Does anyone record drums in a dead room or is it live only?

[Mongoo]

Live rooms are better for recording accustic instruments ahla drums right? But do you ever record them in a dead room? If so what are your reasons?

Or is dead room recording for drums never done?

Thanks

Mongoo

[Paul Woodlock]

Live rooms are better for recording accustic instruments ahla drums right? But do you ever record them in a dead room? If so what are your reasons?

Or is dead room recording for drums never done?

Thanks

Mongoo

Greetings

my rule of thumb is......

If the ambience of the room sounds great then record in there.

IF the ambience of the room sounds crap, then don't, I'd rather record the drums in a dead room, and add artificial ambience later in mixdown.

So my answer is, it depends on what you have at your disposal.




Paul

[SKEETER]

I am new here. I have recorded at home for many years, and experimented a lot. I came to the conclusion a long time ago, much to the *shudder* of other musicians, that it is far easier to record everything as dead as possible and add ambience later. Digital reverbs have gotten to the point where even cheap ones sound good. Not only that, I listen to rock era stuff and for example hear John Fogerty singing "Green River" and it sounds like he sang it in dead room, with a lot of good ole plate reverb added later.
I also have the luxury of having quite a few effects units to use, so that I am not using the same ambiance on everything.
I have my drums set up to face right into a wall, with mattress padding on the wall in front of the drums and quilts hanging on either side. I then put an old sleeping bag over the kick. I mic everything independantly, except the high hat, which I place the hat and crash on the left side so that both are into the same mic. I get good isolation, and a real snappy sound, and am able to control the sound well. The ceiling is at an angle to the floor and the wall behind me has things against it (shelving, an amp in a rack i built to keep the amp up high) . The wall behind me is proably 6 feet or so from where I am sitting to play drums. This is not the perfect setup, but I get a very good sound with minimal screwing around with mics.
I record vocals in a small booth I made to be as dead as possible as well. I do record the guitars openly in the room and get some room ambiance sometimes, but most often mic them close up with a high SPL condensor. I record bass direct into an old alesis compresor and from the compressor straight to the deck. Sweet and simple.
As I say, artificial ambiance is far easier to deal with than making a life study out of your rooms acoustics. I wanted to play music, not sit at a desk doing math calculations. Most listeners are not going to be able to tell the difference, and the ones that can are likely to all disagree with each other about the "right" way to do it.

[z60611]

Paul Woodlock:

If the ambience of the room sounds great then record in there.

“Recording Studio Design” by Philip Newell, pg 152, 6.2.1
It seems that When The Levee Breaks, with its stunning drum sound for the time, was never planned to be on the album, or indeed to be recorded at all. In the room in which they were recording, John Bonham was unhappy with the sound of his drum kit, so he asked the road crew to bring another one. When it arrived, they duly set it up in the large hallway, so as not to disturb the recording, and waited for John to try it. At the next available opportunity, he took a break from recording and went out into the hallway to see if he preferred the feel and sound of the new kit. The other members of the band remained in their positions, relaxing, when suddenly a huge sound was heard through their headphones. The sound was from the drum kit in the hallway.
John had failed to close the door when he went out, and the sound from the kit that he was playing was picking up on all the open microphones in the recording room. The hall itself had wood paneled walls, with a large staircase, high ceiling, and a balcony above. It was thus diffusive, absorbent to low frequencies, reverberant, well supplied with both late and early reflections, and very much of a sonic character which matched perfectly the style and power of the drumming. He went into a now famous drum pattern, over which Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones began playing some guitar and bass riffs which they had been working on. Robert Plant picked up on the whole thing and sung along with some words of an old Memphis Minnie/Kansas City Joe McCoy song. Subsequently, Andy Johns, who had been recording the sounds out of pure interest, reported from the mobile recording truck that they should consider this carefully, as he was hearing a great sound on his monitors.
Such was the birth of this classic rock recording …Why this story is relevant to this chapter is because it shows, most forcefully, how a room inspired an all-time rock classic. It is almost certainly true to say that that without the sound of the Headley Grange hallway, Zepplin’s When the Levee Breaks would never have existed.
Had Led Zepplin been recording in a conventional studio of that time, they could perhaps now have been considered to be one rock classic short of a repertoire. But, it must also be remembered that had John Bonham been playing a different drum pattern in Headley Grange, or had Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones opted for a different response, then the sound of the drums in the hallway may have been totally inappropriate. This highlights the limitations of live rooms; they can be an inspiration and a unique asset in the creation of sounds, or they can be totally intrusive nuisance. Furthermore there is no one live room which will serve all live room purposes.