how much EQ do you use?

[tubejay]

[quote author="buttachunk"]ah, your ceiling is flat ? what kindof material is it ?[/quote]

Good point. Flat ceilings under 9' can really suck for recording.

One thing I do is put a baffle covered in thick blankets and acoustical foam around the back side of my drums (my room is really really live sounding without it, and I can't get the room sound out of any of my close mics if I don't do this). Basically, it's this type of shape:

\_/ I usually have it run behinde the drummer and the side pieces go out to the end of the kit. So the kit is kind of contained in this space, but the sound still goes out into the room. It tames my close mics without affecting my room mics. Seems to work wonders for me. I get a nice focused overhead sound too, which gives me a nice stereo field.

 

[Bauman]

Yea, I read all the time 'better cut than boost' but I boost boost boost! :grin:
Can help myself...
It really depends on the mic you use and the room and the music...
I see EQ more like a tool to change/create sounds than a tool to correct sounds. If I need to correct something is because I've screw up...
I do move mics a lot pefore press REC.


cheers!
Fabio

 

[Svart]

thanks guys!

the ceilings are not quite flat, they are parallel with the floor though. they are a type of rafter, much like an unfinished basement ceiling. i have pieces of shag carpet hanging in U shapes above the drums, but the walls behind and to the sides are pretty much untreated. this is where i assume the reflections are coming from. I use my "overheads" more as room mics, in front of the set so i can get more distance from the kit for a more open sound.

thanks for all the suggestions, I'll be trying much more acoustic treatment now and let you know how it goes!

 

[soundguy]

svart-

there's a lot of different kinds of drop in ceiling tiles out there. When you buy pro made baffles, often what you get is this very stiff fiberglass, its like the stuff that goes in your wall but its pressure formed into a tile, so its dense as hell. If you can find some of that stuff and use them to make baffles, it might solve a lot of your problems. I only brougth it up because you can often find that stufff for free if you go on a salvage hunt. If you get the right stuff, you can build yourself as good a baffle as you'll pay lots of money for. I made enough to put in every 90 degree right angle in my room and they are about 3.5 feet long each. Worked really well in making a similar problem to yours much better.

dave

 

[NewYorkDave]

A good example of not being able to generalize too much about "how much" EQ is appropriate:

I've been using Cool Edit Pro to try to make some old (~20 years) cassette recordings sound listenable, and I'm finding myself having to use some pretty radical amounts of EQ, on the order of 14dB or more of cut in some places. If I found myself having to use that much EQ on a new recording, I would re-track... But of course that's not an option in this case.

 

[Svart]

thanks Soundguy and NYD!

I'm going to go searching for sound treatment stuff over the holidays, hopefully having some luck by the weekend.

I'm kind of at odds with my feelings on using extreme amounts of eq because it IS there to use and using it DOES make the track(s) sound perfect.. so is it really all that bad? I still feel that my room sucks and that i need to treat that in order to keep from having more problems in the future.


:guinness: :guinness:
have a good holiday!

 

[ytrehalf]

[quote author="Svart"]as for the room, it's 8ft ceiling.[/quote]


I would highly recommend deadening your ceiling, at least in the portion of the room where your drums and drum mics are, especially if you're using drum overhead mics.

If you're unhappy with your room sound the low ceiling could arguably be the easiest thing to fix. Just deaden it. Your mics won't know how low it is. You can just use some push pins to put a blanket up. If it seems like an improvement you could work out something more permanent.

[quote author="Svart"]I find myself cutting 15db or more sometimes especially when mixing the drums, usually around 2khz-3khz and 400hz-700hz.[/quote]

Cutting 400 hz is not uncommon for drums, particularly if you're going for a modern sound.

If you're consistantly cutting 15db at 2-3khz, on the other hand, that definitely sounds like you're compensating for a problem with either the drums or room, given good mic placement and properly functioning gear.

 

[PRR]

> the room, it's 8ft ceiling, cement and hardwood walls with *some* acoustic treatments. the room is 20x 30 with various things like chairs and amps and such scattered around. I have partitions on casters that i can move around a bit to change the shape/size of the room. I've been wondering about treating the room

What is "*some* acoustic treatment"? Diffusers? Absorbers? How big? How thick?

8' tall is really too small. I suggest you chain-saw the ceiling away, expand into the upper floor. 16' would be a nicer height. But anybody living up there may object....

How does it feel to sing in there (no electronics!)? Do you hear the mud and screech? It might actually enhance some voices, but if it mucks-up the drums then you want a more neutral sound.

To target different frequency ranges is hard. But rooms tend to have gentle reverb slopes unless they are very live. With mostly-hard surfaces, the room is probably on the live side. It won't follow simple theory because of the extreme proportion (8'x30' is very long and shallow, more a basin than a box). You really have two dimensions: the 8' height and the 20-30' widths. But generally adding absorption will probably even it out.

