floor/ceiling treatment and drums

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FALKEN

FALKEN

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I've been reading through searches all morning and am a bit confusted on this subject. everything I have read says that you want to treat either the floor or the ceiling, and since its hard to put broadband absorbers on the floor, generally you treat the ceiling and leave the floor bare. ok, sounds good. Only every drummer I've ever known uses a carpet underneath the kit. so then what happens when there is absorption above and carpet beneath??
 
It kills the high end crack of the drums.
Better to leave the floor bare so you get some reflection from the bottom of the snare without sucking the life out of it.

Drummers have gotten used to using carpet really because it keeps from scratching the floor with the kick and hi-hat pedals, while holding the kit from sliding away from you as you play.
Good rubber feet help (on the cymbal stands) eliminate the problems as well as a small rubber backed mat just big enough to set the kick on and the throne to keep it from wandering away.
 
yeah, I use a carpet for those very reasons. :D

I walked around with a snare drum and you are 100% correct!

One other question though. The same line of thinking about the floor/carpet combo says that if you put treatment on the ceiling, then it allows you to use overheads (close to the ceiling) as opposed to a front of kit mic (further from the ceiling). But don't most people use directional mics for overheads? if you had a cardoid mic pointing down at a kit, would the ceiling even come into play?
 
Obviously the closer the mics get to the kit the less the ceiling interferes with cardiod mics, but you still have a lot of sound bouncing around between the parallel surfaces of the floor and ceiling.
The more you can absorb the reflections from above the less comb filtering and smeared imaging you will have because of the bouncing of sound relatively close to the kit.

I dont know why, but I am not getting notified any more when I subscribe to threads, sorry It takes so long to get back.
 
I was having lots of problems micing cymbals, they were harsh sounding and a little overpowering, so I hung a "cloud" over the kit. This really helped to tame the overhead reflections and made recording much easier while improving the overall sound of the kit. If your room is already carpeted (mine is) a couple of sheets of plywood under the drums is an easy and fairly cheap solution, and you can screw a few blocks of wood onto the plywood to prevent the drums from sliding.
 
FALKEN said:
*snip*

One other question though. The same line of thinking about the floor/carpet combo says that if you put treatment on the ceiling, then it allows you to use overheads (close to the ceiling) as opposed to a front of kit mic (further from the ceiling). But don't most people use directional mics for overheads? if you had a cardoid mic pointing down at a kit, would the ceiling even come into play?
Click to expand...

Falken,

Comb filtering is the issue when mics/ears/speakers are close to a surface. The peaks and valleys of different frequencies cancel eachother out in funky ways as you get close to a surface. There is a video on Ethan Winer's site realtraps.com that shows this as he moves a mic and then a speaker nearer and farther a-la grover to a window as the speaker plays pink noise. you can hear the frequency sweep up and down as they move. It's pretty drastic.

Even though the mics are pointing away, there are still peaks and valleys in the frequency response that will result. Evening them out with absorbtion should help.
 
Falken:

You could build a small plywood drum riser, with 2x4 braces under it, then just put down whatever is minimum carpet or other material needed on top to make the drummer feel OK, while leaving as much surface bare as possible. As far as a cloud, I've used 1" fiberclass boards covered with R-19 fiberglass batts and then with cheap bedsheets over the R-19 and taped onto the foil back side of the 1" fiberglass boards to hold everything in place. I made them typically 3x5 feet and screwed them right to my ceiling over the spot where I want to make noise.

Cheers,

Otto
 
My cloud is a 6"X7" woden frame made from 1'X2' board, covered with upholstry materal (I just happened to have this laying around) then a layer of 6' insulation on top of that, then a king size bedsheet ($2 at a yard sale) over the top to enclose the fiberglass. I used eye hooks on the corners and in the celing then used mason's twine to hang it. The total weight is around 15 pounds. I left the twine long enough to be able to adjust the height and angle whenever nessassary. Normally I lower it to around 2 1/2 to 3 ft above the highest cymbal at the front then about a foot lower in the back. I clamp a couple of gooseneck mic holders on either side for my overheads (this is a good way to avoid mic stands in the way and still gets the mics where I need them.) It was a simple project, only an hour or so from start to finish and it made a world of difference (for the better) in the way my room sounds, both for practice and recording.
 
Obi-Wan zenabI said:
Falken,

Comb filtering is the issue when mics/ears/speakers are close to a surface. The peaks and valleys of different frequencies cancel eachother out in funky ways as you get close to a surface. There is a video on Ethan Winer's site realtraps.com that shows this as he moves a mic and then a speaker nearer and farther a-la grover to a window as the speaker plays pink noise. you can hear the frequency sweep up and down as they move. It's pretty drastic.

Even though the mics are pointing away, there are still peaks and valleys in the frequency response that will result. Evening them out with absorbtion should help.
Click to expand...

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense.
 
well, here is what I was thinking for a "cloud". was to get those fiberglass boards, and wrap them in fabric, like standard, right. then get some of that posterboard stuff cut to the same size. you know, the 1/8" posterboard they sell in craft stores. cut it to 2'x4' (same as the fiberglass) and glue it to the back with hot glue or liquid nails (probably right onto the frk paper). Then, when its dry, take like the smallest drops of liquid nails around the edges and just glue it onto the ceiling. when it needs to come off you could probably pry it off around the edges with a flat edge. so whaddaya think?
 
That might work with one exception, try using some sort of spacer to get your cloud/panel off the celing a few inches. The "dead" space above the cloud seems to make a lot of difference. I made mine adjustable and through experimentation found the distance above the drums that works best for me. My cloud works well to cut down on the harshness of cymbals, especialy with drummers who play hard. I get a lot less clipping (sounded almost like some sort of flutter) on those huge cymbal crashes since I installed it.
 
hey we built one 4x4 and hung it last night. I was able to find the studs in the ceiling and put the hooks in that. it has 2" fiberglass and a thin layer of wood on the back, slightly angled forward over the kit. it sounds really, really dead when you play the kit. it still sounds somewhat live out in front of the setup.
 
Dani Pace said:
My cloud is a 6"X7" woden frame made from 1'X2' board, covered with upholstry materal (I just happened to have this laying around) then a layer of 6' insulation on top of that, then a king size bedsheet ($2 at a yard sale) over the top to enclose the fiberglass. I used eye hooks on the corners and in the celing then used mason's twine to hang it. The total weight is around 15 pounds. I left the twine long enough to be able to adjust the height and angle whenever nessassary. Normally I lower it to around 2 1/2 to 3 ft above the highest cymbal at the front then about a foot lower in the back. I clamp a couple of gooseneck mic holders on either side for my overheads (this is a good way to avoid mic stands in the way and still gets the mics where I need them.) It was a simple project, only an hour or so from start to finish and it made a world of difference (for the better) in the way my room sounds, both for practice and recording.
Click to expand...

With all due respect, do you have your inches and feet backwards in this post? Where I come from, "=inch, and '=foot.
 
Thanks Andy, my typo error. Ill try to edit it and correct it. Guess I need to proofread my posts.
 
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