gjm wrote:Khazul wrote:Unless you have a decent accoustic space for the job - give up and get a good electronic kit
Could someone comment on what makes the acoustic space decent for the job?
The simplest way to interpret that is it sounds nice when picked up as ambience in whatever mic recording you are doing - ie it sounds good - fine - if it sounds disturbing in anyway - then it aint fine - quite simple really
Overhead mics, or even better more distance ambience mics are a good way to figure out what your room actually sounds like - ideally get a mate to random beat the crap out of your drums will you wonder around the room with a mic wearing a pair of cans to find out where it sounds best
Kind of problems:
Flutter echos - very rapid echoing of transients that take a while to decay
Effectively echo that are fast enough to make a tone all of their own and fine some resonant mode of the room.
'Boxy' ambience - tend to have a pronounced mid range boost to it, tends to decay to one of the above problems as they are often evident too.
Several resonances in certain frequency bands - can be anything from your usual bass mode monitoring issues right up thorugh the frequency range - with accoustic recording can make certain frequencies really ring or simple sound really harsh.
In the case of a drum kit - you get the worst of everything - snares for eg have a strong transient that will aggravate flutter enchoes and ringing - broad spectrum sound from the snares tends to catch every resonance mode in the room, which in turn can actually make the other drums resonate - end result boxy nasty indistinct sounds, and overhead micing is a completely waste of time. Close micing works better just because your closer to the source relative to reflected sound.
You may find it really hard to tune lower toms and kick due to room resonance (modes) close to the frequencies you want to tune to. Those modes will keep making the drum vibrate off tune in bad cases.
Fixing these kind of problem isd just like fixing any other accoustic space for eg for studio mix monitoring, the only difference is if the room is of a useful size (ie > 5mx5mx3m or so) then you may actually want to not over treat it and keep some of the natural ambience.
For a tiny room - well you may as well give up and treat the whole thing (ie allmost turn it into a vocal booth) and try to keep the frequency response balanced, and reflection well absorbed and/or well dispersed.
In the end - I thought sod it and went down the roland v-drum route - TD12 kit - I didnt really want to turn my living room into a padded cell - no matter how appropriate that might have been to some
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