Most absorbers are "fuzz": wool or fiberglass fibers. These act as "high suck filters". Above a certain frequency, they absorb 80+% of the sound that hits them, but at lower frequencies they do little to nothing. The transition is when the thickness is about 1/10th wavelength. Sound moves 13,000 inches per second, so one wave of 1KHz is 13" long. An absorber 1.3" thick will absorb 1KHz and up, but is nearly useless below 500Hz.

So even a couple layers of thick wool blankets will suck your 2-3KHz zone. But you need enough area. Less than 10% of total room surface area usually does nothing. More than 50% is usually too dead for live music. If you put all this on your walls, in this big-floor room, you need to cover most of the walls to hit 25% of total surface area.

Cutting 400Hz needs about 3" of fuzz. 2" foam may do it, but you may get a "step" from dead at 500 to live at 200.

By FAR your cheapest absorption is fiberglass attic insulation. Yes it is ugly and itchy, but it gives most of the absorption of the dense "acoustic" fiberglass at 10% or 5% the cost, because it is sold everywhere competitively. Buy about 400 square feet of 3.5" (2x4) and 5" (2x6) Pink Panther or equivalent, kraft-foil one side. Hang it around the walls. Try 100, then 200, then maybe all 400 square feet, leaving some space beween the batts. Also try instead stuffing it up between the rafters, pink side down. With dead ceiling, you have the big 20-30' dimensions live; with dead walls you have the short 8' dimension live. Deadening the ceiling seems wise, but too much of that will also absorb sound flowing sideways under the dead ceiling, and make it hard to hear from one end of the room to the other (which may be bad or good).

"Acoustic ceiling tiles" SUCK. They are trimmed for lowest price while absorbing well in the 2KHz-4KHz band. They are too thin to do anything below 1KHz, and the decorative facing won't let highs into the body of the tile. So the room is boomy and screechy, but measures well on the cheap-tile test protocol. They may actually be a good trick for your mid-hi problems, but don't fill the room with that crap, not over 10% of total surface area (buy 100-200 sq.ft. and try it).

Carpet fools many people. It can be very dead above 2KHz and totally hard below 1KHz. Some fool carpeted our small recital room: it is dead yet boomy, generally dull and unbalanced. We will be ripping it out, as well as some older but non-original "acoustic tiles", and going back toward the original plan (plaster and porous cellulose boards).

What pitch do you get when you thump your walls? Plasterboard tends to boom around 200Hz. Hardwood paneling will also boom, but frequency depends a lot on details. At the thump frequency, absorption is high. Maybe you don't have too much 400-700, but too little 200-400?

 

[daArry]

Have any of u pro's tried/seen this: http://www.har-bal.com/

 

[Svart]

wow, thanks PRR that is really informative. I've played with most of those ideas in the past, but you've really put it in perspective!

I've done a few things that seemed to help a bit since i last posted.

I've removed most things from the general area of the drums. I've taken 14" wide strips of HEAVY shag carpet and hung them every 14" inches about 4" from the walls. this really cut down on reflections and odd 'verb sounds. this actually cleaned up the sound a bit. not so much boomy-ness. it also cleaned up the very high reflections.

I'll be trying the acoustic tiles next.

 

[SSLtech]

One of the bast albums that I ever recorded started out as a hurreidly recorded demo for a single song. I just threw mics up on voice and guitar, DI'd a bass guitar and hit record. The singer (who had released several albums on major labels up to this point) called me at home a couple of days later:

"what did you do to the guitar... it sounds great! -This is the first time that I've ever played a recording at home and have it actually sound the same as my guitar sounds when I rehearse!!!"

I sheepishly confessed that I had left the guitar flat and uncompressed, since the session was a rush job, and -on throwing open the fader, I'd liked what I heard, and left it well alone, moving on to the next thing... sort of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it!"

He was delighted, next comment was "I liked the vocal sound too!" -the vocal had been recorded flat, using a B&K 4006, but I didn't mention that it was flat, I just took the compliment and wished him well.

A few weeks later, he came back to demo the next album and asked for me to do the session. -He once again asked if there was anything I did to the guitar, saying that he was still digging the sound of the whole demo. -I told him that I'd left it alone, and done nothing at all!

"Well. could you do nothing to the guitar again" he joked. -We laughed about it and miked the guitar cabs and the acoustics... they sounded great flat, so I left them alone. He came in and listened to the playback of a rough sound-check and pronounced them as good as the demo that he loved.

Next he asked what I'd done to the bass and vocal... I again told him that I'd done nothing. He joked that he'd really like to pay me to do absolutely nothing if it sounded as good as last time. we laughed some more and moved on. I half-jokingly said that it's be great if we could do a session without EQ'ing a single thing either in record or in the mix. -In a good humour, he said that it sounded like a fun thing to try!

