Quick & Dirty Treatment for tracking room. by this satur

OVERVIEW: Well my subject says it all, I've been a troll here for sometime, but only a recent member! I've found myself in quite a quandary! For a myriad of reasons I'm just now able to start acoustically treating my tracking room. And of course I've promised a friend I'd be able to record her bands demo this weekend! This gives me around 2 actual days to prepare the space for recording. My objective is simple, Within the extreme time constraints, what can I do maximize the room acoustics. The band is a 5 Piece Metal/core band with female vocals. (assume Metal band volumes) LIMITATIONS: Time! I have until Friday night to prepare the space Skill, I'm pretty handy (I built the house myself) but assume I am a total layman in the finer arts of acoustical treatments If at all possible whatever I construct, I would like to be salvageable and mobile, for use in later revisions of the studio space. BUDGET/SUPPLIES: >I have most construction tools at my disposal (assume I have all fasteners/tools etc) >I have a few dozen boards of One-by (mostly 1x4, some 1x3/1x6) Along with a large amount of lumber. >I have a 46"x 15 Meters of Bulk fabric Purchased at walmart. It is denser burlap, it is very similar to thermal shirt/pant material. Using the "blow test" not much air passes though. >1 Large roll of 24" R-25 Unfaced Batting (pink fluffy) 1 small roll of R-13 Faced Batting >1 Roll of 1Cm Square wire mesh/fencing (I was going to use to hand compress batts into mid-bass traps. >I could spend another $200 max, if necessary INFORMATION: ***I'm sorry for the low picture quality, these are taken with my phone, Real camera's been missing for a month *** Here is the basic floor plan, Slab floor under carpet. (assume, drum set will be located near the blue arrows in the corner, and DAW interface with monitors and gear, located on a desk unit between the utility and bathroom doors, OR possibly on the kitchen bordering wall.) I can provide information on the attic/ceiling insulation if useful. The ceiling is sprayed with drywall mud/mixed with Styrofoam 'peanuts?' about the size of BB's, Sprayed on fairly thick, It is very similar to the spray on acoustical texture used in commercial buildings. the walls are sprayed drywall mud in a fairly aggressive 'splatter' texture. Everything is painted with semi-gloss latex paint. Here is a frame for a corner-bass trap I was going to work on. a really simple design, I was going to use Wire fencing, to sandwich unfaced batting, into a 'panel' that seals off the entire 15'corner, being 16" or so form the center of the inside corner. How much batting to compress I am not certain yet. Is this worth continuing? QUESTION OVERVIEW: 1, Using existing materials (or up to $200 purchased) What can I build/construct to assist in room acoustics for LIVE recording/tracking of a metal band. 2, Where should objects be placed for maximum effect. (I am currently searching forums for this information as well) I feel like I'm doing a poor job of providing the necessary input. I will be checking this VERY often, to answer any questions. I can easily take more pictures with my phone at anytime. Thank you in advance, this is the best studio-related forum I've ever seen, by FAR! ***EDIT*** Consider 703/705 and any of the other popular basic materials a NON option for me, I've done alot of calling around and anyone who had a remote clue about what I was looking for would require a bit of a road trip, and I dont have the time before this weekend. :(

