Recording - March 2016 - 28

Getting the best sound from rooms that were never meant to sound good
By Bill Stunt
I've had the amazing good fortune to have been the engineer and/or producer on lots of recordings done in very good
recording studios. These were beautifully tuned rooms, carefully designed and constructed to reduce the acoustic anomalies
that can negatively affect the quality of the sound captured.
I've also had the pleasure of working on live recordings from
amazing concert halls and performance spaces that have
unique and musically delightful acoustic properties.
That said, the bulk of my recording experience has taken place
in ad hoc recording environments, or music venues that have
been, at best, only minimally adapted for live music acoustics. In
other words, I've had to record in a lot of really crummy rooms.
We all know that the availability of inexpensive, good-quality
recording equipment has really democratized the sound recording industry. Great recordings are being made in every imaginable space. Raise your hand if you have worked on a recording
done in a garage, a basement, a bedroom, a church, a school,
or in a spare room at the back of a business. Most of you?
Okay, now raise your hand if you've hired a pro to come in and
tune that space for optimal acoustic performance beforehand.
Yeah, I'm pretty confident that there are a lot fewer hands up!
While this democratization is a marvelous thing, it forces us
all to take on the role of "acoustician" at some time or other. I
put "acoustician" in quotes, as a trained acoustician is a highly skilled person with an unerring ear for all kinds of scary
sound issues. Flutter, phase cancellation, standing waves,
comb filtering... It's a long list, and can be intimidating to the
average folks who just want to know how to make the best of
the space available to them.
While we can't all be acousticians, there is a lot that we
can do to identify and ameliorate the things that are audibly
funky about our ad hoc recording spaces. The same is also
true when working in a venue doing a live recording.
Observe and learn!
What goes in? What goes out?
The first thing you need to do when setting up for a recording in a particular space is to understand it. Obviously you're
going to want to get an understanding of how the room performs acoustically, but first you need to understand the sound
isolation characteristics of the room. Isolation goes both
ways-you have to worry about what sounds get into the
space (critically for your recording) and what sounds get out
of the space (critically for your neighbors). Luckily the options
for dealing with both are pretty much the same.
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RECORDING March 2016

Is the venue in a noisy neighborhood? Near a school, perhaps-lunch time can be deafening-or is there a lot of traffic
noise? How close is it to a flight path for a busy airport? Are
there other occupants in the building that might not have as deep
an appreciation for loud drums and electric guitars as you do?
I have a few tricks that I employ almost immediately when setting up, if either noise in or out is a factor. If the windows of the
space are small, as in most basements, I'll stuff the window

1. It may look silly to put a guitar amp on a chair, complete with
cushion, but you'll be amazed at how much less of the sound
bothers the neighbors if the amp isn't touching the floor!

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2016