A long story shortened slightly: -With his indulgence, every time something sounded like it could use a little brightening or something, we took a few minutes -not too long, since this was a demo- and did something acoustically or mic-position related, to effect the change. -If we couldn't get it absolutely as we wanted, we shrugged it off, and moved to the next thing, but we both enjoyed the whole "we'll accept a less-than-ideal sound rather than admit defeat and switch in the EQ!" -Well, after all it's just a demo and we want to move on, let's not get precious... we decided that the line of "going too far" was when there was nothing else left to do other than switch in the EQ.

A few days of demoing later, we'd had a lot of laughs, and I took a DAT of the session home with me. I actually liked how everything sounded quite a lot!

Next thing I came to the USA to do a session, the session ended up lasting several months. When I got back to Liverpool, I found out that the band had booked into another major studio to make the "proper" album, but quit half-way through, when the stuff just "wasn't happening". I came back to the US for another job, and found out that they had recorded the album a second time, with better results... but several of the tracks just still weren't as good as the demos...

They ended up using three (I think it was three) tracks from the demos, because they sounded so good! -I have to say, I probably couldn't have gotten a better result if I'd had a month for each song, and every bit of outboard known to man!

Sorry for the long post... another one of SSLtech's "story-time" specials, but I wanted to provide a full background to one of eht best lessons I ever learned in my engineering life:

-Ever since that session, I've used as little EQ as I possibly can. If I EQ something it's usually because somebody else is asking for it to be EQ'd, or because there's something quite 'wrong' with the original signal, for some reason.

Keith

 

[SSLtech]

Oh, one other thing about that session... it really benefitted from the active participation of the client. -He was so amused about the 'challenge' that he accomodated my whim.

As an example, when we wanted to differentiate several slightly different guitar parts, we used different guitars, different amp settings, different pickup positions and even strummed or picked the strings in different places... either very close to the bridge or in the very center of the free string length. -The client was a very accomplished musician, and enjoyed 'mixing it up' a little, so playing it in a very different way didn't faze him at all... in fact he enjoyed re-exploring the parts that he'd grown accustomed to in a different style.

We discovered that it was sort of important to be a little 'exaggerative'. Subtlety got lost, so we had fun being 'very' different with different parts.

The session was a blast, and one of the best I've ever done.

Keith

 

[Svart]

hey thanks SSLtech, that's a pretty cool story!

I try to go "modern" sounding with most of my projects, most of the bands that come to the studio also come here for that too. usually I DI the guitar and bass and combine with the mic'd cabinets for the guitar/bass tracks i usually leave the guitars flat and vary the combination between the cabinets and the DI for the overall EQ effect, same for the bass. I'll send these to the buss and squish them with a GSSL (until i finish all my other junk!). guitars/bass done. Vocals are directly to the console preamps, usually from a SP C1, which if you haven't heard it ROCKs for most voices. I changed out a few caps inside for a slightly warmer sound and I reach for that very often. the last 2 sessions I haven't EQ'd the vocals either. just send the tracks and 'verb to another buss, squish and voila! now the drums are another issue.

i'm a drummer, have been for 12 years now.

I have this problem when it comes to tracking drums...

I am so COMPLETELY anal when it comes to the drum sound. I've retracked drums 20 times in a session switching various drums and mics. I've been known to ask the drummer to go get some water or coffee and while he's gone, jump on the drumset and track it myself just to see if there is something (s)he or I am doing wrong. :green:

ok so i usually do it politely, but just the same I am never ever happy and I always find something better and cooler sounding. this is good because it's a determination that never lets me just sit around and *hope* that something works, but it's also a burden because I can never just say OK even when someone really likes something just the way it is. :sad:

I've since found things in my console that don't jive with the goals i have for that thing, so i've been slowly working through various aspects of improving and building better equipment. I recently listened to tracks I had done from 1 year ago to 5 years ago and being used to hearing recent tracks over and over during mixdowns, i was shocked :shock: at the drastic difference i could hear and feel.

I digress. you got my mojo up SSLTech. sorry for the pseudo-rant.

Back to my original line of thought: I'm slowly working through everything that I come against. the better the equipment, the more problems I start to hear in my room acoustics and the more I have to deal with besides sloppy musicians. :green: ****, the last singer i had in there actually grabbed the mic and stand like he was on stage. ok so he was actually on key and in the groove for once but the clanking and scraping was really audible. he LOVED the track and would accept nothing else. I felt like vomiting to know that someone would hear this and just think that we were just another bunch of idiots in a trailer with a digi01 and a secondhand mac trying to liberate hard earned cash from folks with second string tracking. Of course that isn't the case but appearence is everything in this business.

ok i think my work stress is finally out now. thanks!

:guinness: