Tracking rooms: live/boomy vs. tight/dry

[Brad McGowan]

I currently have my tracking room treated such that there is minimal broadband absorption. The room is 18x21x11 with a concrete floor and drywall walls. There are some DIY mineral wool panels across two of the corners and then some panel bass traps (old RealTraps design) to control some of the low end. Other than that there is a bunch of DIY and commercially available diffusor and reflector type devices that have been placed on the walls to break up reflections and hopefully give the room a more diffuse ambience. I also have a small cloud of Skyline diffusors above the drums.

Playing drums in this room sounds cool and live...and loud. However, playing anything else in this room doesn't necessarily sound so cool. There is a slight boxiness that always seems to accompany electric and acoustic guitars. I'm starting to notice that instruments and vocals recorded in this room have a smeary quality. Vocals lack a little clarity in the midrange. When all this stacks up across the mix, things lack presence and clarity.

So my question is this:

Is it better to have a tracking room that is more acoustically controlled and drier(shorter decay times and less lower mid ringing)?

How would you guys describe the sound of rooms that yielded the easiest to mix tracks?

Would it be better for me to add more absorptive treatment to my tracking room or just build a bunch of a decent gobos?

I hope people like Ethan Winer and Glenn Kuras will chime in here as well. I'd love to get their thoughts on the acoustics of decent sounding and versatile tracking room.

thanks,
Brad

[seaneldon]

with every studio i've built or worked out of, i always tried to find 2 or 3 spots that i absolutely KNEW would be the "drum lair", and i like to record one guitar amp on the other side of that room, bass amp in iso as well as getting a DI signal, and another guitar amp or an organ somewhere if necessary. try and leave the drums in the same place you like them and find other places to keep a little more "dry" if you've got the space to do so.

[Brad McGowan]

Right now the drums live on the far end of the room in front of rear wall, directly underneath the diffusor cloud. There's also 6 Auralex T-Fusors directly behind the drums.

Brad

[stevep]

Brad McGowan .How would you guys describe the sound of rooms that yielded the easiest to mix tracks?

Brite ! , No low end reverb or flutter,

Its always easier to deaden a room than it is to briten it.

So I started with a vary Live, Brite room and can deaden it if i need to

Also a large drum room , that i mostly use for other things than drums......
(They just sound so much better in the live room)

Brad McGowan .There is a slight boxiness that always seems to accompany electric and acoustic guitars. I'm starting to notice that instruments and vocals recorded in this room have a smeary quality. Vocals lack a little clarity in the midrange. When all this stacks up across the mix, things lack presence and clarity.

Bummer......

You might want to deaden the room when you record your vocals, guitars, bass ect.....


Also try and experiment with the room mic placement, to get rid of the box sound....

Cut 75 HZ on the room Mic's ?






steve

[Glenn Kuras]

Originally Posted by Brad McGowan

I currently have my tracking room treated such that there is minimal broadband absorption. The room is 18x21x11 with a concrete floor and drywall walls. There are some DIY mineral wool panels across two of the corners and then some panel bass traps (old RealTraps design) to control some of the low end. Other than that there is a bunch of DIY and commercially available diffusor and reflector type devices that have been placed on the walls to break up reflections and hopefully give the room a more diffuse ambience. I also have a small cloud of Skyline diffusors above the drums.

Playing drums in this room sounds cool and live...and loud. However, playing anything else in this room doesn't necessarily sound so cool. There is a slight boxiness that always seems to accompany electric and acoustic guitars. I'm starting to notice that instruments and vocals recorded in this room have a smeary quality. Vocals lack a little clarity in the midrange. When all this stacks up across the mix, things lack presence and clarity.

So my question is this:

Is it better to have a tracking room that is more acoustically controlled and drier(shorter decay times and less lower mid ringing)?

How would you guys describe the sound of rooms that yielded the easiest to mix tracks?

Would it be better for me to add more absorptive treatment to my tracking room or just build a bunch of a decent gobos?

I hope people like Ethan Winer and Glenn Kuras will chime in here as well. I'd love to get their thoughts on the acoustics of decent sounding and versatile tracking room.

thanks,
Brad

IMO I really believe the more bass trapping in the room the better. I would go with a cloud over the drums to stop any kind of comp filtering you may get off the ceiling. Besides that you just have to keep in mind that side walls are going to reflect sound back into the mics which can cause comb filtering also. Should you keep it more live? Well if you are getting a killer sound with it more live then keep it. If you think you are having problem then I would put more treatment up and see how it sounds. I guess there is a little "playing around" you could go with.

Glenn

[RKrizman]

Glenn,

Lots of good info at you site. Thanks.

I have a question about drywall's bass absorbing properties. If a room is all single-layer drywall, with a peaked ceiling and thus a couple of pretty tall walls, does that take care of a lot of bass trapping? What frequencies does drywall tend to absorb?

I think my room is a little bass-lite, but I can't tell if it's because excessive amounts of reflected bass is causing cancellation (the usual premise behind adding bass traps), or if the drywall is sucking out low energy and in fact I just have less bass.

Thanks,

-R

[Brad McGowan]

Originally Posted by myfipie

IMO I really believe the more bass trapping in the room the better. I would go with a cloud over the drums to stop any kind of comp filtering you may get off the ceiling. Besides that you just have to keep in mind that side walls are going to reflect sound back into the mics which can cause comb filtering also. Should you keep it more live? Well if you are getting a killer sound with it more live then keep it. If you think you are having problem then I would put more treatment up and see how it sounds. I guess there is a little "playing around" you could go with.

Glenn

Well I have the Skyline diffusors directly over the drums. They seem to have improved the clarity of my drum overhead sound (Royer SF12) big time.

I'd like to have a room that's pretty much good to go for 80% of the things I need to record. I don't always have time in the middle of a busy tracking session to try and bring in additional panels or gobos to make the room more dead. Perhaps I should keep the drum side live and the front half more dead. Glenn--maybe I should order some more panels and try some things...

I wonder if I have a drum room mic recording that I could post up for everyone to hear. It would give you a better sense of the room's ambience and then people could give better suggestions on how to change treatments around. I'll see if I can dig up something tonight. I do have a room mic track from a session I did two weeks ago, but it's smashed to hell with a Distressor on nuke.

Steve--you mentioned that a room with little low end reverb and flutter is good. How does one actually achieve that?

thanks,
Brad

[Brad McGowan]

Also Glenn--how many bass traps do you have in your tracking room? How big is the room?

thanks,
Brad

[absrec]

My live room started out just under 300 sq. ft. with a 10 foot ceiling. Not very big, but good enough for me. I started out with some absorption on the walls since an acoustician told me that, what he could figure from my dimensions, I lucked out and didn't have any bass issues. So that was a good thing. I like the way the room sounded then. However, I had to kill it more to record vocals and guitars. Now it's at the point where I wouldn't go any deader. I've even been toying with the idea of adding a cluster of diffusors on one of the walls to try to liven it back up.

So, to answer your question, I would kill it down as much as you can stand it and then use gobos for the rest. You can do some amazing things with compression to make a room sound bigger. People constantly comment on the drums in my mixes. I commonly hear... "that room SOUNDS bigger than it is!".

-Aaron

[drBill]

Are your walls angled or parallel? Parallel walls and ceiling/floors often yeild a "boxy" sound. I just built a 385 sqft room with 12" angled ceilings and made the decision to angle the walls as well - vertically. About 15 degrees or so. Caused a lot of problems for the finish carpenters and drywallers, but yeilded a fantastically live sounding room without a lot of standing waves. I achieved what I wanted with pretty much zero absorbtion treatment other than carpet and strategically placed furniture throughout the room. Drums sound fantastic. Perhaps some of my best drum tracks have been recorded here. I don't have a $100,000 mic locker, but I'm as happy with the tracks I've done here as I am in many of the bigger studios I've worked at in LA. If you haven't angled your walls, have a week of downtime and some cash, you might want to think about adding an internal wall (or walls) that's tilted to your existing walls.

[stevep]

Brad McGowan .Steve--you mentioned that a room with little low end reverb and flutter is good. How does one actually achieve that?

The way i did it was to
Absorb the Low mids and reflect the highs,

another way ........
Diffuse the mids absorb the lows and reflect the highs

What i did when i built the treatment walls for the live room was .......

One layer of 2-4 " of 703 then added cedar wood with no gaps on 3 walls,
On the other walls and bass trap i used no 703 and left small gaps between the cedar so some of the sound would hit the drywall behind the wood.....

What that did was give me allot of low mid to upper mid absorption while reflecting the highs,

The floor is hard wood over concrete,

The ceiling is still drywall but i plan on adding some diffusers .

To deaden the room , (haven't had to yet) I could use carpet on the floor, and if needed could hang moving blankets on the walls.

The moving blankets are cheep and great to have in the studio.


As far as Gobos,.......

i am building some with absorption on one side (6" of 703) and a reflective surface on the other side,

These could be turned around to tune the room.


