Home Recording - A Good Live Room
14/07/09 01:28 Filed in:
Music
Production
The “Live Room”
This room has to sound as “natural” as possible, so you definitely
want a carpeted floor, and neutral wall material, drywall is good,
with some fort of diffusion type wall treament. If you find that
instruments or sounds with a lot of bass sound overly boomy then
bass traps may come in handy. You can use egg crates for diffusion
and cardboard boxes stuff with foam rubber or insulation and or
shredded paper to make your own bass traps. Please keep in mind
that these items are highly flammable and this is reason enough to
use store bought acoustic treatments as most of them are fire
treated and will not support a flame.
Isolation is the
Key
The main reason for a 2 room setup is
being isolated from the direct sound of the performance as it's
being played. What you are most concerned with is the sound that's
coming through the microphone. This way you can hear any noise or
distortion in the sound as well as beginning to shape what the
final sound of this performance will be. When you are isolated from
direct ambient sounds of a drum kit you can make better decisions
about where to place microphones apply some compression to even out
the volume of the kick and snare drum and generally shape the sound
of the kit as you record these sounds. This is very important for
those operating demo studios where time is money. This also helps
ensure that a great performance won't have to be scrapped because
of a technical problem that results from you not being able to hear
a problem in the first place. This of course is less critical if
you are recording your self or your own band and you have unlimited
time for re-takes. If you are a hired gun recordist you should
always strive for the situation where you are always waiting on the
client, but the client is never waiting on you.
If you only have a one room setup, the best way to compensate is to
develop you own standard way of getting a fairly neutral sound
recorded that you can play with in the mix. It's best to record dry
sounds and use plugins or patch in outboard gear to add effects
afterwards. You may also want to master the art of re-amping your
guitars. This involves recording a plain jane guitar signal into
your recording rig and then routing that signal back out to an
amplifier with a microphone on it. There are also many plugins that
allow you to make great sounds from an un-effected dry direct
guitar. I personally always seem to prefer the sound of an actual
microphone on a real guitar amp!
Tags: Home, Recording, Live, Room