Help with room mic'ing

[petejt]

Hey folks:


I finally got back into recording. I've got my gear running pretty well, and trying to record my guitars by room mic'ing rather than putting the mic straight against one speaker.

Gear setup are two amp heads and a stereo poweramp. So there are four separate speaker signals running to two stereo 4x12 cabs.

I have two Rhode condensor microphones and an 8-channel mixing desk, running to my Apple laptop. At the moment I'm just running Garageband.

I want to have one microphone per cab to capture the overall sound of each. The tracks are hard panned left and right.

The clean (and mildly dirty) guitar sounds are are quite good so far. Well I am pretty happy with the initial results.

High gain distorted sounds are a problem. No matter where I place the microphones, the recording sounds like they are inside a big cardboard box. And I don't want to be close mic'ing because then I miss out on the overall sound. I want to capture what I hear in the room.

Part of the problem could be that my 'music studio' (spooky downstairs converted garage/cellar) is made of limestone walls with sharp angles, so the reflections can be quite harsh and I guess causing interference. I've tried to deaden the room with a few sheets of egg crate foam and old mattresses. I also have a piece of foam between the two cabs as a 'divider', to try and keep their sounds separate.

I know about the 1:3 phase rule, but the recording doesn't sound thin. It just sounds "boxy".



Any tips please?

 

[sled]

Where to start....

Throw away the foam stuff you are using. It's doing you no good... probably doing nothing at all.

Stop and spend time learning how to treat a room properly. Dealing with modes, early reflections diffusion and diffraction. Books by F. Alton Everest are very good.

Master recording one amp first.

 

[DoomBuggi]

You using the word boxy makes me think there is allot of mids in the mix, so maybe trying to attenuate some of the mid range frequencies with the eq in what ever you are mixing with may help to reduce some of the boxy sound. I would say the lower mids.

These two books are very helpful as well;

"Sound Reinforcement Handbook", by Davis & Jones.

"Audio Engineering 101", by Dittmar.

You can get these books used for a pretty low price online.

Hope that helps.

 

[renegade5150]

2nd the sound reinforcement handbook. One of the first books I had to get for school. Sled is dead on, it's the room that gives you a boxy sound. You can build 4'x'2 acoustic panels to help deaden the reflections for cheap. I think mine cost me like $16 per panel using Rolux rockwool panels inside the wooden frames, you can order 8 pieces for 50 bucks. That is probably going to help you the most with your room sound. I would start with getting the best mic placement with 1 mic and 1 amp before using multiple mics first.

 

[Bob Savage]

Unless you've got a killer room, I wouldn't bother.

 

[petejt]

Sled is dead on, it's the room that gives you a boxy sound.

Yeah I thought so.

Here's a couple of phone pics so you can see the current setup.

To reduce the boxiness I tried setting the microphones upright rather than pointing directly at the cabs. It didn't really work.

I'll respond to the rest in a separate post.

 

[petejt]

You using the word boxy makes me think there is allot of mids in the mix, so maybe trying to attenuate some of the mid range frequencies with the eq in what ever you are mixing with may help to reduce some of the boxy sound. I would say the lower mids.

There are a lot of mids but that's how I want it. If you hear it in person it doesn't sound that midrangy, it just sounds rich and full.
If anything- when you put your head where the microphones are, it sounds crunchier and more trebly rather than boxy or boomy.


I just want to capture the sound as naturally as possible. As you can see in the photos, I guess the room acoustics are working against me.

 

[petejt]

Just a note on only recording one amp at a time- I can't.

My guitar sound is a result of blending two amps, well really it is blending FOUR separate signals.
One amp (the Marshall), and a second amp (MarkIV) with three speaker outputs (MarkIV + stereo poweramp).

As I said earlier- both 4x12 cabs are stereo. They all have different speakers in them to get a blend of brighter and darker sounds.


The way I got around using chorus with a distorted sound, without it either warbling it too much/muddying the bottom end/washy/thin sound etc., was to run the effect on one signal against three dry signals. So it's a 1:4 ratio overall. That's crucial.

In the mix- you have one track that is an "aural" blend of two 'dry' amps, and another track that is a blend of a wet signal and a dry signal.
If you mix the wet and dry signals prior to the speakers, it wrecks the effect. So you could call this a weird wet/dry/dry/dry setup.

