I imagine your not a huge fan of this sample pack then?
I'm not saying that using drum samples is a bad thing, espcially if you have no usable drum room to track real drums in, and I'll freely admit to using reverb, compressors, EQ and other stuff in many of my mixes, but that's only because I do NOT have access to Studio B at United, or Abbey Road. If I did, then I would not need to "hide the ugly sound of the small room" by layering effects over it. If I could track everything in a large room with nice acoustics, I would not need to mask the ugliness. When I can record in a large room, I do, and then I avoid using lots of dynamics and EQ. But in small rooms, I have no choice.
but even if I can pull off something just a little more interesting than the claustrophobic pack shown above, I will be happy.
I don't want it as dry as that....but close. My room would probably be double the size I would estimate.
Make your room as big as you possibly can get it, with the ceiling as high as you possibly can get it (even if that means excavating the floor deeper), then test the empty room using REW to see how it really performs acoustically, compare that to the way you want it to be, and install suitable treatment to adjust what can be adjusted, and kill what can't in the low end. Then use effects in the mix to replace what the room cannot provide, since it is too small to provide it. And since you already know that the room cannot provide a true statistical reverberant field below the Schroeder frequency for your room, you can have a "standard" effects setup that gates out the disgusting "boxy" sound from the mics, and fills in the low end with fake-but-less-ugly reverb plugins, then you'll only need to blend in the natural mids and highs.
The answer is that simple.
That's the realistic solution.
But you need to let go of the idea that there is some magical treatment you can construct at midnight on the new moon, using were-wolf blood and vampire saliva, then hang it on the walls of your room with strings made from unicorn tail hair, so that it will pull the missing modal response out of the mystical esoteric space-time hyper-magneto-acoustic entropy mega-tesla-vortex in the base of the Tardis, and somehow inject that into your room, through the meba-spiral snake-oil-anointed black-hole zero-energy HAARP warp-tunnel.... it ain't gonna happen. You can dream and hope until the end of eternity, but you can't get around the laws of physics in this universe.
- Stuart -
