Real Space Reverb Questions

[bash]

I have access to spaces, lots of them. A concert hall, sound room, drum rooms, small halls, chapels, green room (best damn natural reverb in the green room) and I'm considering utilizing them to fill out a personal recording mix. In particular I'm imagining going into spaces, playing back a pre-recorded dry signal via a powered speaker and capturing the reverbs for later inclusion in the mix. I have a few basic questions. The mics I have are low rent although on occasion I have access to some high-end mics. The type of music is just basic rock, so I envision using this on vox, guitars, piano, snare and whatever else sounds cool. :p

For instance with regard to the concert hall, where would the logical placements be for source and stereo mics? Distance? Would you face them towards the source, toward the side walls or toward the rear of the hall. I realize that depends on the sound one is going for and experimentation will be vigorously exercised. As clean and natural as possible. Similarly, is the source to be best positioned on the stage or in the center of the hall for maximum effect? Again, I understand a few hours of moving things around will likely reveal the answers but I'm hoping to get a few starting marks. And, finally, would a small powered monitor (Mackie MR5 in this example) suffice to produce something worth capturing?

Thanks in advance for any insights.

[RobAnderson]

The placement/choice of mic's is largely a matter of taste and/or what you are trying to accomplish.

If you are looking for only reverberated sound, then you will want to get the speaker in the null of the microphone pattern. I have found that two figure-8's facing the sides of the room about 6 feet apart (half a Hamasaki square) give a very nice natural reverb sound, so long as you are not in a room with exactly parallel flat walls. Even so, do not face them directly to the side, but angle them ever so slightly towards the ceiling.

Otherwise, facing a pair of cardioids away from the speaker will pick up the room sound while rejecting the direct sound from the speaker.

If the space is large enough that you can get into a diffuse field, you can use whatever pattern you like - omni's can be nice in this situation.

It is probably best to keep the mic's relatively far from the walls if you want the reverberation of the room, though with drum room mics, I have often placed microphones in such a way that they capture the reflections off the wall itself, so this can also be interesting. You can also point the speaker at a wall or into a corner for completely reflected sound.

[bash]

Thank you, Rob, that's gives me some layouts I can explore.

[David Spearritt]

Bash, the measurement you need to make is called an Impulse Response. See if you can digest this thread, and then ask some more questions.
Impulse Response Recording in the Field

[bash]

Great information, David, but that's taking me into the deep end of the pool. I'm not an engineer, not do I possess or have access to the necessary tools for a proper professional endeavor. Being just a poor musician I am hoping to cheat my budget and get great natural reverb with as few trade-offs as possible for a vanity project. It would be ideal to IR these places and use as plug-ins, no doubt, but it's beyond my depth.

In my crude way perhaps I'll get something useful or perhaps I'll get crap, no telling til I try, though. Thanks for the education on what would be the correct way to do things.

[mixedupsteve]

What your describing is the way they used to do it at many studios. At Abby Road they had a single speaker on one end and either 1 or 2 omnis near the other end of the echo chambers. They would move the speaker around and point it in different directions in order to get what sounded good. There are alot of people still doing this today often using stairwells, warehouses, you name it. Give it a try.

[Remoteness]

Some good suggestions here.

Hey Bash, that's an awesome way to approach reverb.

Capturing the natural sound of a great sounding room or space is (IMO) second to none.

[Matti]

To make the impulses true stereo record 2 sets of stereo impulses, one having the
source left and the other right.

Matti

[Kees de Visser]

Originally Posted by Remoteness

Capturing the natural sound of a great sounding room or space is (IMO) second to none.

Agreed, provided you can live with the additional noise (traffic, birds etc.). Artificial reverb definitely has an advantage there

[Sheikyearbouti]

Hi Bash,

I've done exactly the same thing with some music of mine. Mainly acoustic instruments. The place was the crypt of an old church. As the recording was done in London I had no other option but to do my experiment at night and to give some good level to the playback as otherwise I had to meet the problem of environmental noises like cars, dogs barking, police sirens...
Despite the difficulties I would say that such approach if done well in a good room can deliver very good results.

I wouldn't recommend you to go just for the impulse response thing. Why? Well, it is always handy to have it as you might need the same verb during the mix. But... by doing only this you lose all the great possibilities which the real space provides. I mean, why using impulse responses of those places and not some others which come with your IR plug-in and presumably are done with better equipment and by more experienced engineers than you? What's your benefit of doing this apart from having original IRs?

On the other hand the real space thing provides more than just reverb. It can give you bits of that real space!

As RobAnderson said you can aim to record the reverb mainly and I agree with the methods he suggests. This can be very useful. But why not to go a bit further?

If you can imagine the desired place of the instruments in your mix you can as well think which them would benefit from adding to them some extra depth and ambience and as well helping yourself to give them the desired place in the mix. I speak about reamping them and recording the dry+wet signal, not just the verb.

Why not to try to record such sounds with a good stereo pair while moving the speaker to the left-right/front-back in an appropriate way for you mix. As well by adjusting the distance/angle between your mics and choosing the right stereo technique you can get different results with wider-narrower and differently sounding stereo image. A pair of omni mics in AB setup would do the job just great. In this way you get the real thing - panned sound with a good natural sounding reverb (or if recorded from closer just some nice ambience) that can add depth to your mix.

It is true that you can't change the amount of verb during the mix so it is quite tricky not to overdo/not get enough of it!

This can be "fixed" by mixing the wet sound with some of the dry one (you might need to delay the wet one if you have some phase problems). As well you have the option to pan the wet signal. I did this not by panning the left and right channels but by while keeping them panned hard left/right I reduced the level of one of them. This avoids any nasty phase issues.

As well think when recording just the verb about the stereo size of it you want to achieve. Putting the mics far apart in a big room will give you not very natural reverb but a huge very stereo more delay/fx like result (which could be great). Using them as a stereo pair near/in the diffuse field can give you a more realistic representation of the human perception of the reverberation of this room.

Hope this helps as I tend to confuse people sometimes
In any case if you have never done something like this you will need a lot of experimentation and I wish you luck with it. i would as well suggest you to read something about stereo recording techniques.

P.S. Does anyone know some good locations suitable for classical/jazz music inside or near London? Thanks.

[bash]

More great suggestions, , that's why I love this board. Sheik, you're reading my mind. I'm hoping after this project to actually experiment with re-amping the electric instruments in some of the rooms to get maximum stereo/real-space placement.

[Sheikyearbouti]

It is a great way to give some life to so many spaceless sounds! I've done it only once but now have lots of ideas how to use this technique for many other projects...

I've uploaded a short sample of rough mix of the project I was talking about.
No artificial reverb of any kind was used for it except some random delay only on the two tracks of the psychedelic acoustic slide guitars. The delay was actually reamped together with the dry sound in the church.

The original dry recording is something which I did a few years ago with some crapy equipment in my previous project studio, errr, bedroom If I remember well the chain was: m-box2, 2x SE4 with cardioid capsules and the SE instrument reflexion filters.

As the track in my opinion has potential recently I wanted to go back to it and finish it (do it all over again). The only problem was that my friend who plays on the recording still has nightmares from the long hours of painstaking work in which we recorded the tremolo rhythm guitars (2x classical & 2x acoustics - each plays only one note of the harmony at a time for about 7 minutes). So I had to save them! And it worked.

My intention is to use only the rhythm parts, the psychedelic slide guitars and maybe the bass. All other solo instrument will be recorded again.
For the reamping i used 2x DPA 4006 on a Jecklin disk into Grace preamps and Grace AD. The speaker used for the playback was Adam A7.