Drum room and overheads

[TamaSabian]

No matter how good your overheads are, if the room you´re recording in isn´t isolated, but it has enough furniture, carpets and stuff like that to make it a "better" sounding place, the final result will be a piece of crap. What do you think about it?. How useful is mic placement in order to avoid room weakneses.?
Which one of this mics ( ECM8000 or MXL603) could work well as OH into that kind of room??.

 

[eeldip]

carpet and furniture wont necessarily make a room sound worse.

isolated rooms dont necessarily sound better.

but yea, bad rooms are hard to get around. a real brick wall for a home recordist. no matter how much you upgrade your signal change, a bad room is going to hurt you.

i deal with my bad room by expecting little in the way of a room sound. lots of hypercardiods... the beyer m260 in particular is a good mic to reject room sounds...

basically work around the problem

 

[DJL]

No matter how good your overheads are, if the room you´re recording in isn´t isolated, but it has enough furniture, carpets and stuff like that to make it a "better" sounding place, the final result will be a piece of crap. What do you think about it?. How useful is mic placement in order to avoid room weakneses.?
Which one of this mics ( ECM8000 or MXL603) could work well as OH into that kind of room??.

What are you using for drum overheads now?

The MXL603S (cardioid) would work better than the ECM8000 (omni) in a case like this...... however, if don't acoustically treat the roon your still going to have problems.... so about the best thing you can do until you fix the room is close mic everything.

 

[TamaSabian]

DJL:

Right now I´m using just one MXL990 . I´m looking for some changes in my equipment, a new 1010lt soundcard, and a pair of OH. My budget is low you know, so I have to go step by step.

Thanks for your advice

 

[Gidge]

the 1010lt is $224.10 this week at www.digitalproaudio.com

 

[DJL]

TamaSabian,

Maybe we can come up with some more idea's.... what other mic's do you have........ and tell me about the room, you know like the size of the room, ceiling height, wood or carpet foors, what are the walls made of, where is you drum kit placed in the room (5-pc Tama kit?) and etc, etc?

 

[TamaSabian]

Wow, great price, Gidge, the problem is that I´m in Perú so I couldn´t take that price. A friend of mine will be in Colorado soon he´ll buy it for me.

DJL:

Here´s what I got:

1 SM57
1 PRO 25
1 MXL 990

I´ll take a picture from my room and you will see.

Thanks

Tama

 

[Gidge]

Maybe you can section off a piece of the room, a corner or something, and make a smaller room by hanging blankets and stuff on mic booms all around the kit......

 

[DJL]

I´ll take a picture from my room and you will see.

Ok.

 

[TamaSabian]

This is a draw of my drum room.
As you can see there are 3 walls and a window behind my drumkit. I´ve made some cyberjammin stuff recording drums for 2 or 3 jams, in that occasions I hang two blankets from the ceiling trying to do some kind of "baffle", it reduces the echo. I also put the sofa near to the bass drum, acting like a bass trap (that´s something I read from Tape OP), close the 2 curtains behind me, move my kit a little forward an that´s it.

How do I mic my kit?:

Snare SM57
BD Pro 25
MXL 990 as OH 6 inches above my head
Oohhh I almost forget it.....I try to record at night, when everything is quiet.
Thanks

 

[chessrock]

Move your drums back closer to the sofa. The sofa should absorb some of the bass frequencies. Fill the bookshelves with random objects, or pull your books out to varying depths. The bookshelves could work to your advantage by acting as diffusors.

When funds allow, look for some rigid fiberglass panels -- most industrial insulation suppliers should have some type of it in stock. If not, they may carry mineral wool or rock wool. This is the kind of stuff that can be made in to panels or hung from the ceiling or walls to make your room sound better.

 

[Gidge]

along that wall with the window where the roof meets, hang a few plant hanger hooks so that when you are recording you can hang blankets.....the bookshelves along the side are good........

i guess the sofa bass trap could work.......


"Oohhh I almost forget it.....I try to record at night, when everything is quiet."
neighbors must LOVE you



hey , lets hear some mp3's......

 

[TamaSabian]

Here you could listen to one song from my band called Mamífero (Mammal in english). It´s a rough mix, everything recorded with my SBLive, and a Behringer mixer. I didn´t have a BD mic for that tune, that´s why you barely listen to it.

