Bare Walls or Carpet

  • Thread starter Thread starter moelar2
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moelar2

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I built a room, roughly 11x10X10(h), which I use primarily for drums. The walls are all still bare drywall. I have two rolls of descent carpet, which are currently rolled up against two corners, as diffusers. Whenever I go to record, it sounds good, but I think it can sound better. I read in another thread that it is recommended in smaller rooms to put the overheads behind or in front of the set, as opposed to above.

(i) Basically, my question is this: Should I bother putting the carpet on the Walls? If so, how high, ie., half ways up, all the way up? Also, what walls, ie., front and back, side to side, or all the way around?

I use Sm57 on snare (which I have been pulling back lately to capture hihat, something I don't usually do, but its been sounding better), Beta52 Kick (no complaints), MC012 for overheads, and either samson mics (cheapos, yet good sound) or beta 56's on toms (not satisfied at all - they sound much better, in my limited experience, on guitar cabs).

(ii) My concern is with getting a good sound out of the room through overehead mics.


Thanks in advance.
 
First of all i would like to say, carpet only obsorbs the high frequencies. This is usually a problem that most homerecordest's make when building their studio (i did). Using the wrong obsortion is usually actually worse than not using non at all. Why? The main source of your sound is your room (besides the direct). If you suck out all the highs, but not the lows, you got a real major imbalance. With my experience, this really takes away from the sound of the drums because there is overloading lows reflecting into the mics now. Although the high reflections may cause noticeable phasing problems and unwanted reverb in the recording, it might actually be better than having way too much bass reflecting into the mics.

So my suggestion is to build some sort of bass traps. There are some that are very cheap to make. I have 4 trap cans in my studio which seem to work well, but i have heard their are even cheaper ways of (although maybe not as affective). Or maybe if you want to go and take all the matris's off all of the beds in the house and put those up, you might get pretty good results. But if u cannot tame the lows (or mids even), i would use little obsortion. Maybe cover 2 walls with carpet, but leave the other two blank. This will probably help alot but still leave some highs in the room.


Just basically, dont over do it ;). I guess i probably said a little too much there :D, but im just trying to make sure you dont do something you will regret later.




Darnold
 
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