Untreated room mystery

[FrankHudson]

OK, a little mystery story. Let's say our story begins like this: someone in this recording forum (or likely any other...) says:

"Hi, I'm a guitarist and mandolin player. I'm thinking of making a record with another multi-instrumentalist who's an old friend, and my son will be playing drums. We've scrounged up a bunch of vintage microphones and good recording gear -- but we're recording in a living room. I read here that may be bad idea, and no amount of great microphones or technique will keep this from sounding terrible."

A thread results in this mystery story talking about baffles, bass traps, and low-cost DIY absorbers, etc. -- and it'll all be summed up with "treat the room or it doesn't really matter what other gear you use if you want decent sound."

Then for some reason the OP goes ahead anyway. Oh, look, our mystery story has video, which I saw here in another thread.



Sounds good to me. I can hear a little less than optimal room sound on some of the speaking, but at least in casual listening I'm not hearing it on the music selections. It doesn't appear to be a "lip synch" promotional video trick thing where "real studio" tracks are dubbed in. Am I fooled? The room certainly looks like any old room. We can see the corners, so no bass traps. I don't see any other sound treatment anywhere, other than normal couches and clutter.

Are others hearing sonic defects from the room in this? Anyone want to be the detective and gather us into the drawing room and explain how they did it?

[Brent Hahn]

A combo of lucky and smart. The only thing making any real low end is the kick, they've got it really far away from Taj and Ry, and the plentiful bleed from it sounds pretty cool (that's the luck part).

[rick-slo]

There is a Wayne Henderson video with him and two or three others playing rather impromptu in an ordinary living room which sounds very good. When the gods are smiling most anything can work well.

[dnf777]

These past couple of years have shed much light on recording equipment and set ups! From Mary Chapin Carpenter in her kitchen with an iPhone for both audio and video, to Keith Urban in his home million-dollar studio (with Nicole Kidman walking by in her underwear, asking if he’s recording) its clear that a real studio, pro gear, and know-how make a difference, but sometimes the basics produce some pretty amazing results.

[KevWind]

Humm? well let's see and hear. It's a nice RAW performance , has that going ...
Looks like 9 or 10 ft ceiling made out of wood beams and something not sheetrock
Its fairly large and I am guessing the dimensions are not even multiples of 12
Even with that on my studio system honestly sound is a bit flat, not bad but not great..
And the obvious elephant in the room (ha pun) what might it sound like treated ?????????????????????

[shufflebeat]

Room sound is not intrinsically bad, chamber music was traditionally performed in, ...a chamber, for instance, but practicalities and the acoustic properties of the space dictated to a large extent what would sound good.

Recording in a concrete cube is always going to be a challenge but a decent shaped living room with some soft furniture and strategically placed duvets can be perfectly acceptable for lots of scenarios.

Even better, singer in the livng room, fiddle in the hallway and acoustic guitar in the bathroom.

[standup]

Ry and Taj probably had pro engineers and staff doing the recording. They knew where to put things in the room for optimum sound, knew where to put the mics, and knew how to get the best sound in that situation.

That's a big factor.

[AcousticDreams]

Originally Posted by KevWind

Humm? well let's see and hear. It's a nice RAW performance , has that going ...
Looks like 9 or 10 ft ceiling made out of wood beams and something not sheetrock

Originally Posted by standup

Ry and Taj probably had pro engineers and staff doing the recording. They knew where to put things in the room for optimum sound, knew where to put the mics, and knew how to get the best sound in that situation.

That's a big factor.

What a wonderful video clip. Put a big smile on my face watching these two in action.

I believe when the music needs less processing such as reverb...then what ever the non perfect room frequencies are, they make less of a difference. In this case it worked out beautifully.

Each of the players had two mics. One each was ribbon. I assume Figure 8 which as you know...has a high rejection polar pattern in the immediate vicinity. In fact, the half of a figure 8 is somewhat like a hypercardiod.

It looks like they each played within a foot of the mic. Close micing really helps when you do not have a treated room. As it is picking up more of the instrument or voice than the room. Thus the room is heard less regardless. Michael Watts has made a tone of recordings for his demos on the road with mics just 10 inches from his guitar.