I have the option as well to run another chorus effect on the Marshall, so the setup becomes wet/dry/wet/dry. And funnily enough it doesn't get very soupy- the bottom end stays intact. It just gets richer.



My alternative is to close-mic two speakers each on each cab, as well as have two room mics for ambience. But remember this is an amateur basement hobby music studio made of limestone walls with old mattresses and egg crate foam!


I might though consider using panels to offset the sharp angles in the room, to help diffuse the acoustics.

 

[petejt]

Is it worth me making a "Tent of Doom" cubby house out of the egg crate foam, to enclose the speakers as much as possible?

 

[JTyson]

I've been dealing with this too, my cave is a 30x40 building on a slab with 8ft plywood ceilings, not condusive to huge sounds at all.
We mostly close-mike, but the other day we threw up a room mike just to scratch pad a session so we would not loose any ideas we came up with, and I guess we got lucky without really trying and found a sweet spot to catch everything. The bass was very thin and top heavy, but the drums and guitar came out surprisingly good Not my ideal tone at all, but good enough to make me rethink how I want to mike up for later to add a bit of depth to the tone. The mike was not even in the direct path of the cabs, it was kinda between them and out of the treble beam, but for 1 mike in a room, it was surprising. It was a Bock 195, which has turned out to be a fantastic mike for a lot of stuff. Deadly as a room mike for drums, and great for 412's too. We usually run it paired up with a Royer close miked to 2 tracks on 412's, but I'm gonna try it pulled back a bit into the room next time.
I would imagine we will have to time-alighn the tracks running it that way to keep phase in check.
I would put up a piece of the track, but I dont know how to get it uploaded to the forum as is
Anyone know how to get a PT track, or ITunes file uploaded?
I'm retarded

 

[Blix]

Room mics aloe will not cut it, simple as that. You have to close mic all or at least a couple of the cabs to avoid the "boxy" feel.
A mic I can highly recommend is the Sennheiser e906, it will really capture what you hear nicely.
With 4 room mics you get all sorts of phase cancellations, all over the place. And that's creating the boxy tone.
The 1:3 rule only applies to close micing really.

 

[sled]

Is it worth me making a "Tent of Doom" cubby house out of the egg crate foam, to enclose the speakers as much as possible?

Throw away the foam stuff you are using. It's doing you no good... probably doing nothing at all.

Stop and spend time learning how to treat a room properly. Dealing with modes, early reflections diffusion and diffraction. Books by F. Alton Everest are very good.

Your cab is located close to the room corner. Move it out into the center of the room. Then move it around looking for a good spot. Stay away from corners and walls.

What are the room dimensions?

Master recording one amp first.

 

[petejt]

Your cab is located close to the room corner. Move it out into the center of the room. Then move it around looking for a good spot. Stay away from corners and walls.

What are the room dimensions?

I'll measure it and post them later.


Meanwhile I'll try moving the cabs into the middle of the room, then use one of the mattresses and the foam to form a kind of 'tent' enclosure around the cabs. It means though I won't be able to play in front of my amps.

I do have two other mics which I could use for close-mic'ing, but at the moment they're broken. I'll get them looked at soon.

 

[DietCoke]

I think if you can put your head in the sweat spot and it sounds good there, then you should be able to mic the same spot and record it with close to the same sound, unless it's a crap mic. I guess my point is, are you getting a sound you like in the room?

 

[petejt]

I think if you can put your head in the sweat spot and it sounds good there, then you should be able to mic the same spot and record it with close to the same sound, unless it's a crap mic. I guess my point is, are you getting a sound you like in the room?

Yeah, in the room it's pretty good. Just translating that to a digital file is the tricky bit.



I managed to get those two dynamic microphones working now. I've also put the cabs in the middle of the room and faced them towards the wall, where I've placed one of the mattresses. I've set up a rough "Tent of Doom" enclosure with the egg foam sheets, and will make some sort of supporting structure for them later on.

I've close-mic'ed the lot now as a test, just roughly placing each mic off-axis but head on with a speaker- remember I have four individual 'amp' sounds going at once. I finally got the levels set and a rough track recorded, but by then I was keeping my housemates awake!

