Drum Recording In A Small Room

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TheMaartian
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2017/08/25 15:27:56 (permalink)

Drum Recording In A Small Room

Here's a new video from SOS that I found well worth the time.
 


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    bitflipper
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    Re: Drum Recording In A Small Room 2017/08/25 19:07:25 (permalink)
    There is a documentary, available on DVD via Netflix, called Muscle Shoals that talks about that famous studio's famously tiny drum room. You'd enjoy it, I think.
     
    At the time, the philosophy was to close mic everything and keep it super dry. Quite different from more recent techniques and dedicated drum rooms with high ceilings, reflective surfaces and microphones ten feet in the air. But a lot of great classics were recorded that way (e.g. Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll, the drums sound pretty good in that one) and those lessons are relevant to today's bedroom producers.
     
    As with acoustical instruments in general, including vocals, it basically boils down to: if you don't have a great room, take the room out of the equation. Then you can drag a great drum room into your space through the magic of IRs and convolution.
     
    The only quibble I have with Hugh and Paul's advice is the packing blankets trick. In my experience, packing blankets don't do squat - other than creating the illusion that you're doing something proactive.


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    Voda La Void
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    Re: Drum Recording In A Small Room 2017/08/25 19:47:17 (permalink)
    bitflipper
     
    The only quibble I have with Hugh and Paul's advice is the packing blankets trick. In my experience, packing blankets don't do squat - other than creating the illusion that you're doing something proactive.




    Packing blankets exclusively, or heavy blankets in general?
     
    Heavy blankets bought from the thrift store changed my bedroom studio from a reflective nightmare to a creepy dead space where sound goes to die.  It really was night and day after I hung the blankets.  It was the single most impacting thing I did, next to the EQ and Compression steps.  That, and I opted to put the bass drum mic just inside the shell instead of outside of it.  
     
    But I always wondered if packing blankets would work better...I'm going to guess that's a 'No' from you!  

    Voda La Void...experiments in disturbing frequencies...
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    bitflipper
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    Re: Drum Recording In A Small Room 2017/08/25 22:28:15 (permalink)
    They're too thin to absorb anything below the upper midrange, perhaps 3 KHz and up. Because they absorb those frequencies that are necessary for speech recognition, they do make the room sound unnaturally dead when you speak or sing. But a quick measurement shows that they are essentially transparent to the important frequencies at which your small room resonates, and which comprise the heft of drum sounds.
     
    A heavy duvet (yeh, I didn't know what that word meant either until I started experimenting with acoustic treatments), OTOH, does much more. It's all about density, mass and thickness.
     
    I will say this about packing blankets, though: they at least serve a dual purpose when it comes time to pack your gear into a U-Haul trailer.


    All else is in doubt, so this is the truth I cling to. 

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