dang bathrooms...

[eligit]

i bet i'm not the only amateur who has tried to stick an amp in the bathroom for at least a little isolation.

problem? bathrooms sound like crap! small, tiled..

i've been driving myself crazy trying to eq a mic in the bathroom. i have some pads up on the walls in there trying to cover some of the bad reflections.


finally i got fed up, put on the isolation headphones, brought the amp back into the livingroom/ "control room" ha) w/ wood floors...stuck the r84 back in front of the amp (about a foot off the floor on a padded stool) about 14" back w/ a slight boost at 10k and a little cut at 150....bingo. beauty tone.

this is kind of a bummer because my monitors are sure easier to work with than phones...but what else can i do, the tone in the bathroom is just bad....? and the fidelity of the remote audio hn-7506 pnones is not exactly amazing....so there is some guesswork involved there....r

[wallace]

What other spaces can you put the amp in? Do you have a hallway or a closet nearby? What kind of sound are you trying to get?

[tINY]

Do you have a couch with removable cushions and a matress?

Fill the bathroom with that kind of stuff to kill the reflections. 1/6 by volume should do pretty well.....



-tINY

[cdog]

Try a closet.

[theblue1]

If all you have is the bathroom, try draping the amp with a mover's blanket or other heavily sound absorbent covering. It won't give you the sound of the amp in an open room, obviously, but it may still prove more workable than the naked amp in the reflective bathroom.

[joeq]

Bathrooms are for reverb!

Why knock yourself out trying to make it work for a guitar amp? Find another space for the guitar. The cellar, the attic, the shed, under the stairs.

The van.

Almost anything would be better, right? Or build a box- there are some good threads going on about iso boxes and cabinets and such.


Then set up a send/return to the bathroom for some interesting verb.

[eligit]

i have tried some of this stuff. i live in an apt tho so no basement. the back room is ok but the computer fan gets into everything back there.

the only real bummer is that when i muffle the heck out of the bathroom to kill the nasties and think it sounds "ok" i later compare that with a track recorded in the main room and the one in the larger room sounds 10 times better...

and it's not just a matter of natural reverb, it just sounds "good" as opposed to "ok i guess".

the other issue that i notice especially w/ the aea r-84 is that since it picks up in the back ( this is a lovely thing in the bigger room) it sucks ass in either a dead closet OR a nasty reflection bathroom..

yet another mic specific issue is that since the aea likes a bit of eq the same frequencies that i boost to get the right tone are ALSO sometimes sort of shared by the nasty reflections so i give a little boost around 10k or whatever and "zang". nasty.

. sounds counter-intuitive i know..

anyway thanks for the advice all....

[joeq]

Well, when you have to record with the amp in the bathroom, make sure you also take a clean direct signal. Then some other time you can reamp the guitar from the clean direct, use the best mic or mics, the best preamp and the best room and get it sounding the way you want it.

If you wait until mixdown to do the reamping, you can tweak the amp and the mic position instead of tweaking the EQ. It's fun.

[Jules]

Try tossing a duvet (down filled eiderdown) over it.. & close micing it?

Cut down on the early reflections..

[Jeff16years]

Originally Posted by eligit

problem? bathrooms sound like crap! small, tiled

they often smell like crap also.