Hey man Im a fellow rocker who has dont this very type of recording many times. Full bands in my kitchen, bedroom bathroom what ever. I am as far away from an expert as you could passibly get on the subject of acoustics, but considering your time frame and my experince here goes. 1. If you dont have a good sounding room and don't have the time to get it that way just deaden the crap out of it and add space in the mix! You can add reverb and EQ to get it sounding better. 2. You said Metal/core. I think you meant Metalcore. If its a Metalcore band you are really in luck. That type of music deosnt require a lot of space. Its very dry sounding when done right. With the material you have and assuming your tracking all the instruments live at once without a headphone monitor mix? Your worst problem is going to be instrument isolation. So here is what I would do 1. Get some plywood for under the drums. Carpet makes them sound boxy. Hang pieces of your fluffy stuff above that area, the bounce off the celing makes over head mics sound like crap and its just hi freqency anyway, with all the cymbles. If you can get way without using overheads even better. 2. Sorta use absorbtion sparingly around the drum area. You want a little sheen there. Dont deaden the drum heads too much either! You will thank me later for that. 3. Isolate the kick! Stick a mic in the bass drum and make a tunnel with a blanket or insulation or something. If you can get this mic isolated your doing good. Put another one on the beater head to pick up the click if you can. 4. Just deaden the rest of the room with whatever you got. look at some of the absorber designs on the is forem and do you best to duplicate it. I wouldnt think you need to build anything. Just hang some junk up. 5. You can record a guitar amp in a box. You dont need a good acoustic space for metal guitar. The drier the better. Id make some shields out of your fiberglass and some partical board. Just use spray glue to stick fluffy on a half sheet of ply wood and sorta sheild it from the drum mics. The drummer should get just enough guitar to play the songs. Honestly drums are the key here. The best recordings Ive done like this, I just ran a signal from a Guitar Pod to the drummer and just had one guitarist play along with the drummer useing headphones. Then I just tracked the guitars seperatly after that. Your not gonna get low absorbtion out of the stuff you have, but I read that the fluffy stuff just kept in the original pakaged bails put in a corner makes a pretty good trap I hope this helps, by the way if you do have full monitoring through headphones availible. Just stick the amps in a few closets! Its the drums you got to be acousticly conserned about, and really thats more about the overheads if your close micing the rest of the kit. Just remember hard floors soft ceilings, and METAL=DRY. Mix it like this Bass drum kicking hard. Rest of the kit with a little reverb Guitars panned hard right and left. Bass right up the middle Vocals unusually low in the mix. This is how metalcore sounds so loud and chaotic. It gives the illusion of the band bieng so loud the singer is drownded out a little.

Excellent reply! I appreciate it very much! A few quick details before work! I intend on tracking the drums by themselves with a headphoned guitar scratch track, then recording everything else seperately. Due to my Input constraints I'm only going to have 4 inputs, And my mic situation is pretty limited, NT4 for stereo overheads, PG52 in the kick, and probably a 57 on the snare. I know I"m going to loose some of the set with only 4 inputs, but I think if I play with it enough I can get an 'ok' sound.... (or at least I've heard some with similar micing ;) I never thought about just stacking the bails in a corner in the plastic wrap, how much of a difference do you think it will actually make? I could pretty easily go grab a few more bails of the unfaced stuff. Crap gotta run, I'll check this again in 8 hours! thanks again!

Go buy enough rolls of the unfaced fiberglass to stand up to the ceiling in all your corners, they will help even out your room response fairly well. If the rolls of insulation don't want to stand up, you can put some sticky-tape picture hanging hooks on the wall corners, mounted sideways, and just use string between the hooks to hold the stacks of insulation from falling over. These should go about the middle of the roll just under the top one in most cases. The carpet is gonna make the whole room sound boxy (only absorbs highs and upper mids, leaving low mud) but the corner stacks will help pull out a lot of that mud; leaving them wrapped will keep from taking out too much highs. If you want less highs, take a sharp knife and make several slashes in each roll's plastic wrapping - You've already gotten enough good advice on the rest to get some pretty good results, it's gonna take a LOT more than a couple days to improve on it, and a LOT more experimentation too. Good luck... Steve

Did I just get a knod from the head honcho?????? Thats awesome I dont feel so stupid now! Couple more tips before you get started. Are all 4 mics going to be recorded on one track? Or will they get individual tracks and bounced later? Do you only have 4 mics in your posession? Deos your recorder have an RCA stereo line in? If so here is a reall good trick to add more inputs if you can borrow some mics. Go get a small unpowered Beringer mixer. They are dirt cheap. You could get one with 4 XLR ins and tape and line outs for under 100 bucks. Run 2 overheads to input 1 and 2 on the mixer. Get a good signal. Run 2 more mics for toms on input 3 and 4 get a good signal. Its imortant that you go ahead and pan and eq these inputs as if they are permanent, dont set the levles to hot, its a one shot deal. Send that whole mix out of the TAPE/OUT via RCA to the recorder onto 1 track. Mic your bass and snare on the other 2 tracks. You should have one left, Id put another mic on the bass drum. Record! You should have a strong signal on bass and snare that you can process independently and a fairly good mix of your toms and over heads all on one track just process that track the best you can. Important to note that what ever goes wrong on this stereo track cant be fixed indiviualy. If one mic craps out mid take you cant just fix that input. It effects the whole signal, toms and overheads. After your done take the Beringer back to the store the next day and get your money back!!!!! I use to record ENTIRE kits like this. All on 1 stereo track, it was a lot of work but punk rockers make dew with what we got. There is one very important thing to remember about doing this. Make sure the drummer gives good audible counts before each song and during breaks. The guitarist wont know where to start if they dont. If they are use to doing 4 counts Id make em do 8 just to be sure. The drummer is gonna hate how one guitar sounds in the headphones recording. Just tell them once he has the drums down the rest is butter. I even had one drummer who played his songs with out a guitar at all. Just a guy in the room with him playing air guitar and giving hand signals! If they know the song real good it shouldnt be a problem, but if they are a new band.........well have fun my friend

