Warehouse

I'm guessing that, "record them in a smaller room" is not the answer you're looking for...

The floor may also be something to consider.  If the warehouse has a concrete floor, you'll get a lot of early reflections off of it.  Carpeting will help.  If they can set up the drums as far from a wall as possible, you can minimize some of the damage.  Plexiglass drum shields help to cut high frequencies, but won't help you much with the room sound.  Close micing with unidirectional mics, noise gating, and careful EQing may be your better options

Another concern is having the giant drum sound bleed into vocal and guitar mics.  Unidirectionals will help minimize it.  Placing the drums farther away from the rest of the band may help you get better separation, but may negatively impact the band's performance (or the drummer's performance).

Just my opinions, though.  Others may have better ideas.

moving blankets on the floor and hung up on the walls near them.  you could build some cheap quick frames for moving blankets to place around them.  just 2x4s or 2x6's in a rectangle to stand up near them with moving blankets draped over them (and on the floor under them)

let it ride.

let the room rule.

when they hear it, and they hate it, they'll rent a real room next time.


otherwise, i would suggest palmer pdi-09's on the guitars (that's what i use)

direct for bass

drum replacement software for all the drums.

and all the blankets in the world.

Beagle

Karyn


I don't have moving blankets,  or stationary blankets.

I'll take a couple of duvets if I remember.

aren't those the things that the horses kick up on the track?

That would be divets...  should I try that as well?

Got any figure of 8 mics? you could always use them for OH, pointing the nulls towards the ceiling

Tell them you are going for the led zep drum sound.  ;-)

batsbrew


drum replacement software for all the drums.

If you don't have it, I have drumagog and I can help you (I'll sign an NDA if you wish).

i'd love to hear a 'real world' example of drumagog in play...
this would be a perfect situation to use it on.


but what's the point of recording in a warehouse, if you're not going for the warehouse sound?

what would be cool, would be to record the drums in isolation (get everyone else to play direct somehow, headphone amps, headphones, play along with the drummer but only record the drums)

then, go back and overdub the individual parts.
this way, you could get some real separation, especially if you record the other parts direct, or at least with some sound treatment.......

the drums would sound huge (if not washed out) and the music could be bone dry.

that's what i would do.

that sounds pretty good, 
but for a very basic straight time rock groove- how well would it work for a more finessed drum part?
jazz, or worldbeat? does it work as well for that?
i suppose blending is the best of both worlds, in this case, the 'warehouse' sound would be basically like putting a large hall reverb on a dry drum track, blended with the drumagog, eh?

Hi Karyn.

Well I've been in this situation more times than I want to admit to. LOL! Granted, allowing the room to breathe with the drums can be a good thing...but it can also be a bad thing if you're stuck with the print and it's over-bearing. In today's times we rarely hear a drum kit with the room ambience of a warehouse, so I'd definitely control the room.

For what it's worth, here's what I do in this situation. The first thing I do is lay some carpet down where the drum kit will be set up. I then tack or tape the wall behind the drum kit IF possible. I know, you may not have any walls depending on the warehouse and how it's structured. From there I build an isolation booth around the kit using quilt racks/blanket racks like what you see below.

[link=http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16353441</a>]http://www.amazon.com/b?i...ode=16353441</a>

Being in business over the years has its perks..lol...blanket racks, quilts, anything else you can think of, I got it left over. LOL! But anyway, this little virtual booth of blankets or carpeting can really make a world of difference in controlling the room. Anything that you can put around the drum kit to stop the huge room artifacts will help especially since you are close mic'ing.

The good thing is, Ed has volunteered a great service and that is, Drumagog...which is spectacular and should be in every engineers tool box by default. Yeah Ed, it will work on jazz, World beat and even works live in real time. I actually did a demonstration with it for a client one time creating an entire drum sound using my mouth beat box'ing into a mic and then adding drum samples to what I mouthed. The end result was an absolutely perfect drum kit.

So this is a really great alternative too Karyn in the event you just want a bit more reinforcement or you have some problem areas. If you have problem areas, all you'll need to do is cut the problem clips up tight so that all that is heard are the hits that you would want replaced. If you have a problem with hats Ed, due to how expressive they can be, you can always cut the track up and put the open hats on their own track and just use Drumagog open hat samples there.

But seriously Karyn, keep Drumagog in your thoughts. Just about every studio known to man is using something like it or running midi triggers (D-Drum) on their kits as a safety net. Drumagog will work with midi stuff too although they have always had a problem with it in Sonar only. There are work-arounds for this though. But since you won't be running midi, you won't have a need for that feature. Another form of correction if need be is to use Audio Snap to turn drum beats into midi so that you can use SD3, BFD, Superior, Steven Slate etc....so you have a load of options at your disposal.

I recently did some work for guitar virtuoso Greg Howe to where we used Drumagog all over the album he produced. Anyone knowing of Greg's work knows he always has a fierce drummer on board. It worked like a charm with my own custom samples as well as the samples you can buy for it. If you have lots of bleed, eq the sound to remove as much of the bleed as possible and then gate it. Then run Drumagog on the track and it will only trigger the hits. It's truly an amazing piece of kit. :) I hope this helps...best of luck Karyn. :)

-Danny

I would make the recording softer (lower in volume), trying to imagine that fine point of picking up the instrument in the front but not any other ambient noise of the room. Might be hard to do, but I would make the recording lower in volume and less in volume than having the mics set to loud for the recording.

UbiquitousBubba


I'm guessing that, "record them in a smaller room" is not the answer you're looking for... 

This is the solution. 
 
Chatting to one of the band yesterday it turns out that the warehouse has a small "side office" which we can use and is big enough to setup the drums in.

I'll take a couple of duvets quilts as well,  (just incase I get bored and need a rest)

Karyn

UbiquitousBubba


I'm guessing that, "record them in a smaller room" is not the answer you're looking for... 

This is the solution. 
 
Chatting to one of the band yesterday it turns out that the warehouse has a small "side office" which we can use and is big enough to setup the drums in.

I'll take a couple of duvets quilts as well,  (just incase I get bored and need a rest)

perfect!

RabbitSeason


Well - how did it go?

It was,  errrr,  satisfactory.
 
Could have used more time,  or less songs..
 
I did tracking only,  mics straight to disk.  No EQ,  very basic headphone mix so they could hear each other.
Other than the playback checks at the time I've not even heard any of it myself yet.
 
I'll run up a quick mix of the 3 tracks tonight so they have something they can show off to their friends, then a propper mix in 4 weeks or so when I get back from the Olympics.
 
 
 
The warehouse turned out not to be a warehouse.  Or it would have been a warehouse but they got moved to a nearby office building.   Largish room with carpet and hard walls.  One corner was paneled off to produce a small corner office,  I used that as a drum booth.
 
Could have been better with more time, but good enough on the night.
 
They're talking about a whole CD now....