Dead or Live room??

[YooDooRight]

Hi,

Big fan of 60's recording here (particulary the sounds of Chess/Decca/Motown etc) and am about to start work on my bands debut album but need help with one issue:

Dead room or Live room??

We have a number of different rooms available to us but can't figure out wether these bands used dead or live rooms. We are aiming to record mainly live bar the vocals and want to achieve a really bright and punchy 60's kinda sound. The drums are particularly important here and i can only explain that we're after that bright aggressive (fat tape compressed) snare sound that sounds like a snare(!) and not a cardboard box. We favour a simple mic up, 1 kick and 1 or 2 valve mic overheads.

Can anyone help?!

Thanks.

YDR.

 

[Ethan Winer]

> Big fan of 60's recording ... Dead room or Live room?? <

Understand that many/most of the great old recordings were made in large rooms, not a room the size you'll find in a home. Even the original Motown studio in a house had the upper level taken out to make the ceiling twice as high as usual. So unless you have a large room at your disposal, the answer is Mostly Dead.

--Ethan

 

[NL5]

> Big fan of 60's recording ... Dead room or Live room?? <

Understand that many/most of the great old recordings were made in large rooms, not a room the size you'll find in a home. Even the original Motown studio in a house had the upper level taken out to make the ceiling twice as high as usual. So unless you have a large room at your disposal, the answer is Mostly Dead.

--Ethan

How big is big????

 

[giraffe]

How big is big????

think school gym.

 

[bigj]

DAMN!!! That's Big!

 

[giraffe]

not all of them mind you, but some of them.

 

[NL5]

not all of them mind you, but some of them.

I am not talking about the biggest - just when is it big enough (approx) that a really live sound would work well?

 

[LeeRosario]

I would agree mostly with a dead room, but with a catch 22.


The problem in the 80s was that alot of material went the complete opposite route from the 70s. They went to sterile rooms. Somehow that created dry recordings that couldn't be brought back to life properly. Hence the "80s" sound. Even with reverb and FX added, you could still feel this uncomfortable sterile coating over a song tracked in a dry room.


So in the 90s forward, it's been eased up upon with slightly livelier rooms. However, you can't beat the sound of a concert hall, so the live and large combination sounds pretty good. Live and small maybe not so much.


But also, you have to consider the micing technique. I understand that 60s and 70s sound came about from direct in recording and mic sources from internal places. In combination with ambient micing and all that jazz.

For example, mics on the inside of your toms help give that dead 60s rock tom sound. Not to mention uncomfortable amounts of duct tape.

 

[Ethan Winer]

> when is it big enough (approx) that a really live sound would work well? <

There's no one right answer. And you can get some useable liveness even in a very small room with a reflective floor and everything else covered with absorption.

A good rule of thumb is when every room surface, including the ceiling (but not the floor) is 10 feet away or farther from both the performer and all microphones. That qualifies as large enough to think in terms of a live sound.

--Ethan

 

[Fletcher]

In terms of getting the "60's sound" you'll need a hell of a lot more than just a big room. The room at Chess wasn't all that big, the room at Sun wasn't all that big... but they were running through very high headroom, exceptionally well built equipment either direct to disk or direct to 1/4" mono tape, and eventually 1" or 1/2" 4-track.

The Beatles were running to 1" Studer J-37 4-track machines through EMI custom built consoles [that used TAB tube amplifiers]. The microphone collections employed at the time were [to say the least] "cost prohibitive" to todays home recordist.

The best you can do with modern technology is to write and arrange your material in a "60's" kinda way... then find some seriously good players!! They didn't have Pro-sTools back in the day [hell, they didn't have overdubs in a lot of cases!!] so the musicians actually had to play the stuff right.

Once you have the writing, arranging and performance down you're 85% of the way there... the last 15% will be in the audio textures you create with the sonic capture and processing [things didn't have as much treble as they have today... probably because they weren't in the middle of the "Chinese Microphone Brightness Wars"].

Best of luck with it.