Although drum recordings can be made almost anywhere, some rooms’ character can sound anything but pro in room mics and overheads. Here we share a technique to banish boxiness but keep a sense of space.

In Summary

De-reverb treatments can relieve boxy drum room sounds, but can rob the recording of its sense of air or space. Using a split-band de-reverb treatment can dry up the lower frequencies where the problem is, and retain ambience in the mid and upper frequencies for a more natural-sounding solution.

Going Deeper

Needs Must

When recording drums, given a choice the aim will always be to record in the best space possible. Anyone who can will confirm that putting up the faders to hear the glorious size and dimension of a good space on drums is pretty unbeatable. That said, almost all engineers who record drums will have tracked in spaces that exist for other purposes, such as rehearsing or living.

While domestic spaces can range from being over-dry, to uncontrollably live or ringy, many rehearsal spaces hosting recordings have challenges of their own. Assuming the band in the next room have gone home, the next thing to deal with is these rooms’ lopsided ambiences. These usually arise from the kind of wall treatments that eat the mids (on a good day) and everything else upwards. This leaves the low mids and bass to do their thing giving rise to a duller sound that could be called the Rehearsal Room Effect.

Drier, Better?

Assuming there is nothing good to be had in this kind of acoustic, one approach can be to move the mics in and reverberate later in the mix. If that doesn’t work, there are some great re-reverb processors out there. For the time being though, drums present some specific challenges to these, such as a combo of transient sounds with sustaining cymbals that can give the game away instantly.

In the video, we use Accentize DeRoom Pro2’s built-in split-band mode to avoid some of these problems and lose the boxiness. We play back some untreated drums as compared to the same recording with a drier, tighter low end with the rest of the spectrum left unprocessed. This solves the problems of room sound and cymbal sustain, while retaining an organic sound that can be used as it is or enhanced with audio plugin ambience later on.

The Best Way?

No one is pretending that corrective processing beats getting it right in the first place, but increasingly, engineers must use pragmatism such as recording in the only space available. While there are ways to protect the recording from the sound of certain rooms, engineers can also now explore some In The Box options too.

Setting up band splits manually has its pitfalls, so using a tool such as DeRoom Pro2 that has it all in one window takes only minutes. The results could mean drum sounds that convince for a greater number of artists and engineers. Certainly better than not recording at all, and often a whole lot better than might be expected.

A Word About This Article

As the Experts team considered how we could better help the community we thought that some of you are time poor and don’t have the time to read a long article or a watch a long video. In 2023 we are going to be trying out articles that have the fast takeaway right at the start and then an opportunity to go deeper if you wish. Let us know if you like this idea in the comments.

Photo by Sean Friday