The guitar sound was not needed to be Hi-Fi in this situation. Even though he was using a Martin..it was pretty low fi due to either his string gauge, playing style or the sound of the guitar. I don't think it would have made much of a difference if he recorded through the best chain, best mics, in the best room, the guitar sound was background & Rhythm. Very Low FI and quite appropriate sounding for those great tunes. In this case voice, harmonica and drums were the leads. All of those took up less in the totally of all the possible frequencies.

I like KevWind's Point about the Ceiling beams. It doesn't take much to break up the sound waves. And some of the greatest rooms are all wood. True, they build them a certain way for the best acoustics, still they are wood with reflections. Wood sounds Good!

And we can not see what is on the front of that living rooms can we? They could have set up a whole line of baffles, sound absorbers.

Some time ago I had a Talk with one of the heads of Audio Technica microphones about room sound. What he had to say was rather interesting. He said that most often just by turning a little bit and facing a certain direction you can find a spot in the room in which you face and there are the least amount of reflections. Makes good sense if you think about it. Stand and shout out in different directions. One way will sound better as it is first hitting a couch, or a dense piece of furniture.

For those of you who saw "Get Back". The first thing that came to mind...is they were playing in this big open room and it still sounded pretty good.

[keith.rogers]

Originally Posted by standup

Ry and Taj probably had pro engineers and staff doing the recording. They knew where to put things in the room for optimum sound, knew where to put the mics, and knew how to get the best sound in that situation.

That's a big factor.

Yes. It's obvious that the musicians and mics were placed to optimize the space, or perhaps minimize its influence - don't know, wasn't there - by folks that had a suitcase full of equipment and knew how to use it.

[Rudy4]

The Taj / Ry video highlights a sweet sounding and intimate setting for two world class acoustic performers, "room sound" not withstanding.

I guess the point is that the performance is paramount, with the room being less consequential.

In other cases, "room sound" is as much of a key component to the recording as the performers. Ry Cooder / V.M. Bhatt's "A Meeting By The River" on Water Lilly is probably the best example of this that I can think of.

The two recordings noted would be almost a perfect case study of the book ends of "performance" and "room sound".

[MikeBmusic]

It's a 'live' performance capture. So the 'room' is only captured once in the recording (albeit by all mics that are used). When you multitrack in such a situation, you are capturing the 'room' again each time you record a new track, so the unwanted sound from the room is multiplied.

[AcousticDreams]

Originally Posted by MikeBmusic

It's a 'live' performance capture. So the 'room' is only captured once in the recording (albeit by all mics that are used). When you multitrack in such a situation, you are capturing the 'room' again each time you record a new track, so the unwanted sound from the room is multiplied.

Frank Hudson brings up a good point, asking why then these live performances in untreated rooms sound so very good.

Then MikeBmusic, through a few words, brings it into focus.
The addition of the same room problems multiplied by multitracking. It is one of those big Ah ha moments for myself.

I saw another discussion about running a printed tract out to a hardware tube processor then back for Print. And then running it out and in over and over. For the same reason they said the signal quickly turned to absolute mush. The noise build up.

Moral of the story: One of most anything, can be Charming by adding some character. Ten of that very same thing in a row, might become overbearing and lead to confusion.

[Trent in WA]

On a related note, here's a great article from Sound on Sound magazine a few years back on recording Shirley Collins' 2016 album Lodestar in her home: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/shirley-collins. Reading the article and looking at the accompanying photos, it doesn't appear that the engineers used any acoustic treatment in doing the live tracking and overdubbing involved in recording what was a really good-sounding album. It also doesn't appear that the producer and engineers involved thought or said at any point that, since Collins wasn't going to record in a studio or turn her cottage into a shrine to Owens-Corning 703, they might as well just record the album using a couple of SM57s fished out of the bottom of the junk drawer. They also didn't seem to think it was a bad idea to use high-quality mics because they might--horrors!--pick up some of the sound of her untreated living room, study, and kitchen. (If you don't want to read the entire article, the engineers relied on materials in Collins' home like blankets and decorative screens when they needed to modify the space's acoustics.)

