Ide'as for artificial drum-rooms?

[Daniel Comport]

Start with a dead room /dry room makes a huge difference - you want control over ER and tails - dampend / dead makes this a much easier task

[Marcocet]

Actually, I always found it to be the oposite. Get the best room sound you can from the space you're in, then expand on it. If the room itself has some weird modal properties that are difficult to get rid of then I'd dry it up all the way, but it almost seems counterintuitive to go all the way in one direction just to end up in the oposite one. If your sound is completely dry, then you need to add a LOT of fake room. If it's almost there you'll only need to blend in a little, it will be far less noticeable.

Since we're in High End I'll go ahead and say the Bricasti M7 will pretty much kill that job. It's the best tool I've found for faking a room by far. Another good trick is just taking a single room mic (lets not let phase become too much of an issue here), darkening it up a bit and then limiting the living hell out of it to pull as much of the room up as possible. Also, think a lot about directionality and eq when you're setting up a mic. While a nice, bright, close cymbal sound may work well on its own, it's not going to give the listener much of an idea of space. Maybe turn down the treble on everything that's not the focus of the kit (usually kick and snare. Yes kick drums need treble.). Throw a little reverb on what you've got and you can get a pretty damn convincing room sound happening.

[jac]

Altiverb is really good on working on rooms/spaces. Depending on the materials i like to make a submix of the program in order to get a live vibe of the band playing together in the same space.

[AllBread]

I just dropped the coin on a Bricasti M7 for exactly ths use and it's really blowing me away. It plops that dum set right in to any kind of room that you want and adjusting the reverb amount is like walking out into the room and pulling the room mics further fom the kit.

[Drumsound]

Originally Posted by Marcocet

Actually, I always found it to be the oposite. Get the best room sound you can from the space you're in, then expand on it. If the room itself has some weird modal properties that are difficult to get rid of then I'd dry it up all the way, but it almost seems counterintuitive to go all the way in one direction just to end up in the oposite one. If your sound is completely dry, then you need to add a LOT of fake room. If it's almost there you'll only need to blend in a little, it will be far less noticeable.

This is really true. If there actually is room sound in addition/alongside artificial reverb the artificial sounds more natural. ALSO you can send the room mics to reverb to "extend" the room or delay them to make the mics seem further away.

[K. Osborne]

I often like the control of a smaller tracking room but really dig the big room sound. I like putting reverb plugs ON the room mic tracks as the first insert so that I can make them sound as though I recorded them that way. I also love squashing room mics to get that lovely rock sound...of course that only really works if the room is big enough to have a real "sound" at all. This is ESSENTIAL for getting that big room sound for me. I just don't understand sending to a verb other than on toms and snare... I love compression after reverb.

Another thing I often do is record a mono room but put a stereo verb on it. That alone can teach you something about balance... It's amazing how sometimes room and kick mic with a well designed reverb can sound finished and polished.

I spend a LOT of time designing my own reverb presets. I don't like a lot of presets in things, I just make them myself.

I really try to visualize the drums as I'm mixing and choosing verbs. Really helps. I start with overheads and sometimes give those a space if they need it. Very subtle usually, just audible on snare and toms really. I'll play with lots of different verbs on the room mics to sort of define the size of the kit first, then build around that.

I'm almost always using altiverb, Oxford reverb, or redline reverb.

[jgimbel]

I've definitely had a lot better luck getting more realistic different room sounds by using IR reverbs more heavily on room mics, as opposed to going heavier with reverb on closer mics. A big part of the sound of a room is not just the sound bouncing back from the walls, but the kit in the room blending together, so having that blended sound of a full kit (a room mic) even in a less-than-perfect or not-perfect-for-the-type-of-music room still makes it a lot easier to convincingly change the room you're hearing the drums "in".

[Faderix]

Here's a clip, I'm using a M7 to support a M/S setup around 8 feet in front of the kit.
There's not much of the original room mic in the dry mix since I wanted some clear differences between the examples.

I'll appreciate all your comments about it.

MW_Drumroom_Dry_Aug_2012.mp3

MW_Drumroom_Aug_2012.mp3