Making a room sounding good for drum recording

Hi all. I want to record drumms in a room and I dont know which acoustic treatment and materials I should put in the walls and floor in order to make it good sounding. In my case, outside isolation is not a problem because there are no neightbors and no sound from outside than can be perceptible when you are inside the room. I think the only problem could be the size. Its 2.04 meters high, 4.30meters long and 3.70m width with symetrical structure, so pretty small compared with some examples i saw on the internet. Walls are made from big concrete and currently covered with 5mm cork panels, and floor is made of stoneware tilings currently covered with a thin carpet. Can I do something to make a sutch sized room good sounding specifically for drum recording?. I have arround 1000 Euros to spend. Sorry for my english , I´m from Spain. Thank you very mutch.

Hi mauriel, and Welcome! :) For that size room, probably the best you can do is to take out the carpet on the floor, except for just where the drum kit is set up, treat the ceiling with very thick absorption (for example at least 10 or 15 cm of Owens Corning OC 703), and also some panels of OC-703 on two adjacent side walls, to dampen the acoustic response a bit but without killing it entirely. You might also need a panel diagonally across a couple of the corners, for bass trapping. You can build simple wooden frames for those panels, and cover them with fabric, to make them look good. All of that should cost less than your budget, and will help. However, your ceiling is very, very low, so recording drums is not ever going to sound fantastic in that room. Drums need height and space to sound their best. With a 2 m ceiling, you don't have much space at all for setting you your overhead mics. The thick insulation up there will help with that, as it kills a lot of comb filtering and other reflections and artifacts from above, as well as making the ceiling seem higher acoustically, but it still won't make the room sound like Abbey Road! Even so, it should be a very big improvement on how it sounds now. - Stuart -

New here, so 1st post: Im currently reading up here and have the same goal: Make our room better for drum recording. I have a question on this specific topic here however: You said you wanted to dampen the ceiling and yet say that a high ceiling is good for drums. Can you explain that a little further, cause I find it contradictory. We have a rather high ceiling in our room (2,8m) and would have the space to dampen it, if it makes sense. So now Ill keep on reading. Cheers Timm

Hi Timm. Welcome. Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :)

You said you wanted to dampen the ceiling and yet say that a high ceiling is good for drums.

Right: Mauriel does need to damp the ceiling, heavily, precisely because he does not have a high ceiling. If he did have a high ceiling (for example: 5m or so high), then he would not need much damping at all. For a very low ceiling like his, you do need to damp it so that it seems to be higher than it is, acoustically. If there is plenty of absorption on it, then there won't be any high-frequency reflections at all coming back from the ceiling, very much reduced reflections in the mid range, and some from the low end. In effect, a heavily damped very low ceiling seems to be much further away, acoustically. Overhead mics with a low ceiling sound bad, due all the comb filtering, SBIR and other effects caused by the ceiling. Damping the ceiling greatly reduces those artifacts. With a high ceiling, those artifacts aren't there anyway (or rather, they are there, but are not occurring in the frequency ranges that matter), they are delayed in time as well, and also reduced in intensity, due to the distance.

We have a rather high ceiling in our room (2,8m)

That's slightly higher than normal, but still not what I'd call "high". For drums, a high ceiling would be at least twice as high.

would have the space to dampen it, if it makes sense.

It probably would make sense, depending on how the rest of the room is treated, how big it is, the style of drumming, and your goals: What type of sound do you want your drum room to have? That's key. If you want a dry sound with close mic'ing so you can add effects later, cleanly, then that's one thing: If you have a good-sized room and want a "real" live sound with plenty of room ambiance in the mix, then that's another thing. I'd suggest that you start your own thread on the forum, post some photos of your room, and the dimensions, and a description of what you want to do, how you want it to sound, how it sounds now, etc., then we can help you figure out what's the best way to treat the room in order to get there. - Stuart -

Thanks for the early advice, I plan to post room with spec and pics but want to avoid you guys having to answer to many dumb questions so Ill read more first and then post incl. some questions and Budget. Also Profile updated :)

Also Profile updated

:thu: Yep! That was it! :)

but want to avoid you guys having to answer to many dumb questions so Ill read more first and then post incl. some questions and Budget.

Excellent! But sometimes the "dumb questions" are actually the very important questions! So don't be afraid to ask if you get stuck. That's what the forum is here for! - Stuart -

But sometimes the "dumb questions" are actually the very important questions!

No worries, enough of those will mix in even with good preparation... :)