I will go out on a limb here: Many times on this board, less-experienced home recordists come here with questions about mics and equipment and are treated to lengthy explanations about how and why they really need to apply acoustic treatment to their space, without much consideration or knowledge of what the characteristics of their space is, what their material limitations are (gobos take space to store that I wager most people don't have), what kind of music they write and want to record, etc. While that advice is well intentioned, I don't think it's much more helpful than telling a newbie that if they're serious about getting a good sound they need to get a matched pair of Schoeps mics and high-end preamps to match, and otherwise they're just wasting their time. Lots of great albums, including ones inspirational to at least some of us on the forum, have been recorded in spaces not optimized for recording--bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, basements, back porches, etc.--by people who knew what they were doing, and probably learned what worked by spending time making bad recordings and figuring out what they needed to do to make them better.

[Joseph Hanna]

Originally Posted by FrankHudson

Am I fooled? The room certainly looks like any old room. We can see the corners, so no bass traps. I don't see any other sound treatment anywhere, other than normal couches and clutter.

The concept of an acoustically great room isn't about room "treatment" unless of course the room has identifiable embryonic problems. Sting bought his first home in Tuscany for many reasons but among them were he felt there were areas optimal for recording vocals and acoustic guitars. The bottom line is a great room is just that, treated or not. The trick, which is almost universally misunderstood here, is the ability to diagnose the problematic issues and address them. In the end, if the room is acoustically great for whatever cosmic reason, the room is great.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by Trent in WA

I will go out on a limb here: Many times on this board, less-experienced home recordists come here with questions about mics and equipment and are treated to lengthy explanations about how and why they really need to apply acoustic treatment to their space, without much consideration or knowledge of what the characteristics of their space is, what their material limitations are (gobos take space to store that I wager most people don't have), what kind of music they write and want to record, etc. While that advice is well intentioned, I don't think it's much more helpful than telling a newbie that if they're serious about getting a good sound they need to get a matched pair of Schoeps mics and high-end preamps to match, and otherwise they're just wasting their time. Lots of great albums, including ones inspirational to at least some of us on the forum, have been recorded in spaces not optimized for recording--bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, basements, back porches, etc.--by people who knew what they were doing, and probably learned what worked by spending time making bad recordings and figuring out what they needed to do to make them better.

That's a thin limb you're on. When people come here asking for advice, the regulars here offer the best advice they can to help that person get from A to B as quickly and successfully as possible. Sure, there are some albums recorded in untreated spaces, but the vast majority of the albums we listen to were recorded in studios and those studios has rooms that were acoustically superior to a spare bedroom or a tiny office. I've never seen anyone here say that it's impossible to get a decent sounding result in an untreated room but when that happens on some albums, as you've admitted, it's the result of many years of experience including a superior understanding of every piece of gear and what adjustments you'd have to make in that room to make it work. They're not just throwing some mics on stands and taking whatever comes.

For the newbie that doesn't work full-time as an audio engineer, that doesn't have the lessons taught first hand and in person by their betters, and that doesn't understand the nuances of every piece of gear they own, they're not going to see the kind of results that professional recording engineers will get in the same circumstances ...and they're not going to get them for many years. Most people who come here for advice will have neither the time nor the availability of an in-person mentor to pull off the journey from bad recording in an untreated room to great recording in an untreated room. The best thing those people can do to improve the quality of their recordings is to add room treatment.

We all understand that full and ideal treatment is not possible in all situations and in those cases people offer suggestions that would be a good compromise. If the explanations about room treatment are lengthy, it's because for so many of the people who come here for advice, this subforum is the first place where they're introduced to the concept and room treatment is not a concept most people initially embrace nor understand. It wouldn't be helpful to simply tell someone to make these panels and hang them on your walls without telling them why.

So like I said, when people come here, they get the best advice others have to offer based on the stated goals of the person asking the questions. If they provide additional details that require that advice be adjusted, it usually is. But as I said already, the vast majority of the albums we listen to were recorded in studios where the spaces have been either built to produce a specific acoustical response or spaces that have been treated so as to allow for superior results. Room treatment is the easiest way for a home recordist to maximize their results.