All advice is very much appreciated.

[Eric Best]

The best way that I know of to tell if your room sucks is that your mixes sound very different when you play them on different systems in different rooms. It is possible to mix in a bad room (I did it for years, but thankfully I don't have to do that anymore), you just have to learn the problems with it from experience and adjust.

Eric

[giles117]

Pretty accurate, if your mixes suck outside that room, the room sucks.

Bryan

[Leeking]

Originally posted by giles117
Pretty accurate, if your mixes suck outside that room, the room sucks.

Bryan

riiiiiiiiiiiiight~, put the blame on the room, Mr It-wasn't-me....

[c7sus]

Stand in the center of the room and clap your hands. You may hear short flutter echos. That's the most simple test anyone can do.

Here's a ton of information, and a reverb calculator and other useful stuff to tell you what your room is up to. John's sites will get you going in the right direction.

http://johnlsayers.com/index.html

And this site.

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html

And here's a cool downloadable test-tone generator. Set the generator to sweep mode and listen from where you normallly would, then move back a bit. You listening for peaks and dips at the test frequencies. The 40Hz signal rattles my wall here. Be careful!

http://www.nt-instruments.com/defaul...pLngPageId=276

Good luck.

Craig

[Blue Bear Sound]

Originally posted by giles117
...if your mixes suck outside that room, the room sucks.

...and if your mixes suck while inside the room, it's YOU that sucks!

[Dethska]

Thanks for the help so far guys. But, I'm more interested in recording than mixing right now. Basically, I'm trying to figure out if my drum set is bad, if the mic placement is wrong, or if I'm fighting a crappy room. Probably a mixture of all three. But I'd like to know for certain so I can figure out how to attack this problem. My drum recordings are awful. I just started out, and I'm getting better, but I get frustrated when I can't get even close to the sounds I want.
The links posted are great and I've been to John Sayer's site and SAE many many times. And I understand how a lot of this acoustics stuff works, but I don't know how to tell if I need a bass trap here, or a resonator there, or a diffusor whereever. I can stand in the room and clap and hear the echo, but it's easy to get rid of that. I'll throw up an eggshell mattress pad. No more echo. But, I know that's a bad idea. Because now my room will be muddy because I knocked out the highs but I still have a lot of bass reflections.
I know if I post a blueprint of my room, John or someone could tell me how to make it better. I'm just hoping that I can learn enough to do it myself. Then I'll have that knowledge if I ever decide to move rooms (a bold idea, I know, this learning thing.)
I don't mean to gripe, I just am frustrated because I'm so confused by all this stuff. But in a good way.

[c7sus]

Keep going over John's sites. The stuff will eventually sink in.

Use the reverb calculator. It will show you which frequencies are the modes in your room. Then you can check that reading against what you hear with the Virtual Minirator.

Then, go back to SAE and look at the stuff about low, mid-low, and mid absorbers.

You can use the calculator Ethan posted here a couple weeks a go, too.

You haven't said what the dimensions of your room are, but most likely you're having problems from 250-500Hz, and possibly lower than that.

Bass traps go in the corners because you need the depth to make it effective.

The space in front and to the sides of where you monitor from should be fairly absorbant.

Check out how John has illustrated his live rooms and control rooms. You don't want "dead", you want sonically neautral", or at least more neutral than now.

You can do it. It's really not too difficult once you figure out what the problem frequencies are.

[Tonio]

So do you have a seperate room? One for mixing, and one for live? I'm guessing its one room/combination.

Everyones' suggestions on translating the mix is good. Essentially you need to hear what the heck you're mixing, but you seem more concerned about the sound of the drums themself. That's really hard if you have a combination room, because you need to treat the "live room" for a little ambience to make the drums sound good, but to mix you need a more neutral
enviroment. You may need to find a compromise between the two.


You could incorporate making a/few adjustable absorber/diffusion
panels like the ones at John's site. That way you can make it more abmient for the recording and more absorbent for mixing.

If you have seperate rooms, I'm an idiot and you would have to treat each room accordingly. More confusion sets in..........

T

[toorglick]

You want the po' man's guide to a how a room sounds. Here it is: if a good sounding drum kit sounds like shit on the recording, then your room sounds like shit. If a good sounding drum kit sounds too bright but otherwise okay, your room is too bright. If a good sounding kit sounds okay but always sounds like it's in a room (you know what I mean), then you need to address several things. If it sounds okay but a little mushy, you have to deal with the corners.

This is assuming you know how to record a drum kit with 3 or 4 mics.

If your room sounds like shit, then you really ought to consider moving to a new room, or you will have to do some construction.

If your room sounds bright, figure out where the highs might be reflecting off of and hang some tapestries.

If your room sounds like a room, then you might need to build some temporary walls around the drum kit and/or practice with micing your drum kit.

If your room sounds mushy, put some type of upholstered chairs in the corners. Something that will absorb the bass waves.

Good luck!

[Dethska]

Tonio- right now I'm all in one room, but I have a seperate room I will make my control room, if I ever get some longer cables. But currently, I'd rather learn to mix in a good drum room, than try to record in a good control room. My thinking is that, you can mix "around" a room, but what goes to tape, is pretty much static. Does this make sense?

Toorglick- That's pretty good advice. The sound from the drums is pretty mushy but also has the "room" sound. It's definately not too bright. I've been experimenting with micing styles but want to know if I'm fighting a bad room sound, or if I really am horrible at this.

I guess my goal here is too know exactly what sort of treatment will help me. I'd rather not spend a lot of money builing diffusors and bass traps and such and haphazardly throw them up, only to find that I've just changed the room sound, and not improved it. Thanks so much for the help so far. Keep it coming please.

[Eric Best]

Do your drums sound like cardboard boxes? This is a typical problem. Do a wideband EQ cut around 300hz and see if it helps. If this helps, THIS IS NOT THE SOLUTION, you probably need some low mid absorption in your room. You can make some membrane traps out of R19 fibreglass insulation with the paper facing out of the boxes that will absorb with a center frequency between 250hz and 500hz.

You can build them for about $15 each. Start out by building 4 and see if it helps. Bass traps never hurt either. You rarely need more high end absorption unless you have bad flutter echos.

Eric

[VesuviusJay]

Well so far, I have been getting excellent results with close miking in an untreated room, but I havent done drums or any ambient mic placement. Im sure for both of the above I will have to break down and start foaming crap. :P But I have a reference for cost effective studio foam.

http://www.foambymail.com


Jay

[Ethan Winer]

Jay,

> Well so far, I have been getting excellent results with close miking in an untreated room <

Close-miked recording is one, but when you're making mixing decisions you really need to hear the low frequencies accurately.

--Ethan

[VesuviusJay]

Could you expand on that? I think I am finally at a level of comphortability with mixing in untreated environment. Maybe I am experiencing now something I dont know about. Why should I be concerned about the bass freqencies? Muddiness, or overpowering reverb? Sounds like an interesting new perspective.

[Dethska]

Jay- It seems that "foaming" a room isn't the best way to deal with ambient sounds. That just kills the high end and makes everything muddy. I spent an entire evening last week tearing all my foam down and moving furniture in my "studio." I used the SAE website's drawing of a control room and tried to arrange my room in a similar way. I used two old mattresses in the back corners and stuck a piece of foam up directly behind the mix position. I moved my drums out from the walls and angled them so the front didn't face any perpindicular walls. I also moved my mix station so the speakers faced towards the long end of the room as opposed to the short end.
The sound in the room has improved a LOT!!! I know the mattresses are nowhere near as good as real bass traps, but I think they are knocking out some of the muddiness. I have yet to do any major listening though. Are there any comments on my setup. Is it my imagination that things have improved?

[Ethan Winer]

Jay,

> Could you expand on that? <

I already did:

www.recording.org/users/acoustics

> Why should I be concerned about the bass freqencies? Muddiness, or overpowering reverb? <

Yes, both of those. But even more important, in small rooms anyway, is the severe skewing of the frequency response throughout the entire low end. Variations of 15 or 20 dB are typical, and it's impossible to mix the bass and kick properly when your room has such huge response variations.

--Ethan

[VesuviusJay]

Great Article Ethan! Intersestin subject. Thanks!