And this one is a cyberjam, not finished yet. It´s recorded l/r on purpose, that way the "producer" could extract the drums and synced to the rest of the tracks using the basic framework as a guide.

Please have no mercy, that way I will learn more.

 

[TamaSabian]

Oops, I put those plant hanger hooks along the other wall, I thought that the 4 courtains behind me could be enough.

 

[coloradojay]

I'm still a newbie to recording, so this might be a question with an answer that should be obvious to me. I have been lurking in the clinic for a while to see what kind of mixing suggestions people are getting on their recordings for a while.

I listened to the song on the first link, through my headphones here at work (I still don't have my monitors yet anyway). To me the drums sound fairly tight, the kick could have a little more bottom, and the cymbals are a little tinnie (just my personal opinion on some half-decent cans). Can anyone tell me what negative effect the room has on the drums in this particular recording?

I'm not sure that I know what to look for in this regard, but I would have imagined the drums to sound more echoie or reverbie if the room was really playing a factor. The snare sounds pretty dry and tight to me (but what do I know...).

 

[TamaSabian]

That´s what I thought before I came here.
You have to consider that a well tuned drumset could do a lot of difference. I think my entry-level kit sounds pretty decent, it´s a Tama Rockstar DX, all heads are remo, pinstripes on toms, powerstroke 3 on bd, coated ambassador on SD. Tom sizes are what I dislike, 12" 13" y 16" are too big, and make it sound louder. Maybe a fusion kit setup with a 20" bd could sound better in my room.

 

[chessrock]

And one more thing . . .

open the windows if you can. This will allow more of the sound to escape from the room, which is a good thing.

I wouldn't worry about noise from outside -- the drums are loud enough to where that shouldn't be a problem.


Coloradojay, drums are a very low-mid and bass-heavy instrument -- kick and snare reside from 500 hz, generally, all the way down to 40 hz and even some subsonic stuff from the kick.

Lowmid and bass frequencies are very difficult to tame. You can't just hang blankets or put up foam. And they cause all sorts of problems in a room like TamaSabians. The room dimensions and layout come very much in to play, and low ceilings and paralell walls are basically the culprit.

What happens is the higher frequencies from the cymbals are very easily absorbed by whatever blankets, furniture or other absorbant material you might hang, etc. While the bass frequencies (and low-mids), on the other hand, kind of go through any material you put up and just bounce all over the place willy-nilly and make everything sound muddy / tubby / or boxed in. That's kind of an oversimplified way of describing a very complex phenomenon that could otherwise take up chapters worth of explanation or study.

Having large windows is good, because it does give some of those problematic frequencies a place to escape. Very thick, dense insulation panels like corning 703 or mineral wool -- hung from the ceilings or surrounding the kit (perhaps some extra sofas would help out, too) -- can help absorb some of the lower frequencies, also, and make everything sound tighter.

In Tama's case, the fact that he's using a very minimal micing technique and (I'm assuming) close-micing can help minimize some of these effects . . . but it's still one of those things where you never realize just how much better and clearer everything sounds untill you actually make the move and improve those accoustics.

 

[TamaSabian]

I didn´t knew that opening windows could help, poor neighbors. I´ll try that.
Colorado jay, Chessrock is right about the micing technique that I´m using. I only got 3 mics by the moment, I´ll buy a pair of OH and see how everything comes. I imagine that changing my SBlive to a 1010lt will make a big difference.

 

[coloradojay]

Thanks for the reply Chessrock. I guess what I'm wondering is what should I be listening for in a track like this to note that the room is not good, or adding some undesirable sound to the recording. I think the answer is: there isn't enough mic in this configuration, picking up the room to notice it right now, but when overhead condensors are added the room will be an issue. Am I understanding that correctly?

 

[Drummerbones]

In a room with any decent amount of sound absorbing material, I've never had a problem using my Shure SM81's. I've had a bigger problem on a few occasions trying to GET a room sound, as opposed to a clostrophobic drum sound that requires clever reverb etc. I generally mic my cymbals maybe12"- 18" above, pointing outward away from the snare/toms to isolate them and get more seperation. Great sounding cymbals, not much to worry about from the room. That probably wasn't much help with your situation, but I've never had problems doing it this way. Good luck.