I record and mix in
my ‘studio’, which isn’t too great acoustically. I can manage somehow
when mixing, by working on headphones and doing lots of
cross-referencing, but the problem is that when it comes to recording I
really hate the room sound on my vocals, and most of all on acoustic
guitars, which I use a lot. The reverb tail is pretty short, but I’m
still having a hard time getting a nice dry sound on my guitars,
because I can’t record dry! I know that the obvious solution is to
treat the room, but the truth of the matter is that I can’t do much
better than this for now. So is there any way to treat a ‘roomy’ sound
(on vocals and guitar) to make it sound drier? I know it is very
difficult, or maybe impossible, especially for acoustic guitars, but any
kind of suggestion, even for small improvements, would be very welcome.
A
high-resolution spectrum analyser such as Schwa’s Schope lets you
quickly and precisely home in on specific resonant frequencies that may
be responsible for a coloured or uneven sound.
Via SOS web site
SOS
contributor Mike Senior replies:
Given that the reverb doesn’t have a
‘tail’ as such, I reckon it’s the reverb tone that’s the biggest
problem, so trying to use some kind of gating or expansion to remove it
is unlikely to yield a useful improvement. You could help minimise the
ambient sound pickup by using a directional mic for both vocals and
guitar and keeping a fairly close placement. For vocals, very close
miking is pretty commonplace, but for acoustic guitar you might want to
experiment with using an XY pair of mics instead of a single cardioid,
to avoid ‘spotlighting’ one small area of the guitar too much. That
setup will usually give you a more balanced sound because its
horizontal pickup is wider than a single cardioid on its own. In all
but the smallest rooms, it’s usually possible to get a respectable dry
vocal sound just by hanging a couple of duvets behind the singer, and
because I suspect that you’ve already tried this fairly common trick,
I’m suspicious that room resonances are actually the biggest problem,
rather than simple early reflections per se. Duvets are quite effective
for mid-range and high frequencies, but aren’t too good at dealing with
the lower-frequency reflections that give rise to room resonances.
So
given that room resonance is likely to be the problem, what can you do
about it? Well, if you’ve no budget for acoustic treatment, I’d
seriously consider doing your overdubs in a different room, if there’s
one available. If you’re recording on a laptop, or have a portable
recorder, maybe you can use that to record on location somewhere if
you’re confined to just the one room at home. I used to do this kind of
thing a lot when I first started doing home recordings, carting
around a mic, some headphones and a portable multitrack machine to
wherever was available.
Part of what the room
resonances will be doing is putting scary peaks and troughs into the
lower mid-range of your recorded frequency response, but the exact
frequency balance you get will depend on exactly where your player and
microphone are located in relation to the dimensions of the room, so a
bit of determined experimentation in this respect might yield a more
suitable sound, if not quite an uncoloured one. You might find that
actually encouraging a few more high-frequency early reflections using a
couple of judiciously placed plywood boards might also improve the
recorded room sound a little. A lot of domestic environments can have a
bit too much high-frequency absorption, on account of carpets,
curtains, and soft furnishings.
After recording,
you could also get busy with some narrow EQ peaks in the 100-500Hz
range, to try to flatten any obvious frequency anomalies. One thing to
listen for in particular is any notes that seem to boom out more than
others: a very narrow notch EQ aimed precisely at that note’s
fundamental frequency will probably help even things out. You can find
these frequencies by ear in time-honoured fashion by sweeping an EQ
boost around, but in my experience a good spectrum analyser like
Schwa’s Schope plug-in will let you achieve a better result in a
fraction of the time. However, while EQ may address some of the
frequency-domain issues of the room sound, it won’t stop resonant
frequencies from sustaining longer, which is just as much part of the
problem, and there’s no processing I know of that will deal with that.
For
my money, this is the kind of situation where you can spend ages
fannying around with complicated processing to achieve only a moderate
improvement, whereas nine times out of 10 you’ll get better results much
more quickly by just re-recording the part.
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