dylanger wrote:I've been playing around with this a lot lately. I was lucky enough to get to experiment a little in the old Fluid live room and I basically did what I saw Matt and Andrew do. When I tried the same thing in my little basement it didn't work very well for me, its a pretty bad sounding room.
macrae11 wrote:The room certainly does matter, but it's not the be all end all for most types of sounds. For example I was as happy with the drum sounds we got last time at Outreach as I ever have been. Now if we were doing some massive Bonhamesque production it probably wouldn't have worked for that but for anything less than that I'm more than happy with the room. It's certainly not a bad room by any stretch, but quite neutral. Obviously an objectively bad room won't work particularly well but you don't necessarily need a "special" room to get great sounds.
Mathieu Benoit wrote:The room at Outreach is far from sucking. I'm talking about recording rooms the size of a living room with 8' ceilings. In cases like that maybe I'd try a whole different approach. Or maybe I'm give up recording altogether... Hahaha.
Malcolm Boyce wrote:Specifically speaking about drum kit sounds... I really don't adjust mic placement/proximity of close mics based on room size/quality much. Really, the kit and microphones will play a bigger part in that for me. What will change for me in the addition and/or placement of room or distant mics.
This is a limitation I have in my home space that I knew going in would be a challenge for my tastes. I tend to mic OHs higher than many, even on live stages.macrae11 wrote:... so an 8 foot ceiling can be very detrimental and cause all kinds of gross comb filtering/early reflections that lead to less than optimal placements.
Malcolm Boyce wrote:Something that's pretty foreign to me is hearing about spot mics on things like drums in a kit being around a foot away. When did you first see that kind of thing happening Andrew? I used to consider myself pretty liberal with distance from drums until I started hearing what you guys are doing... "Close" mics on drums when I was starting out were about an inch off the head so being a few inches or so away was pretty "distant" by those standards.
Malcolm Boyce wrote:Like most things, context is a big thing for me to consider when micing something. Something as obvious as the difference between micing a snare drum in a kit, or a snare drum all by itself, or a single tambourine, or a tambourine in a drum set. An acoustic guitar, or an acoustic guitar with the player singing as well. With a single mic on a single source, you can take greater liberties with distance than when other mics and sounds are involved.
Something that's pretty foreign to me is hearing about spot mics on things like drums in a kit being around a foot away. When did you first see that kind of thing happening Andrew? I used to consider myself pretty liberal with distance from drums until I started hearing what you guys are doing... "Close" mics on drums when I was starting out were about an inch off the head so being a few inches or so away was pretty "distant" by those standards.
Mathieu Benoit wrote:When the close mics are fairly distant, you really have to pay extra attention on placement, more than usual even. In some cases the close mics may not even sound great on their own but with the combination on different mics everything together sounds amazing.
macrae11 wrote:I always find that when you spend the required time working on placement the individual mics sound better and more like I want the finished product to sound in solo than super close mics. If the bleed is under control I have to do way less corrective work than closer mics. Maybe a tiny bit of expansion and some spice EQ.
Mathieu Benoit wrote:macrae11 wrote:I always find that when you spend the required time working on placement the individual mics sound better and more like I want the finished product to sound in solo than super close mics. If the bleed is under control I have to do way less corrective work than closer mics. Maybe a tiny bit of expansion and some spice EQ.
Agreed but usually the "greatness" comes from the overheads in concert with the close mics. Take the floor tom on the Jaclyn session as an example. On it's own the close mic had the attack covered but the low end wasn't really present until other mics started to come into play.
macrae11 wrote:Actually I've only mixed a couple of songs so far but especially on Storm there's far less overheads than I typically use and there was enough low end on the floor tom that I muted the bottom mic.
Some of my all time favourite drum sounds on record have been toms miced top and bottom. Other than fooling around with it a little, I have never really made use of this practice.Mathieu Benoit wrote:P.S. For those of you playing at home, we routinely place a bottom mic on the floor tom. Crazy. I know.
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