A great many thanks to both of you! The unfaced batt 'pillars' will save me alot of time to spend on other things in the room, I should have my DAW and monitors setup tonight, so I can at least to a small degree experiment with different songs/instruments and how they affect the room audibly, its all very rough. I wish I had more time, but they have a deadline for cutting this demo, and since I'm free, I'm about exactly what they can afford :) I'm about to go and see how many unfaced batt pillars i can put in and where. the R25 rolls are 'huge' 4 of them will use up half the room! ;) but its worth it. I may pick up some burlap to cover them with so they look better, I'd just drape it over the stacks. About how I'm intending to record. I'm trying VERY hard to follow the KISS principal ;) I actually have another 8 input interface (Q10), but its an hour away at a friends house. I was hoping I could achieve as good of results in the time frame with less mics (and less distraction and confusion) then with 8+ mics and all that entails. Realistically I'm probably going to be lucky if I have more then a couple hours MAX with the drums before we need to hit the record button. Most likely, alot less time then that without too many people being distracting. You know how it is! At any rate, this is my current options. I have a Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96, it has 4 XLR (neutric) inputs. I'm recording in Adobe Audition 1.5 Mics: 2x SM57 2x Studio Projects B1 1x Shure KSM32SL 1x Rode NT4 3x Shure PG56 1x Shure PG52 (and a couple, really cheapo, condensers, one LDC and one SDC) Of these options what to put on female vocals?! doh! (sorry I know this is the wrong forum for this! ;) So considering this room, and what i"m going to have in it. Is it Essential to run and grab the Q10 for more inputs. Or can I cut a decent "demo" on what I have here? My musical cohort john, keeps pushing me to keep it simple as I can. part of me agrees, the other part wants to mic EVERYTHING... ;) oh the woes of audio production!

IF the female vox is kind of strident and you don't want her that way, use the KSM 32; they tend to mellow things out a bit. Otherwise, for rough stuff a 57 works for vox a lot of the time. Use your two "airiest" MATCHING mics for drum overheads. If you have a credit card that's not maxed out, I'd go for something better than the behringer stuff since you'd be taking it back anyway - you may not notice it with your style of music, but one of the reasons behringer stuff is so cheap (besides the fact that he's a thief) is cost-cutting on components - if you get two adjacent channel strips to sound the same with the same tone settings, you're a freakin' wizard :cry: Using carp's method for lotta inputs on drums, you'll need to do a bit of "cut and try" til you get the mix you want; but it's usually worth it to nail the drum sound, that's what drives things. Also as carp pointed out, if your band isn't experienced I wish you luck; I've had to play half the parts for some demo's I've cut for bands just starting out... Steve

Thanks again Knightfly! I actually own a cheap, 4 xlr input Behringer, but its an hour away with my Q10. As much as I really want, I just dont think I'm going to be able to have more then 4 inputs, and you guys are scaring me now! ;) I'm regretting leaving that eqiupment behind attempting to 'keep it simple'. I've never yet used the NT4, I dont know how well it will pick up the toms, hopefully they arent almost buried under the cymbals/snare/kick. I cant deny I'm a tad nervous! I'm going to have to wait untill tommorow to get the unfaced batts, (payday ;) I'm going to go in there now and keep setting the room up. I plan on posting a link to the recordings I get, so you all can see how much I botched things. :)

well by reading your last post, I think your worst problem is going to be haveing enough time to record! Individualy tracking all the parts is going to take a while. You might consider the Q-10 and recording everyone live. It can for sure be done the way your aproaching it though! Dont be scared. Id love to hear it when your done. Here is a couple of bands I recorded like this. Actually I was in worse shape. These drums where all recorded on 1 stereo track. THATS 1 Track people. These songs should start playing when you click the links. A punk band I recorded www.myspace.com/theadvance Yours truly on guitar and lead vocals! This is my band CARP www.myspace.com/carprocks Hey Fly whats your beef with Berhinger? I always wanted to know how the make stuff so cheap. Ive been BEGGING to have something break so I could prove them wrong, but I have had nothing but perfect experince with all the stuff I have. Whats the background on them?

