keep the room mic

[firby]

I am in the other ballpark. Don't nix the room mic. You will want the whole thing to sound big. The room mic is key. Personally I would mic between two toms with a 58 and then pray that the toms arent featured in some elaborate 80's tom fillapalooza.

Generally I record good drums with kick snare ovl ovr and room. Sometimes I spot mic a hihat. But I am a jazzer/funker.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

erm, i think you meant this as a reply to the big drums/8 inputs thread?

but hey, i'm all for room mics, so maybe they deserve their own thread just because.

[JGriffin]

Agreed, room mics are the shit. Sometimes I put up a room mic even when there's no drum set and no recorder. In fact, just last night I was hanging around the home studio and put up a 414 in omni mode just for kicks, ran it through the Studer and spent some time wondering whether to use the limiter. My bass player was over and he kept saying, "ooo! run it through a Distressor!" So I did that, and then we went back to watching Wrath of Khan. Which sounds really awesome through a 414 in omni mode with a Distressor.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

yeah when i'm just sitting around smoking i often will put up a couple room mics and crank those through the monitors. just fills everything out and makes me feel like there's more ME there you know?

[vvv]

I find the room mic really useful to augment the bed mic when the girlfriend is over, if you know what I mean.

[Phiz]

I've recently become interested in what placements other people use for their room mics, particularly when recording drums. I know it comes down to 'whatever sounds best'. I generally end up on the other side of the room, which for the places I record is 10-15' from the mic. I'm usually about 4 to 5' up. I'm starting to think that this is further and higher than common practice. For your setup, is the distance generally a constant, or it is a fraction of the room dimensions?

[MoreSpaceEcho]

oh great, way to interrupt the thread with a SERIOUS QUESTION.

i think it depends on what you're looking for from your room mics. well, it depends on a million things, like the drums, the drummer, bla freakin' blah....but just to break it down, are you looking for the room mics to be kinda the dominant part of the sound or something that's more tucked in there to fill out/lend some space to a close sound?

for me lately, i'm using the room mics for the majority of the sound, usually with a pretty big helping of compression. i have plenty of kick snare and overheads in there, but if you're listening to the mix and you take out the room mics you'd definitely say 'what the hell happened to the drums?'

i know i know, get to the point already. so for me, as i have often typed on here before, i have a pair of earthworks omnis on the floor maybe 6 feet in front of the kit, pointing straight ahead at the bass drum spurs. so this is 'roomy' but not 'insanely roomy' so it works ok being way up in the mix. whenever i've tried mics further back, like 10-15 feet or so, it just sounds too weird to me...but if you only brought in a little of that in the mix, it could really help out a close mic'd kit.

in general i think you want room mics lower to the ground than you might think, cause you really want to get more drums than cymbals...

[JASIII]

yeah, spaced pair of omni's near the floor.

Does anyone use a mono room a lot? Do you find it affects the stereo picture when you mix?

[drumsound]

I'm also a big fan oof moni room mics. I like them on straight stands at the lowest setting. They're about waist high then. A mono room can be cool because it gives you more panning space for other elements in the mix. And if the ride or hats are clear in the mono room you can help your stereo image by adjusting the room paning o match the OH and solidify the picture of the drums. Or you can go for a lod school Meters thing with most of the close drumms on one side and the room on the other...

[MoreSpaceEcho]

Does anyone use a mono room a lot? Do you find it affects the stereo picture when you mix?

i've been using an m160 like a foot in front of the kick, snare height, in addition to the usual kick, snare, stereo oh and room and i like it alot. it does sometimes, depending on the part, make the stereo a little weird, mainly with the cymbals...depends how loud i have it relative to the other mics...but it's like the wash in the m160 will be working against the wash in the overheads, not so much a phase thing, they're all technically in phase, but more the sounds are kinda rubbing against each other in a strange way. mostly it's fine though and i find it really helps out the kick and snare.

[cgarges]

Ooh, ooh, ooh! (frantically raising hand)

So, who frequently uses room mics on sources other than drums?

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[MoreSpaceEcho]

depending on the singer and style of music i will put one up sometimes on vocals. doesn't always work but it's great when it does.

pretty much anything acoustic will have a room mic....

i put one up on electric guitars about half the time, don't end up using them that much, but again, when it works it's great.

the other day i had a violinist here overdubbing on one track. she had an electric violin going through loads of reverb and whatnot on some boss pedalboard into my fender deluxe. i forget what mic i stuck in front of the amp but it didn't really matter, cause where the sound was HAPPENING was the 57 i had up as a talkback mic. no idea where it was in relation to the amp, but i heard that and thought "a good engineer would record THAT mic". so i did.

[drumsound]

Sometimes when I'm doing an acoustic record I put a room mic on everything to give it a more homey feeling. Sometimes on guitar and piano I like to have room mics. I haven't done a horn overdub in waaaay to long, but I did a funk record a few years back where I miced each player and had stereo room for the horn section. Bowed strings seem to demand room mic(s) (I mean the sond not the performers demanding). If I'm doing mono Leslie I might pepper in some room.

[Gentleman Jim]

Dumb things I've done with room mics that I liked:

*stick one way up in the corner of the room, facing the corner. Then pan it hard and delay the whole signal roughly around 100 ms.

*double track the drums just on the bridge/break using only a room mic. Mix in according to taste.

*use one far across the room to record a second channel of vocals. Squash, pan the room all the way right, and keep the main vocal dryish and at about 10:00.


But nobody's paying me for my time, so I can do things just to amuse myself.

[lionaudio]

I really like using room mics on electric guitars if the music calls for it. with clean guitar, I will sometimes close mic the amp, and then have the same signal running through another cabinet in a completely different room, and put a condenser about 10 ft. away from that cabinet. when you hard pan these two mics, it gives kind of an old Van-Halen type of delay to the guitar that is pretty cool especially in headphones. Also like putting a room mic all the way across the room, and only engaging it for certain parts of songs to give a "dreamy" effect. For drums, I like a mono room mic usually about 6 ft. in front of the kit, or I will buy another mic, and use it for stereo, then return it the next day. Definitely into having the mics as close to the floor as possible. Usually between knees and waist high