My bedroom for vocals :)

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TASCAM MAN

TASCAM MAN

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I took the studio to my bedroom the other day since my bedroom had the best "dry" acoustics in my house and got superb results:D
 

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For the first time ever i did the exact opposite a couple of days back and went out into the hall because my room was too dry! :eek: i was trying to record some handclaps and even with some distance between myself and the mic they just sounded flat and unnatural, even with various reverbs. So i went out into my super "wet" hall way, clapped, and thought "now that sounds like a clap!" so moved the mic into the hall and gave it a go. Best sounding claps i've ever gotten, and they work really well in the mix :thumbs up: (i was worried they'd sound odd as everything else was recorded very dry)

I know it's said a lot here, and i know i shouldn't be so surprised, but i'm always amazed at how much difference a room can make.
 
For the first time ever i did the exact opposite a couple of days back and went out into the hall because my room was too dry! :eek: i was trying to record some handclaps and even with some distance between myself and the mic they just sounded flat and unnatural, even with various reverbs. So i went out into my super "wet" hall way, clapped, and thought "now that sounds like a clap!" so moved the mic into the hall and gave it a go. Best sounding claps i've ever gotten, and they work really well in the mix :thumbs up: (i was worried they'd sound odd as everything else was recorded very dry)

I know it's said a lot here, and i know i shouldn't be so surprised, but i'm always amazed at how much difference a room can make.

No man talk by all means haha that's great to hear that !! I know cause I was looking for a "in your face" type of vocal with no ambience and a kinda natural compression sound so, wound up in my "dry" sounding bedroom. My hallway was my first idea but its dry in my hallway to haha !!!
 
Tbf, after playing around in the hallway i started venturing around the house to see how different rooms sounded. Long story short - hallway/top of stairs (old 1920's red brick terrace with a huge space above the stairs) great for "percussive" percussion (claps, blocks, tambourine), and bathroom great for "jangly" percussion (jingle bells, shakey egg, maracas). Tbh i will probably still do the majority of recording in my music room as everything bar the handclaps sound absolutely fine in there, and i'd much prefer to have a dry, controlled sound i can edit/work with than having to work around an already wet sound, but for somethings the space is exactly what it needs to make it "pop" as it were.
 
Id love to see some pics of your place sometimes? Got any pics already on this site somewhere?
 
Do you know what's really annoying; over the past week i've been taking a lot of photos of mic placements and pedal settings as i'm working on an album for the same band and want to be able to recreate a sound if needs be, but looking through my phone i have only have a couple of photos, and both are from reamping drums to get a create a room mic/real reverb from, but you get the idea ;)

I tried to add them to the post but they're too big so rather than resize them i've just done them as attachments.

EDIT: yay, they kindly resized themselves. Thankyou internet/HR :)
 

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Thanks justsomeguy that looks like a nice place to mic up things and not to mention a real nice looking and probably sounding mic...Neauman??(wrong spelling)
 
Cheers man. Yeah it's a fun old house. Plus the neighbours on one side is a mate of ours who plays drums and has band practices at his house so neither of us minds the odd bit of musical noise, and the other neighbour is cool and assures me he doesn't ever hear any thing.

Ahh man, i wish it was a neumann. It's a £60 Alctron HRM8b ribbon (essentially Apex 205 before being rebranded) with the internal blast filter taken out. It sounds awesome but, for distant micing it needs ALOT of gain and it can get noisy.
 
Cheers man. Yeah it's a fun old house. Plus the neighbours on one side is a mate of ours who plays drums and has band practices at his house so neither of us minds the odd bit of musical noise, and the other neighbour is cool and assures me he doesn't ever hear any thing.

Ahh man, i wish it was a neumann. It's a £60 Alctron HRM8b ribbon (essentially Apex 205 before being rebranded) with the internal blast filter taken out. It sounds awesome but, for distant micing it needs ALOT of gain and it can get noisy.

Still I bet the mic has a lot of character/quality and sentimental value to you for sure!!! :listeningmusic:
 
Do you know what's really annoying; over the past week i've been taking a lot of photos of mic placements and pedal settings as i'm working on an album for the same band and want to be able to recreate a sound if needs be, but looking through my phone i have only have a couple of photos, and both are from reamping drums to get a create a room mic/real reverb from, but you get the idea ;)

I tried to add them to the post but they're too big so rather than resize them i've just done them as attachments.

EDIT: yay, they kindly resized themselves. Thankyou internet/HR :)

gotta respect that, especially the bathroom photo. many other would just put some convolution there and pretend it's fine. im planning to do something similar for the album where drum rooms are unusable, maybe this photo gave me faith. thank you.
 
