Recording - February 2013 - 20

Here at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver, we have the outrageous good fortune to reside in a state-of-the-art performing arts center that was built just ten years ago. The facility houses multiple concert halls and some very large rehearsal spaces, including the cavernous room 130, where the Lamont Symphony Orchestra rehearses. This room measures 50 by 100 feet with 25 foot high ceilings. The floor is hardwood and floats on a springy foam layer over the foundation slab. Suspended below the ceiling are multiple convex hardwood acoustic panels to reflect and disperse the sound back into the room. On all four walls are heavy drapes that can be drawn to shorten the high-frequency reverberation time. Also, the Olympian designers of the facility, in their infinite grace and wisdom, ran microphone and video lines between this room and our two recording studios. So what we have access to here is the kind of recording room that can only be found at mega-studios such as the old Hit Factory in New York City, or Hollywood’s Ocean Way Studios. Big rooms like this have been used to record projects by superstar artists such as Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and the Rolling Stones. Why would a little 4-piece outfit like the Stones need such a huge room? One reason is that in a room this size one can record monstrous drum sounds. You may not have access to such a room, but you probably do have access to an empty warehouse, industrial space, school gymnasium or perhaps a church that sits empty during the week. Carting your recording rig to such a space can yield mega-studio results.

By Michael Schulze

Why not go BIG? So we decided to do a Monday night student recording project and pretend to be rock stars. The goal was to set up a drum set in this huge room and combine the usual close mics with more distant room mics so that we could achieve anything from a tight, dry mix to something far more cavernous. My new students cut their teeth engineering small jazz groups in our main Pro Tools studio (Studio A). Multitracking small-group jazz recording is an excellent way to learn the art, and this is the way many of the old-school superstar engineers got started. When recording jazz drums we usually employ only 4 mics: kick, snare, and a stereo pair of overheads. The goal is to position the overheads so that they pick up a perfect blend of everything but the kick, then blend in the kick mic, and just enough of the snare mic to make it just a touch more present in the mix. This approach yields a superrealistic, almost three-dimensional sound and is, in my opinion, the best way to do justice to a super genius jazz drummer who really paints with color and texture. This can also be a great way to record when going for an old-school drum vibe like you hear on early recordings by the Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin, or on recent recordings by artists like The Black Keys. But most modern rock recordings by bands like Foo Fighters or Soundgarden are done in a less minimalist way. In a loud, dense rock mix the engineer needs precise control of the level of each and every drum and cymbal. Drums and cymbals are individually miked, equalized, and compressed and may have different amounts of reverb applied. This approach yields a less realistic sound but enables the engineer to keep every single piece of the drum set right up in your face in the most wonderfully confrontational way. We set out to produce a drum recording just like that. Distant mics The drums were set up about 1/3 of the way into the room. If you set up too close to a wall the sound bounces off and gets right back into your overheads, resulting in a “boxy” sound. This is why small recording studios usually have acoustically absorptive materials on the walls to suck up the sound. In this big room we were able to get far enough away from the walls to avoid this. The hard walls allowed lots of reverb to develop, so we pulled the heavy drapes closed, which soaked up some high frequencies, making the reverb time sound shorter but still huge. We asked our drummer, Brandon Meagher, to play for a while while we walked around the room to make sure that we had the space itself sounding good. We then started placing mics. The first mics we set up were a stereo pair about 8 feet in front of the drums. These mics were positioned so as to pick up a completely realistic stereo image of the entire kit, just like you hear when you stand 8 feet in front of a
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RECORDING February 2013

Recording - February 2013

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