If you have some lo mid flutter you could try some diffusers for that frequency, big$$$ ..Or set up Gobos with the reflective side out at an angle along your walls.



I used the "room Mic's" (mostly just a talkback mic) on almost every track of the last recording we did and it was over 40 tracks, with no smearing or anything weird.


Its great when at mixdown the lexicons aren't even turned on until the backup vocals come up.


I still have one spot with a small amount of flutter from the ceiling but the diffusers will fix that. (doesn't show up on the room mics)



There must be some way to control the boxiness without spending to much $$$




steve

[stevep]

Heres a link to the treatment of the live room,

Scroll down to the middle of the page to see the treatment wall, and on the next page at the bottom is the drum room treatment wall.


Steve's new Recording Studio from the start

[nathanvacha]

I think I'm posting after a few guys who have much more experience than me...

but I have a suggestion, nonetheless. Or an opinion at least. I would build in a little booth of gobos, or even add a small booth/room to do vocals and some guitars in if you can afford a small amount of space. It doesn't need to be isolated from the rest of the live room if it's already separated from the control room, but just a smaller, drier sectioned off area where you can stick a singer or guitar amp. It's up to you to figure out how to make it vibe-ey, but that way at least you retain the sound of your live room for drums. If you really like that, then it seems a shame to compromise the whole large room if there's another way around it.

[Glenn Kuras]

Originally Posted by Brad McGowan

Also Glenn--how many bass traps do you have in your tracking room? How big is the room?

thanks,
Brad

The room I am using for right now is pretty odd. I think it is 32 x 13. I have loads of bass traps, but move them in and out of the room as I need them. My ceiling is only 8 feet high so we covered it with our GIK 242 panels above the drums. I think with your ceiling height you have, I can see the RPG stuff working pretty well for you.

Order more panels? Sure if you would like give me a call and we can work things out. Hell if nothing else it would be great to hear from you.

Hey on a side note Brad, I think The Cogburns are going to record a few more songs next month. You want to take a shoot at mixing it? We want to have a good demo when we do our tour in the UK in December. Sorry I did not send you any of the tracks from the last CD, it really was not my proudest moments of engineering!! Ha… We did put some of the songs up on My space if you want to take a listen. Thank God John at Massive Mastering was able to make it sound like music. Khaki

Glenn

[Brad McGowan]

Originally Posted by absrec

So, to answer your question, I would kill it down as much as you can stand it and then use gobos for the rest. You can do some amazing things with compression to make a room sound bigger. People constantly comment on the drums in my mixes. I commonly hear... "that room SOUNDS bigger than it is!".

-Aaron

Aaron,

This sounds like a sound approach. I'm tempted to try this...leave my drum area fairly diffuse and then add a bunch of absorption to the rest of the room. You are right about the compression thing--it's not too difficult to really bring out the roominess with a Distressor on Nuke. However, it's rather difficult to remove boxy room tone from your overheads.

Brad

[Brad McGowan]

Originally Posted by stevep

Heres a link to the treatment of the live room,

Scroll down to the middle of the page to see the treatment wall, and on the next page at the bottom is the drum room treatment wall.


Steve's new Recording Studio from the start

Thanks for the info and link Steve. It looks like what you did is basically put 703 on the walls and then cover with wooden slats? Do I have that right? That does make sense for absorbing low-mids and reflecting hights. I've done a slightly similar thing by placing DIY absorber panels and then pinning Auralex Metro-fusors to the face. It's not as a slick as your installation, but it's a much less permanent thing. I'm in a rented space so I really don't want to do much permanent construction. What I probably need to do is just create more absorber/reflector combos like this for my room. That's probably the best use for the Auralex Metro-fusor panels. They don't really diffuse anything, but they do break up flutter echoes and when placed over an absorber they allow more highs to be reflected into the room. I also remember reading somewhere about Andy Hong using vinyl covered absorber panels in his live room to do a similar thing.

Nathan--I think I'm coming to the conclusion that my "awesome" live drum room kind of sucks. Its tone is not something that I want imparted to all my tracks. I do have a second room that is more dead and I often put guitar amps in it. But I think I would probably gain from having a slightly more dead live room with less ringing in the lower mids. I recorded an interesting snare track last summer. I placed the snare outside in the alley behind the studio and had the mic just outside of our roll-up door maybe about 30 feet from the drum. That track sounds crystal clear and has no murkiness to it whatsoever. It actually sticks out in the mix like a sore thumb because it has a totally different acoustic coloration to it (or lack thereof). What this tells me is that the space you record in makes all the difference and over the course of 20-30 tracks can really color your recording in a good or bad way.

