Recording Live

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peipons

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Hello,

I'm new here. I've been thinking about getting in to recording at home and it looks like by spring I'll be building a garage with a dedicated room for a studio on the second floor. Before we start building, the main question is what size room is necessary to record a band 'live'? I guess the obvious answer would be 'several rooms' in order to eliminate sound bleeding into other microphones. But it seems I've seen a lot of groups (professional groups with 'behind the scenes' type video) that do it all in one room together... seemingly without a lot of isolation.

Mainly, I would be recording solo vibraphone (no isolation necessary... I'm by myself. YES!) but potentially small groups would come to record as well (small jazz bands, chamber ensembles (i.e. string quartet), as well as your standard band (vocalist, guitar, bass, drums... etc.).

Any light shed on these subjects would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jamie
 
hmmmm, pretty much, do a search on room treatment and then if you're gonna track everything in the same room (like a lot of us do) get REEEEEAAAAAALLL familiar with your gate plugin! but seriously, the bigger the untreated room is, the more "live" it will be, i.e. LOTS of reflections because the sound will have more space to travel. that's not always a bad thing though, a tiny room may have very very "boxy" qualities that are soooo undesirable so you're best bet would be to make everything very dead (easier to do in a smaller room i believe) and like i said get familiar with gating and go for it! good luck! :)
 
Thanks for the quick reply...

So get more practical. Obviously, to a certain degree 'bigger is better'. But practically speaking: How small could you potentially go and still get very good results? Could you even fit a small band in an 8 x 6 meter room (plus recording equipment etc.) and get good quality out of it?
 
It's really tough to answer honestly. Might want to think about your starting budget first and then decide what to tackle first. Room treatment is of course very important, but if you have a budget of $300 you wouldn't want to spend all of it on DIY room treatment and then have nothing for mics and other recording gear.

Or do you already have some recording gear?
 
My live room (serves as recording studio, practice room) is 13'X27' with 9' celing, recording gear in a seperate room. I have used it to record several bands "all at once." The largest band was 6 members. My room is fairly well treated (traps, diffusors and clouds) but still there is lots of bleedover, even when things are spread out as much as possible and close miced. Live or all at once recordings are harder for several reasons, the main one being the band has to be really tight, you can't fix a single mistake, everyone has to get their parts right. Everything has to be ballanced to start with. Everyone needs to be able to see and hear everyone else. You wind up with cables run all over the place to get tangled or someone to trip over. You have to pay close attention to the mixer board to bring up solos or fade things in or out (almost impossible if you are playing too.) Of course there are those who want to play at gig volume and expect you to record it without anything clipping or sounding muddy, drummers who insist there is no way to play softer, singers who want to eat the mic, girlfriends or other stragglers who don't know when to be quiet, and plenty of other problems you will quickly discover for yourself. I'm not trying to discourage you, live recordings can sound really good and many bands want to include a live song or two on a demo. There is a lot more work involved in good live recordings than just throwing up a couple of mics and hitting the record button.
 
I guess the general consensus would be that no one room is really big enough to keep a live studio recording more or less 'bleed free' and the best option would be to acoustically treat the room as much as financially possible. Am I on the right track? (no pun intended)
 
A good sounding room is a must. No amount of treatment will completely stop the bleedover. Close micing at low volume will do the most to allow you to keep things on seperate tracks. Placement of the various instruments can allow you to achieve the best sounding "natural stereo" if you use the bleed to balance where sounds occur in the stereo field. It's tricky to get the balance just right but it can be done. Panning instruments hard to one side can help to give some seperation while other mics provide room ambience for the instrument. Another problem you may encounter when using a lot of mics in one room is phasing. I can't advise you on how to avoid phasing other than to experiment with mic placement to minimize this problem. If possible you can put all the band members in one room then place amps in other rooms and mic them on seperate tracks. DI the bass to get it on it's own track. Drums can then be tracked in the main room with the vocals, drum bleed into the vocal mic(s) should sound fairly natural when everything is mixed together. I hope at least some of this helps.
 
Thanks for your help... if I knew how to give reputation points, I'd give them...:D

EDIT: Just figured it out
 
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