The lower you can keep your overheads, the louder the toms will be in them; you should be able to get a good compromise height adjustment in 3-4 tries, so the cymbals and toms aren't killing each other. With a matched pair of mics (preferably small diaphragm condensers) you want to do an X-Y pair most of the time; this puts the diaphragms within 1/2" of each other, one just above the other, for least amount of phasing between them - the one on the left is your right channel, and vice versa since they'll be facing toward the opposite side - You can buy an xy adapter for a normal mic stand at any of the online music places, but after I saw how wimpy they were I used part of the hardware off the one I bought and made my own spreader bars out of thicker, stainless flat bar stock and added a pair of Shure iso-mounts - works great... Steve

MOST excellent! the information just keeps comming! Knight, the mic I plan on using, well most likely, WILL be using is the NT4, you've probably seen/used them before. So your suggesting, I 'face' the set with it, instead of doing a birds eye view from the top down? I had thought of that yesterday, to try to get it lower to the toms, while still maintianing stereo and plenty of cymbals. I hope the mic is up to the task, I've not recorded with it yet, but I am pleased with the sound on an album my friend and I working on. Well pleased considering our budget and skill level. Carp, I dig the advance, I dont have much experience about those styles, but that sounds like pretty good stuff! I thought it sounded decent, even considering the crappy format myspace runs in! The sound of your band, is much closer to what I'm going to be working with. I'm going to put as much of this into practice as I can. What else am I going to learn tonight?!

Actually I'd forgotten that the NT4 was Rode's stereo mic; sounds like at least one reviewer liked it http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_rde_nt/ Next tip - have the drummer play, move your head up and down near center of the kit out front, and put the mic where your head was when you liked the sound(and balance between cymbals/toms) best. Quick and dirty, usually works. You'll still need to cut a quick track and listen to be sure, and probably make a few adjustments... Steve

Sounds like a tip I learned when recording guitar/bass cabs, I had never thought that each speaker would sound different, but when your willing to suck it up, and put your face down there, you find that each speaker is somtimes Drastically different! Its just a matter of picking the one you like best. :) I'm actually in the room now, with my DAW and monitors setup, I hung some medium density cloth up in the corners, to remove some of the flutters and echo. but the bass is VERY much noticeable all about the room, tommorow, I hope to stack a few batt pillars. I'll report back with the results. Thank you for all the wonderful input.

Thanks for the compliments. I too have steped up to a firewired interface. The FIREPOD. I hope my recordings get better. Good luck man and dont forget to post a song when your done. I love to hear low budget stuff. By the way your singer will most likley be screaming at the top of her lungs for metalcore. Id go for a 57 on vox. The strings are most likly going to be tuned really low, so get a good kick signal.

Please let me know how that sounds, I have a Aardvark DP 24/96 (4 neutric inputs) and a Q10, (8 neutric ins) they work great piggy backing on each other, and you can find Q10's on ebay in good shape for like $350, its a hell of a interface for that kind of money. I dont have much experience with 'really' high end stuff to know the difference actually. Its such a simple way to record really, there has to be some kind of hold back to it though, like hardware trying to do to much and taking away control the high end guys want. Because there has to be some draw back to having almost NO outboard gear. I just dont fully understand what it is yet :) I'm still VERY wet behind the ears.

Carp, sorry I missed your question about my distaste for Behringer; I'm a musician/song writer/engineer/yada/yada, and I don't like people who pirate music, software, or ideas (it's different here, where I volunteer whatever I can that will help) - The way Behringer makes thing so cheap is they copy others' designs, then use as low cost parts as they can, and as cheap labor as they can get; I'm amazed the stuff works as well as it seems to, but if you get critical and try to match channels, whether you can hear it or not there are mismatches in circuitry caused by the cheap, wide tolerance components, that can cause phase differences at different frequencies, no two EQ sections having exactly the same frequency/phase response, etc - I've mainly just learned over the course of 60+ years that you get what you pay for, or LESS; so I personally tend to "buy right" instead of "buy twice" when I can possibly afford it. This is not to say that some decent recordings can't be made with less expensive gear; a lot of that is who's behind the knobs and how well they know their stuff - it's mostly my dislike of pirates I guess... Steve