Right now my live room sucks and I need to change it.

Glenn--I'll call you so we can discuss my room and your band.

thanks,
Brad

[stevep]

Brad McGowan .Thanks for the info and link Steve. It looks like what you did is basically put 703 on the walls and then cover with wooden slats? Do I have that right?

Yes .


You can save some $ and deaden the room ,,.......Or Use diffusers to keep the live sound,.... maybe more $$$$

When building a room you can never tell what it will sound like until its done.

Have some fun and experiment




Hope it works out





steve

[Scott R. Foster]

Hey Brad:

You got about 4,150 cubic feet which is on the small side for a truly "live" room.

Typically a room this size will benefit from a fairly extensive absorptive treatment [not so much as the ubquitous 1,000 office/control room/ iso booth/mastering suite/guest bedroom] but still a goodly number of sf of treatment would be called for.

Given the 11' of ceiling height.. why not install a commercial grid and tile system. Use high NRC tiles and a mineral fiber batt on top. That'll give you good reach low in the band and you can't beat the Sabin per $ ratio.

This would leave you inventory of absorption panels for corner treatment and the diffusion elements to stave off parallel wall flutter.

Good Luck!

[Brad McGowan]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the tips! I forgot to mention that the ceiling slopes slightly from about 10 feet on one side to about 12 feet on the other. So it's not parallel with the floor. And it already has commercial ceiling tile installed, but not in the manner you would expect. A previous tenant glued it to the sheetrock ceiling. So unfortunately it would be difficult to implement what you are suggesting.

I think what I may try is bringing in bunch of absorber panels from my other room and then covering them in soom way similar to what Steve suggested to maintain high frequency reflections.

thanks,
Brad

[jajjguy]

Originally Posted by RKrizman

I have a question about drywall's bass absorbing properties. If a room is all single-layer drywall, with a peaked ceiling and thus a couple of pretty tall walls, does that take care of a lot of bass trapping? What frequencies does drywall tend to absorb?

Drywall, especially single layer, resonates, creating a very peaky absorption response. If i remember right, it'll absorb most around 125 Hz, which would be a good area to absorb except that it's not like an even low shelf or anything, it's more of a sharp dip. All of this depends on the particulars of your stud spacing and whether you have insulation and so forth. But i would hesitate to consider a simple drywall wall as useful bass trapping.

I have more experience in different rooms as a player than as a mix engineer, but i have to agree with Steve, that i prefer a good amount of reflection in the highs but with no overall reverb tail, especially in the low mids and lows. Maximizes detail and clarity and minimizes mud, very helpful especially for acoustic and ensemble playing.

[Brad McGowan]

Thanks for chiming in.

Brad

[Scott R. Foster]

Brad:

Since you have a few spare panels... an idea you might try is nesting a panel behind a corner mounted panel.

Cut a few of your spares down to 12" wide and mount em across the corner.. then put a 24" panel in front of it. This design works like gang busters.

Good Luck!

[Brad McGowan]

Hi,

This weekend I pulled a bunch of the diffusor/reflector things off the side walls on one half of the room and replaced them with about five 2x2x4" and three 2x4x4" absorber panels, on top of which we pinned 12 Auralex Metrofusors. That side of the room seems to be a bit tighter and focused sounding now. I haven't done any recording tests yet, but just talking, hitting drums and playing acoustic guitar made this evident. The cool thing is that the more diffuse end where the drums typically get recorded still has it's own livelier sound. We'll see how things go this upcoming weekend.

thanks,
Brad

[lucey]

(greeting Brad ... from Scotland ... I'll be back to work by Friday)


In a room your size I'd like to see some corner mid bass/bass trapping, a fully live floor, a diffused to more dead ceiling and diffused walls.

all that should make it bigger and more even. and then you can gobo off an amp or singer (somewhat)

[Brad McGowan]

Hey Brian,

That's kind of what I have to some extent and am trying more to achieve. The rear corners (live side) have corner bass traps. The floor is definitely live. The ceiling is slightly absorptive...mostly in the high frequencies although the Skylines above the drums is the exception of course. The walls were practically 80-90% diffusive/reflective before. The room had a smeary, phasey, honky vibe though that just sucked. So I think the key will be sucking out more of the 200-500 Hz crap while still retaining a lively high end response.

I'll probably order 4-6 GIK traps to help with this.

Enjoy the rest of your honeymoon!

Brad