small drum room issues

[Jacob]

Hey guys! loving the forum.

My question is about getting a good drum sound in a terrible enviornment. The issue is my drum room is about 16 x 16 ft with a small hallway on one end. I have treated it pretty heavily all the walls are full of mineral wool, bass traps in all the corners, tons of broadband absorbtion on the walls. I have always heard that in a small room no reflection is good reflection, so it is for the most part a dead room, my question is how do I get the room back in, I don't really have any good convolution reverbs and only plug in stuff otherwise. Any suggestions on technique and gear that will help me better achieve a less boxy boothy sound would really be appreciated.

Oh and my mic setup is

OH: cascade fatthead II spaced pair into GR 500nv
KICK: Audix D6 into sebetron
SNARE: top Heil PR-40 btm SM-57 into sebetron
ROOM: Neumann TLM49 (man I wish I would have taken Mercenary's reccomendation on the AK-47 instead a few years ago) into focusrite
tracked through echo converters

Almost forgot the worst part about the room. ceilings are only 7 ft it's not reflective though it is composed of mineral wool between the joists in the basement.

[Seaneman]

I am more drummer than engineer, but have logged a squazzilion hours in rooms of all sizes on the kit, trying to get good sounds. In small-ish rooms that have been deadened to remove the room itself from the equation, the tuning of the drums themselves becomes paramount. Dead room+dead drums= dead sound. I always try to let things resonate as much as possible to open up the sound. If you get strange overtones, selectively use gel pads near the edges to remove unpleasant frequencies, but try not to over-muffle. Also, placement of overheads goes a long way toward a larger sonic landscape in the end mix. Try a bunch of different placements till the space opens up. I'm not a huge fan of room mics, but I've always had more success with them low to the ground in front of the kick at 8 or ten feet. I too am reverb challenged at my home studio, so I feel you're pain. On a side note, I have been looking hard at picking up a pair of the Fatheads for overheads at my house. Do you have any input on their performance and usefullness? Hope I helped at all.

[Jacob]

Thanks for the reply. When I first bought the fatheads I was a little disappointed as they were very dark and required so much gain that through the sebetron the noise floor was immense, after I got the great rivers, i realized the true potential of these mics, they are killer on a cab paired up with a large dynamic. I have seen some improvement over my NT5's for overheads but obviously am not getting the sound I want still. I have been moving the overheads around alot and am hoping to find something I like.

Oh and I'm not sure how much of an improvement it was, but I got the Lundhal upgrades.

[Zachg]

How did the room sound before you treated the room? Cause a dead room isn't always the best thing, as long as the acoustics are pretty good.

As much as this goes against the "capture it right at source" rule, a good reverb might be helpful in your case to help get some of that room sound back in.

Slightly off topic question, but how to you like the fatheads? I might like to get a set of those in the near future. Also how much gain to they need? thanks,

Zach

[Sandyrb]

The issue is my drum room is about 16 x 16 ft with a small hallway on one end. [...] Ceilings are only 7 ft.

Okay, believe it or not I've had really good drum sounds out of an even smaller room. In my opinion all the advice given here is good; don't kill the reflections, tune the kit really well and so on. These are all great things you can do.

In general I would use Glynn Johns type overheads; one over the drummer's left shoulder and the other one near his right elbow, measured equally from the center of the snare. I found that usually this gave the greatest sense of dimension to the kit. Distance would normally be anywhere between 35 and 50 inches, BTW, but whatever works.

One of the things which really helped me was to always capture at least two tracks of room sound. I would mostly use a cheapo Apex 210 because it sounded dirty and I would slam the snot out of it with an 1176 in "crush" mode. I would stick it as high as I could get it near the ceiling and aim the null point at the kit. I would also do stuff like sticking mics in dustbins and placing them behind the drummer. Basically, whichever sounded the hugest at the time was what I'd go with.

If you're recording to a digital workstation, the following will help. What I would do next (and often still do, despite being in much bigger rooms these days) is to split the room tracks using mono-to-stereo delays. Now, as sound moves approximately a foot a millisecond, you can guesstimate the size you want your room to be or, perhaps more accurately, how far back you want your room mics to sound. So, for example, I'd stick 15ms on the left channel and 25ms on the right. Then I'd pass the resulting track through an MS dematrix so that the left signal acts as the mid/sum and the right acts as the side/difference signal. Finally, pipe this through a stereo reverb, whatever it happens to be, adjusting your mix control however you like. :)

Obviously you have to be kinda careful how this all comes together because it's a lot easier to make things sound like garbage as we all know, :p but it really helped me out when I was working in more limited conditions. There are recordings I made in those days which still sound huge even though I'm now privileged with the luxury of a 2400sqft live room with 15ft ceilings.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any questions. :)

Cheers,

[Jacob]

Hey thanks Sandy, great tips in there. I was using the glynn Johns method before I treated the room, but it wasn't sounding right. I'll have to go back and try it now that I have finished the treatment. Thanks to everyone for the replies.