Still I bet the mic has a lot of character/quality and sentimental value to you for sure!!! :listeningmusic:

Tbh it's the first ribbon mic i ever bought and the first mic i ever modded so it's very high on the sentimental value list. Plus, it does sound fan-flippin-tastic. Really deep and tight low end and ultra smooth high end. It's not great for everything, but it's one of those mics that when it's right, it's absolutely perfect! I used it stock for about a year and loved the sound but had always planned on modding it as there's so many detailed online articles about how to do it, but because it was my first time doing anything like this i decided to do the simplest mod that i could reverse if i didn't like it. I roped in a mate who's better at this kind of thing in to give me a hand (and by that i mean he was mainly there to offer suggestions/advice/troubleshoot/not panic if i did) and after a very scary 30 mins of working around a very delicate ribbon we gave it a go and the result was awesome. If you've not got a ribbon mic in your collection, the Apex 205 is a really nice first step into the world of ribbons :)

gotta respect that, especially the bathroom photo. many other would just put some convolution there and pretend it's fine. im planning to do something similar for the album where drum rooms are unusable, maybe this photo gave me faith. thank you.

Cheers man :) Tbf i use Altiverb for all my main reverbs and probably 90% of the time it's fine (and if altiverb isn't working i use my old Alesis Microverb I. Sometimes less choice just makes things easier) but i really wanted that overly smashed room mic sound and found that compressing convolution reverbs didn't have the same vibe as a "real" room mic so i took an old school approach of playing the drums back through a speaker into my bathroom and recording the results. I EQ'd and compressed on the way in mainly so i could get the exact sound i wanted at source (and i love the way the FMR RNC pumps when you push it). The bathroom works really well for a nice gritty, "spitty" drum room sound and the bottom of the stairs is just a bit softer sounding.

lol, i just remembered that when i was student i recorded some acoustic guitar in our kitchen as we had this old cooker with the grill above and the metal plate between the cooker and grill had this awesome, super bright plate sound to it. It didn't come out too well as i was recording with nothing but a Shure PG58 via some adaptors straight into the inbuilt mic in on the soundcard on my old-as-hell PC and the noise was....well.... it was soon after that that i moved on up to an audio interface and proper mic preamps, but the sound in the room was cool.

It's really fun just experimenting and seeing how different things sound in different spaces, and i would encourage anyone to give it a go if you can. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it really doesn't work (my bedroom, living room, and kitchen all sounded dreadful) but even finding a couple of cool spots has been worth the fannying. Again, i will probably still just use my music room for the vast majority of stuff but it's always nice to have options :thumbs up:
 
I've got to try that.

I always record in the same room then add the same reverb. I'm gonna try different rooms to see how they sound with their natural reverb.

Thank guys. :)
 
I've got to try that.

I always record in the same room then add the same reverb. I'm gonna try different rooms to see how they sound with their natural reverb.

Thank guys. :)

sometimes depending how many TKS you have for vocals you may want to place 1 mic in the room (if its a bright/loud room) and then use a 2nd mic right in front of you (with pop filter) and then at the end of your performance listen back to the 2 different TKS and play with the blend of the 2 until your liking ;)
 
Oh wow that's an interesting mixer you have there. How much does something like that run for? I've been all digital for the past 5 years, but I got really interested in these after working at my school's radio station.
 
Oh wow that's an interesting mixer you have there. How much does something like that run for? I've been all digital for the past 5 years, but I got really interested in these after working at my school's radio station.

Well its not just a mixer but a "stand alone" 24TK digital recorder/mixer/effects/pre-amps all in one that cant be beat in my opinion. Its a Tascam 2488 NEO which are discontinued now for (not very long) and they are easy to be had on e-bay at unbelievable prices since so many people works with DAW's (totally computer software recording) so.....if you like the way it looks then just wait until you HEAR it !!! :listeningmusic:
 
Well its not just a mixer but a "stand alone" 24TK digital recorder/mixer/effects/pre-amps all in one that cant be beat in my opinion. Its a Tascam 2488 NEO which are discontinued now for (not very long) and they are easy to be had on e-bay at unbelievable prices since so many people works with DAW's (totally computer software recording) so.....if you like the way it looks then just wait until you HEAR it !!! :listeningmusic:

With the USB connection, is it possible to take the tracks an import it to a computer? As you stated, this could make good porta-studio for live recording.

Just looked it up and yes you can, FAT 16 and 32 format. Might look in to picking one up to enhance my options.
 
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