Recording - March 2016 - 31

goal, though. You might be able to
improve the room as a recording venue
by moving the furniture out or at least into
the corners. Roll up carpets if possible.
The room will sound livelier as there is
less absorbent material around. The harder exposed walls, floors, and windows
will flatter a lot of instruments recorded
with good mic technique.
Sometimes a room is too lively, or the
natural reverb is compromised by exaggerated frequencies or flutter echo
between reflective surfaces. This is not a
good thing; covering one or more of
those surfaces will be required. Again,
anything soft but dense is ideal. Sleeping
bags, duvets, packing blankets... that
kind of thing, hung on the walls or windows, will help to reduce unpleasant
reverberation in the room. Bring back
some or all of the carpeting. Again, use
your ears. You don't have to completely
understand the science of why to recognize when something is not right.
Those unpleasant reverberation artifacts may only be present in certain
parts of the room. You can avoid using
those parts of the room or you can move
some of the furniture and carpeting back
in, cover some walls, etc., until you hear
an improvement.
As I do my initial listening test in a new
environment, I also pay attention to the
shape of the room and to any structural
elements that I know from experience can
be sources of acoustic weirdness. Any
concave structures, like bay windows or
cutouts in a wall, need to be noted, and
you'll want to avoid setting up a mic anywhere near them. This shape tends to
focus sound in an unpleasant way.
Steer clear of room corners! Being too
near a wall is always something to
avoid; low frequencies will get exaggerated as they bounce back off the wall
behind the source. That puts the reflected wave in competition with the direct
sound. A corner exaggerates that effect
even more. As a matter of fact, if I move
furniture around in a room to create
more reflective surfaces, I almost always
shove it into the corners. They make for
a loose approximation of a bass trap.
The shape of the room will have an
impact on the sound and on how you
should set up. If the room is longer than
wide, set up the performers on the longer
wall. This gives you more ability to avoid
the corners. The shorter reflections that
come off the opposite wall are often more
manageable and musically useful as well.
How you group the performers in the
recording space can have a big impact
on minimizing the impact of a less-thanoptimal acoustic environment. If you group
the musicians in a more compact format
you can cut down on the overall volume,
so there is less energy bouncing around
off of the walls, floors, and windows.

I've been in situations where room
acoustics made it difficult to capture the
entire ensemble with good fidelity. One
handy technique in these situations is to
DI the guitars and bass; amp modeling
has evolved to a point where it's often
hard to tell from the real thing. If you
really want the real sound you can
reamp the DI performances and re-record
them later. Alternately the DIs can be
used to capture a live bed track, and you
can go back and re-record individual
performances with amps as overdubs. I
prefer the latter solution most of the time.
Solutions to baffling problems
Most professional studios have movable
sound baffles or gobos. These often have a
hard reflective surface on one side and a
soft absorbent surface on the other. These
are used to create miniature acoustic environments within the larger space and to
provide some separation between sources.
You can find plans on how to build a gobo
for a reasonable amount of time and
money in various online places; I believe
recordingmag.com has some.
I tend to create ad hoc gobos when I
need them. I have used a number of
things quite successfully. In my own studio I use a standing three-sided screen
to create vocal area; I cover it with a
packing blanket and set the mic up in
front of the middle panel, as shown in
Figure 2. This gives me a drier ambience for recording and I get some separation from the other sound sources in
the room. I once created something very
similar with a set of tall Magneplanar
ribbon speakers. They worked great!
I've used furniture to create a baffle
between closely positioned guitar amps
in an attempt to create a bit of sound
isolation. In one situation I found a large
cloth-covered ottoman in an upstairs
room and turned that on its side
between the two amps. The results were
surprisingly good-see Figure 3.
The role of the microphone
The tougher the room is acoustically,
the more critical mic choice becomes. It's
important to have a variety of pickup patterns represented in your mic collection.
Lots of mid-priced condenser mics come
with switchable patterns, from wide-open
omni to tight cardioid. The latter reject
more sound from the rear, which cuts
down on the reflective sound being captured, and can also provide more sound
isolation from nearby sound sources.
Note that the angles where leakage
is lowest changes from cardioid to
supercardioid to hypercardioid to figure-8, and choose accordingly. All
these pickup patterns can be employed
to capture good sound in a compromised environment, but how to use
them is a bit beyond the scope of this
RECORDING March 2016

http://www.recordingmag.com http://www.recordingmag.com

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