Over the past couple months, I finally started trying to put a little room treatment in my studio. I built a couple panels from scratch using leftover Rockwool from when the room was built. They turned out ok. A bit crooked, but not so deformed as to be unusable.
I also said screw it and bought some panels from GIK Acoustics. They aren’t cheap, but they look a lot nicer than what I made and are a bit thicker. I set them up towards the back of the room where I have my drums.
I’m a bit less concerned for now with an overall clean sounding room for studio monitors because I do all my mixing in headphones. And also, let’s be honest, I’m unlikely to be anything resembling a pro mixing engineer who needs a perfectly balanced room. But, less echo/flutter/ugly noise for drum recording? That is something I can get down with.
So, the back of the room has a bunch of thick panels (244 bass traps). I also bought some slightly thinner panels (242 panels) that I am using to create a gobo around the drums (or whatever I plan on recording in the future).
Yesterday I tested the room out with a simple two-mic setup on the drums. I placed an SM-57 a couple feet in front of the kick drum pointed directly at it. The second mic is an MXL 990 that I put a few feet over the kit pointed roughly at the snare drum. I recorded directly into my Audient Evo 16 into Reason 12.
After recording, I normalized each file and adjust the levels a pinch. No other compression, eq, or other effects were used on the recording. As a first run with the new sound treatment, I am actually pretty happy with how it turned out. Nothing groundbreaking in the world of drum recording, and certainly nothing groundbreaking in the drumming itself. But, I can work with this for creating samples for myself and maybe beginning to track the “live” rock project I want to do this year.
