home performance vs studio sound?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wyatt W
  • Start date Start date
W

Wyatt W

New member
Hey guys. I'm relatively new to home recording. I'm recording all my instruments either through midi or direct line-in. The only thing I'm tracking live at home is vocals. I bought an SM7b and I am using the Roland UA-55 Quad-Capture and the Cloudlifter to give the sm7 the gain it needs. Here's my question:

The room I'm recording in is not treated (11 x 9 x 9h) and I don't have any money left to treat it. I'm mixing through a pair of nice headphones, which I know is not ideal, but I don't have the cash for a decent set of monitors right now. My concern is not so much mixing as tracking. I chose the sm7b because my understanding is that it will work well in an untreated room vs a condenser, but how well? How much noise will I pick up that I can't hear until the final master and it's too late?

My only other option is to pay to go to a large studio, track the vocals and bring the tracks home to stitch and mix them myself. However, those hours can add up financially, and I'm not sure I'd get as good of a performance. If I sound like sh** the day I go in to the studio, oh well. Where as recording vocals at home, I can take my time, wait for the right day, etc.

So how much impact will an untreated room have on an SM7b in a final mix? I'll be sending it off to have it mastered. Will the average listener be able to tell? Is the performance, at this stage, much more important, or will the sound be vastly different? I feel like I should always go for the better performance, but not if my recordings won't be decent.

By the way, I will be hanging a duvet behind me while I sing, so there's a little control, but not much.

Sorry for the long post, any thoughts?
 
As long as you are right up on the Mic, the room will have almost no effect. that is one of the beauties of that Mic.
 
Hi,
It all depends on what you mean by noise.
If your neighbours are partying or you've got loud ass fluorescent tubes or fans, you might want to take a look at that.

If you're talking about ambient reflections and that kind of thing, don't worry too much.
Get right up on that mic (as said) and you shouldn't have too much of a problem.

It's not that the 7b (or any dynamic) is better at rejecting background noise than any other mic,
it's the fact that you can get much closer to most dynamic mics than you can with condensers, therefore increasing the source to ambience ratio.

I've said before, if you talk to a guy at ten feet in a cathedral it'll echo.
If you whisper in his ear in the cathedral he'll hear you just as well, but it won't echo.


Accumulative noise is the real killer. A quiet fan isn't much of an issue on a vocal track, but if there are ten instruments and a handful of vocals, you suddenly have about 15 fans. No good. Deal with anything that's consistent. Hums, buzzes, whirrs....

If you're just tracking vocals, don't worry too much.
Regarding ambience, record, listen, change position, record, listen change position. That's the key.

I record all my vocals in a pretty bare bedroom and there's no part of me that feels I should pay for a studio space.
 
A way to help gauge how much impact the background level is having is to listen carefully with the track at it's mixed/eq'd/compressed level in spots in between (where there's no singing in this case) -mute, un-mute..

That's not the same as looking at the room tones/freq resonances and such that may be impacting the singing directly, but they're probably pretty closely related.

I'd go through this thought process on 'live mixes for example where there's lots of it around from the diff mics. 'Clean it up? -- or not. and use it for glue', 'ambient -those sometimes nice space'n time options :D
 
One of the raison d'etre's of home recording is to be able to record at your own leisure in the comfort of your own home with drinks and food and telly on tap and the luxury of many takes on a frustrating day and no pressure of time constraint and cost of studio hire.
To that end, developers have gone to the ends of the earth to bring people like you and I gear at cheap to expensive levels so we can pursue our hobby/dreams. On top of that, there exist ways of treating rooms and minimizing unwelcome intrusions like electrical hums, neighbour noise, windy days etc.
Truth be told, it's unlikely you'll hear disturbing noise later if it's inaudible to you once all your vocals and instruments are at a good level and noiseless. Quiet moments can be problematic but that's countered by getting it right at source. And that gets better as you go.
Sometimes, I like the influence of the room. I did a spoken word part the other week, using my Zoom H1 as the mic, rigged up on the shower in the bathroom with the screen closed. Man, it was bright. But if I ever require those sort of sounds, I'll use them. Sometimes, embrace the lopsided quality of the room, rather like engineers began to multi mic drums and embrace the bleed.
But only sometimes.
 
Thanks!

Thanks everybody for your input. I think I'm going to take your suggestions and try to treat the room the best I can with what I have. I think I'll get a better performance, in the end, from doing the vocals at home. It'll all be a learning experience!
 
You can buy movers packing blankets at a place like Harbor Freight or rent them from U-Haul, to create a makeshift vocal booth. Sleeping bags will work for this also.

I have a free-standing folding aluminum frame that makes a triangle shape, which i drape the blankets over. The guitar player in my brother's band uses PVC pipe suspended by wire from the drop ceiling of his recording space, and used curtain hooks to suspend the packing blankets like drapes from the overhead PVC.

Using movers packing blankets or sleeping bags to create a make-shift vocal booth is not a substitute for a treated room, but gives better vocal takes than otherwise using an untreated small room with parallel walls and a low ceiling.

I also completely lined the walls and ceiling of a small closet (about 6'X6'X9' high) with three layers of bubble wrap at a previous home studio I had, and used it for recording vocals and acoustic guitars with satisfactory results. But it got warm in there fast with no AC.
 
Where did you find the free-standing folding aluminum frame? I've been looking for something like that - something like a T-Bar lighting stand where the arms will swivel into a triangle shape. Can't find anything...
 
Wyatt W said:
Where did you find the free-standing folding aluminum frame? I've been looking for something like that - something like a T-Bar lighting stand where the arms will swivel into a triangle shape. Can't find anything...
Click to expand...

My mom and pop worked in Ren festivals for years, now retired. He was a metal sculptor. The free-standing stands which they used for hanging small merchandise were in three hinged sections, each section about 4' X 7". Large enough to form a small vocal booth, yet light enough to carry with one hand. They are made of about 1.5" aluminum tubing, with ~ 3/4" aluminum mesh from which they hung the hooks to display their stuff.

It folds up to 4' X 7' X 6", sets up in about a minute, and presto; instant vocal or guitar booth when draped with sleeping bags or packing blankets.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top