[JCBitB]

Hey, I also use Fatheads as overheads, and they are great, but it might be the cause of your headache. With the natural high end roll off, they tend to have a deadening effect on a room from the start. They come off sounding nice and muscular that way, but if your room is fairly dead already then I'd bet they'd make it worse. "boxy" sounds about right

I hate to say more gear is the answer, but if you can borrow some pencils, or something that will give you more top, it might fix your problems. Sandyrb's room mic (with the kit in the null) trick might work great too.

I've done Glynn Johns with the fatheads, and if you haven't yet, make a reason! It flatters the snare like you wouldn't believe. Definitely a 'big' but almost 'lumbering' kind of vibe, it's not great for a crisp and fast snap, which is what I have a hunch you're missing. Are you going for a more modern kind of a sound? With the fatheads, "muscular" and "thick" can turn into "dull" and "lifeless" if you aren't careful.

[burnthair donethat]

Then I'd pass the resulting track through an MS dematrix so that the left signal acts as the mid/sum and the right acts as the side/difference signal.

Cheers,

how do you do this, good sir? what routing do you use?

[Sandyrb]

how do you do this, good sir? what routing do you use?

Your basic M/S dematrix is dead easy... Route the mid signal through channel 1, pan it center. Split the side signal between channels 2 & 3, pan them hard left / hard right, but flop the phase of channel 3. Naturally these three channels become part of your stereo mix.

So you have the following: L = M + S and R = M - S

Or in longer terms: Audio Left is the combination of the monaural signal PLUS the difference signal, whilst Audio Right is MINUS the difference signal. Anyway I'm thinking you probably know this bit and I have no wish to talk down to anyone. I have a really good visual illustration of how it works which I'll upload at some point.

See, the way I do it with my room sounds is to take a mono track then split it to dual mono and add a short delay to the right, giving a "phantom" M&S signal to dematrix. Doesn't work all the time, but it's kinda cool when it does. :) Of course, this eclectic practice isn't just limited to drum room sounds. For example, as Zach and I discovered the other week when we did the weird thing with the C720's two capsules, but I digress...

Hope this helps. :)

Cheers,

[pauly]

if your room is 16 ft by 16 ft you may be getting a bump at about 70 hz. i would hire someone to get a reading on the room and find out what your peaks and nulls are. you can go after say a 70 hz bump by building helmholtz traps. that will allow you to target specific frequencies. helmholtz traps also have hard reflective surfaces so your room wont be so dead. a small room can be lively if done correctly.

[Mixwell]

Use Less Microphones -

Don't use overheads or close mikes. Use a Stereo Pickup carefully in the room, [perhaps those under discussion] using your ear to find the most listenable positions for LESS MICROPHONES. Try to find the balance between a livER room, and completely dead one. Don't make it so dead there is NO RING from an instrument that is meant to RING. Reflections hurt, so don't put your figure eight microphones near the low ceiling with the rear lobe facing it. A room microphone is only good when the room sounds cool. We have done "booth" drums with one microphone, and it sounds sick.

[jeffpeff]

My recording room is a converted garage, about 18 x 19 feet, with a dropped drywall ceiling and linoleum (or whatever they call it now) tile floor. Given my requirements and budget when I set up shop in there, I intuitively figured that the best sound in a room like that would be gotten through a combination of absorption and diffusion...And it's worked really well. In the same way you can't overprocess a recording without it sounding shitty somehow, you equally can't overtreat your room without creating all kinds of unintended consequences. I'll never get a 'big' drum sound out of my place, but it's clean and punchy, with enough air around it to allow a drummer to play naturally and sound good.

I don't think there's much mystery to it, really. I've got all the bass trapping I can muster in all the corners (dual sheets of OC 703 standing up in the vertical corners floor to ceiling, and three similarly-constructed clouds straddling the wall/ceiling ones), and then I covered about 2/3 of the wall surfaces with an alternating checkerboard of 2-foot squares of 2" sonex and 2" auralex metrofusors. The rest of the wall surface area is left bare. Then, I made a 4 x 4 cloud, suspended from the (low) ceiling above the drum kit, and fitted it with more diffusor panels.

All that, plus the two rugs, the big fat chair in the back, and the storage unit behind the drum kit full of cubby holes with a curtain on the front (rather than a door), makes for a room that sounds just fine.

Bass trapping is paramount: You've got to treat your corners, especially in a small room. Only then will you really be able to hear what's going on. Betcha it'll sound worlds better if you skip all that deadening, and instead do some controlled treatments here and there, as I've described.

[Aski]

Hey Sandy,

I'd love to see that illustration of how M/S works. I use it all the time and I like it, but explaining it to others can be difficult. Thanks.

[Sandyrb]

Hey Sandy, I'd love to see that illustration of how M/S works.

Odd, I posted a response to this but it didn't appear for some reason. Anyway, I was only saying that I'll dig it out and post it.

Cheers,

[Mixwell]

Odd, I posted a response to this but it didn't appear for some reason. Anyway, I was only saying that I'll dig it out and post it.

Cheers,

It must have been the phase cancellation

[Sandyrb]

It must have been the phase cancellation

Of course! You'd think I'd have known that. :mad:

Anyway please find attached the MS thing, it probably doesn't require any explanation. Hope you guys find it useful. :)

Cheers,

[Mixwell]

We should flip to mono to check

Thanks for posting that Sandy!!

Most excellent info to chew on.