The Padded Room.
Sep. 5th, 2011 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillI do my recording in a padded room.
There are two schools of thought on this--one is that you should use a room with a nice ambiance, a warm, alive sound, that makes your voice and instruments sound good and you should just record there and not mess with the sound much after that.
The other, older, school, is that you should record in as dead a space as possible--a space that doesn't bounce any sound back from the walls and floor, so the mic picks up only the direct sound from your voice, your instruments, to which you can then add what ever frequency boosts (EQ) and reverb you like. Because you can always add reverb or whatever, but if the "live" room had too much, you can't take it away.. To get a dead space, (also known as "dry") you use a room with surfaces that don't reflect sound, meaning foam (often egg crate foam) on the walls and floor. I refer to this as the padded room.
I started recording in a time, and with people, where the older school of thought was prominent, and that's what I'm comfortable with. I would certainly be willing to give the other method a try, but right now the quiet place I have to record is a padded room--and the room with wooden walls in my house, while giving rise to a pleasing sound, doesn't screen out the noise of the cars on the road, the bugs in the bushes (there's one that starts singing in the fall that chimes like jingle bells) and especially not the train whistles.
So, the padded room it is. Maybe it's the best place for me anyway, especially when I'm recording.
However there are a lot of classes in that building. The best, quietest time to record is on Friday mornings. But that means I only have so much time in the padded room and I don't want to waste any of it. So I try to get everything ready and practice how I'm going to record stuff here in the house.
Today I laid down a metronome track and a ocarina track (very simple one-note-per-measure harmony to help keep the vocals on pitch). I'm not very good with the ocarina yet, plus I just wrote the harmony this afternoon, so I got in some nice practice with Reaper picking the best verse, adjusting notes where I rushed and came in too early to come in at the right time, and looping it to cover all the verses. Then I put in a fermata (held note) that I had played through normally by accident. Reaper is very clever.
(I also, by the way, got around to paying for Reaper. When I downloaded it, it was forty dollars. When I went to pay for it, a new version had come out and it had gone up to sixty. Ouch. And if I had paid for it within 30 days, like they very nicely ask you to in the startup screen, I would probably have slipped in before the upgrade and it would have been forty. My own fault, but ouch. It's a good program, and it looks like the upgrade is an improvement; sixty dollars is, in my opinion, still a very good price for what it is and will do. But ouch.)
Then I tried singing to the metronome and cleaned-up-and-looped ocarina. I think this will work. I tried recording the whisper track (this is Oak and Ash and Rowan and Thorn) and discovered it's hard to whisper into a mic without peaking it. Tomorrow I will see if I can get the pop screen attached when I don't have a mic stand, to see if that helps.
I need to do the setup for another song (I'm going to try to record two a session--that seems like a reasonable goal for songs that aren't too complex) and I'm having a hard time deciding which. Strumming to the metronome is harder than plucking a melody to the metronome is harder than singing to the metronome, and I'd like to work my way gradually up the difficulty scale, but I'm about out of a cappella pieces with the possible exception of Quetico, which I haven't made a final decision on. It could be a cappella, though one of the harmonies goes rather high. I think I will try it as an a cappella piece, and if it doesn't work out I have the option of resorting to an instrumental for that harmony.
If I do Oak and Ash, plus Quetico this Friday, I'll queue up Cedarglass (mandolin countermelody) and Yellow Truck Song (for which I intend to write a mandolin countermelody because you know? You just can't have too many of those) for next Friday, and maybe squeeze in the jig and ending lick for May Daye in the same session.
Knowing now what I will do a week from Friday gives me that many more days to practice those parts and those pieces and get the throwaway tracks ready.
There are two schools of thought on this--one is that you should use a room with a nice ambiance, a warm, alive sound, that makes your voice and instruments sound good and you should just record there and not mess with the sound much after that.
The other, older, school, is that you should record in as dead a space as possible--a space that doesn't bounce any sound back from the walls and floor, so the mic picks up only the direct sound from your voice, your instruments, to which you can then add what ever frequency boosts (EQ) and reverb you like. Because you can always add reverb or whatever, but if the "live" room had too much, you can't take it away.. To get a dead space, (also known as "dry") you use a room with surfaces that don't reflect sound, meaning foam (often egg crate foam) on the walls and floor. I refer to this as the padded room.
I started recording in a time, and with people, where the older school of thought was prominent, and that's what I'm comfortable with. I would certainly be willing to give the other method a try, but right now the quiet place I have to record is a padded room--and the room with wooden walls in my house, while giving rise to a pleasing sound, doesn't screen out the noise of the cars on the road, the bugs in the bushes (there's one that starts singing in the fall that chimes like jingle bells) and especially not the train whistles.
So, the padded room it is. Maybe it's the best place for me anyway, especially when I'm recording.
However there are a lot of classes in that building. The best, quietest time to record is on Friday mornings. But that means I only have so much time in the padded room and I don't want to waste any of it. So I try to get everything ready and practice how I'm going to record stuff here in the house.
