Tracking room ?

[Ethan Winer]

Seb,

> What kind of room would you choose if you had to track all of these instruments in one room ? <

A large room.

In small rooms you're always near to a reflecting boundary - the walls, floor, and ceiling. And when a sound source (or a microphone) is near to a boundary you get comb filtering, which is like the flanging effect. To my way of thinking, this is the single biggest problem people have trying to record anything in a small room. Especially when using overhead mikes on a drum set, when the ceiling is plain, reflecting sheetrock.

--Ethan

[Dave Martin]

What Ethan said - the larger the better.

Even when doing overdubs, I like the ambiance of the room to be part of the sound.

[hollywood_steve]

Do you think it is necessary to have different room to track in so that there are different "ambiance" for different instruments?

Just the opposite; the main goal on any multitrack recording I do is to make it sound like every instrument was tracked in the same space, and at the same time. I can't imagine a situation where I would want different room sounds in one recording. That's why I'm always confused when folks use a bunch of different reverbs on a song; are they trying to help the listener catch on that the guitar player and the drummer have never met and recorded their parts weeks apart? A single reverb, or a single room are a necessary foundation if you want the end result to sound anything like a band playing together.