I'll start again tomorrow morning and hopefully have a sample clip ready to upload, if I get the tent sorted. I'm thinking instead to have one close mic + one room mic per cab.

 

[petejt]

Just an update: I very roughly measured the room as 10m x 6m, but yet that's just one end of the room. The room is rectangular but has a wider section at one end.


I changed things around and it's working a lot better now. The cabs are in the middle of the room, facing the wall with a mattress against it. A piece of egg crate foam is between the cabs as a divider, and more foam around the sides and top as an enclosure.

Each cab has a close-mic on one speaker, and a room mic a couple of feet back and pointed at the other three speakers. I've tried different combinations and still experimenting with the panning, which are all coming out with cool results. I want a pretty solid chunky sound down the middle, but a wider enveloping sound panned hard left and right. It gets wider if I add in some effects out the front.
For clean stuff it sounds awesome panning two channels hard left and the other two hard right.

I've recorded almost an hour of test runs. The clean tones have come out great. The dirtier and heavy tones are getting better and better- more like what I hear in the room. The boxy sound is almost eliminated which I believe has been helped by the enclosure, as well as the advice on placing the cabs in the room (so thank you heaps for that).

One problem is that in a recording- when I attack the guitar strings really hard when on a clean sound, it can sound quite harsh and spike you in the ear, particularly when listening to the recording through headphones. Live it doesn't hurt at all. I guess that means I need a compressor! I do have a Boss CS-2 lying around but it needs fixing. There's also some compressor models in the mixing desk so I guess I could use them....


If I get time tomorrow (busy with other stuff) I'll try to post some clips.
I have some cover songs in mind, including covers of some songs that are not technically released yet.



Thanks again for your help everyone.

 

[petejt]

Over two years on and I'm still trying to record!

Ha, sad to say I haven't done much recording for a while...


Since my last post here I've moved house, and have a different room to record in. It's still a cellar type of room but is just a rectangle and normal bricks, not the Freo pillowcase limestone.
I'll post a pic soon, but it looks similar to the previous photos (same amps and cabs).

I've taken on some of the advice posted above and positioned the amps and cabs in the middle of the room.

I've simplified my rig a bit, which has improved the sound a lot. Just my guitar to a few effects pedals, then split with a pedal going wet/dry to more pedals, then to two amps, each through their own 4x12.

Mesa/Boogie MarkIV set for a lot of low mids, bass, and top end treble.
Marshall JCM 800 set for the upper mids, but does have a decent amount of low end.


I did some recording and managed capture the sound fairly well with two room mics- one microphone pointed near the centre of each cab about four feet away. I'm listening to the playback as I type this, trying to pick out bits where my playing is decent enough to post! (I was just playing random stuff mostly).
Same laptop recording setup as before, updated software.

It sounds very big and full. A lot of girth. Thankfully it's not boxy, and I can hear the low midrange growl coming through.
A little bit of the "crunch" is a bit munted, but still present.

My main gripe is that the palm mutes don't sound as chunky as they should. Live they are really percussive and "chuggy". They seem a bit soggy and loose when recorded this way. It's strange.


I have two other dynamic microphones sitting around.
Is it advisable to use these to close mic each cab and then blend them in with the mixing desk? I want to capture more of the crunch, and some percussiveness. I really hope they don't cause phase cancelling and bring that back that boxy sound...

 

[petejt]

Sorry I forgot to add. When I was recording, I played along to some other songs so I could hear my guitar in a "band mix" context. The track was mostly vocals, keyboards, a guitar through an Electro Harmonix POG to sound like a Hammond organ, drums, and bass. My guitar sound sat well thank goodness. Sounded huge in fact.

 

[Kapo_Polenton]

DIY bass trap the corners and reflective panels on the walls...that is your first step. All that eggfoam stuff, get rid of it, prob only good for sucking out some highs while the lows stay a booming. Given your room, close mic. Cement walls are gonna create bouncing waves all over. Fail that, use room mics from one of the many IR's there are available for that "natural" sound. Third option, throw some reverb on those close mic'ed tracks and they will sound deeper. Room mics are better suited to good sounding/ treated rooms.

 

[petejt]

Thanks for the advice Kapo.


Here's the new room setup. A bit messy I admit- cables everywhere.