Today I laid down a metronome track and a ocarina track (very simple one-note-per-measure harmony to help keep the vocals on pitch). I'm not very good with the ocarina yet, plus I just wrote the harmony this afternoon, so I got in some nice practice with Reaper picking the best verse, adjusting notes where I rushed and came in too early to come in at the right time, and looping it to cover all the verses. Then I put in a fermata (held note) that I had played through normally by accident. Reaper is very clever.
(I also, by the way, got around to paying for Reaper. When I downloaded it, it was forty dollars. When I went to pay for it, a new version had come out and it had gone up to sixty. Ouch. And if I had paid for it within 30 days, like they very nicely ask you to in the startup screen, I would probably have slipped in before the upgrade and it would have been forty. My own fault, but ouch. It's a good program, and it looks like the upgrade is an improvement; sixty dollars is, in my opinion, still a very good price for what it is and will do. But ouch.)
Then I tried singing to the metronome and cleaned-up-and-looped ocarina. I think this will work. I tried recording the whisper track (this is Oak and Ash and Rowan and Thorn) and discovered it's hard to whisper into a mic without peaking it. Tomorrow I will see if I can get the pop screen attached when I don't have a mic stand, to see if that helps.
I need to do the setup for another song (I'm going to try to record two a session--that seems like a reasonable goal for songs that aren't too complex) and I'm having a hard time deciding which. Strumming to the metronome is harder than plucking a melody to the metronome is harder than singing to the metronome, and I'd like to work my way gradually up the difficulty scale, but I'm about out of a cappella pieces with the possible exception of Quetico, which I haven't made a final decision on. It could be a cappella, though one of the harmonies goes rather high. I think I will try it as an a cappella piece, and if it doesn't work out I have the option of resorting to an instrumental for that harmony.
If I do Oak and Ash, plus Quetico this Friday, I'll queue up Cedarglass (mandolin countermelody) and Yellow Truck Song (for which I intend to write a mandolin countermelody because you know? You just can't have too many of those) for next Friday, and maybe squeeze in the jig and ending lick for May Daye in the same session.
Knowing now what I will do a week from Friday gives me that many more days to practice those parts and those pieces and get the throwaway tracks ready.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 12:53 am (UTC)Actually, I think the technique of recording in a room with good acoustics is older -- it goes back to the days when effects like reverb were analog, expensive, and didn't sound very good.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 01:08 am (UTC)The "live room" school of thought may indeed predate the "dead room" school... that is before my time as far as recording goes, however.
But apparently, (at least according to some of the books I've been reading) the "live room" is coming back into favor.
I have to admit I like the sound of it, and when I put effects on stuff recorded in the padded room, I used the live room recordings as an approximate reference.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 06:30 am (UTC)So when it became feasible to do 'dead' recordings and then add effects like reverb they did exactly as you do and used the 'live' recording as a reference (adjusting to fit, sometimes you want more or less than the 'live' recording but that's the reference point).
Several of the German filkers seem to be good as whispering into a mic, a number of their songs involve that technique. I'll try to remember to ask them at FilkContinental the end of this month how they do it (and they do it with my bog-standard SM58s, nothing special). A pop shield certainly does help.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 10:24 am (UTC)I thought using the live room as a reference was a reasonable thing to do, and am reassured to learn that I'm not the only one.
I look forward to hearing what the whispering filkers (sounds like a code name ;-) have to say about whispering technique.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 11:37 am (UTC)Another reason is if you are going to do editing from multiple sources (like sing each verse separately, or cut a piece in to replace a fluff). I remember a couple of albums where it was very obvious that they had cut in a chorus because the reverb stopped at the end of the verse and re-started with the new chorus (there are ways to minimise that, for instance by singing the verse and chorus and fading from one to the other, but they are a pig to actually get sounding right).
(Yes, I've worked with 'live' material from filkcons, and there are techniques to improve things a bit, but they tend to be exensive and very time-consuming. I'd much rather have a 'dead' recording, do all the edits and other effects, and then liven it up at the end, it's much easier.)
As for the whispering, I don't know that they'll actually know what they are doing, it may be just "I do it and it works". But there's a chance that they may have developed it over time.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 02:04 pm (UTC)I had not thought about the difficulties of cutting in and out with a live sound. Yeah, oops.
Dead sound is probably a better option for a non-professional performer like me, since I'm just naturally going to have fluffs to edit out. And frankly I'd rather have the mixing be as easy as possible, since it's not like I really know what I am doing. *g*
no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 03:35 pm (UTC)And us techies also want it as easy as possible. Oh, we don't mind doing 'interesting' tricks every so often, it can be fun solving the problems, but not under deadline or all of the time. Going through the UT 'live' at-con recording trying to edit out all of the block 'clicks' which had imposed themselves on every single microphone channel was /not/ fun, editing out (or lower volume) a click every single beat of the song...
no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 12:14 pm (UTC)I sympathize over the clicks. I have had to lower the volume for every single breath in a song, but at least those don't happen every beat!