Best Mic Position for small room

[connelly73]

Hi I've rcorded a few songs now and I am by no way anywhere near most of the guys on this forum. I would just like to know if anyone has advice on MIC position for recording vocals in a small bedroom i.e. room centre, corner, wall, window... I have a MXL2002 con mic going through a ART pre amp into a M-Audio delta 44 (as I said its very basic) I put my site in my signature and not sure if I can put it in the comment so hope you can see it as I have some f my songs on there.

[newkid]

depends
What type of mike -- omni or cardiod
any curtains or other help with reflections?

I would think you would want the mike next to you
and you would have your back in one corner of the room
Facing the corner with the least reflections.

But how hard would it be for you to try the various options and see what works best for your room and your mike?

[Vulconizer]

A good idea is to try and find -

A) - the spot in the room that sounds the worst to you, if possible. Avoid placing the mic there.

B) - the spot in the room that sounds best to you, if possible. Try placing the mic there.

I would recommend staying out of the corners if you can. It seems that is where bass build-up occurs the most in untreated or poorly treated rooms and that may not be beneficial to your recordings. This can depend on what furniture and such you have in the room though. If you have to be in a corner, then facing out of it as was suggested is the way to go.

If you have a hard time finding an outright good or bad spot in the room, then just try keeping reflections to a minimum. The use of blankets or carpeting can help. Make sure to try and place them a couple of inches off of the wall or windows. They do a better job of sound absorption this way, I'm told.

I have read that having the blankets closer to your mic position can be a helpful thing as well.

Experiment. Go all Mad Scientist on it and learn what works best in your situation.

[edub357]

how small is ur room? vulk is right by adding about using the blankets, just hang a thick blanket about a foot behind your mic almost like making a wall with the blanket or a foe vocal booth.

[paul999]

For vox in a small room I would definitely take the advise to dampen the room as much as possible. I once took a guy doing an acoustic and vox project and built a fort in the small room we where working in. He was a loud singer. I hung 4 sleeping bags from the ceiling and made a square fort in the middle of the room. I then took a foam panel I bought from my music store and put it on the ceiling. I put 2 more where they made a corner pinned to the side walls and put the mic so that he was singing into the foam corner. The recording came out pretty well. For acoustic guitar you don't need nearly as much dampening.

Cheers.

[bozmillar]

If you just have to work with finding the best spot in the room, walk around clapping and see where you get the least amount of boingy reverb.

If you've done everything you can to put stuff on the walls to absorb sound, then put some stuff on the walls to diffuse it too. There are good, better and best ways of diffusing sound, but one rule that always holds true is that anything is better than parallel walls.

[Danny Danzi]

In my experience, unless your room is extremely reflective, reverberant, or you can just hear weirdness when you record vocals, the room is not going to make much of a difference unless the mic you are using is extremely sensitive. It also matters how close or how far you will be from the mic as well as what mic you use. The closer you are, the more intimate and less "room" sound you get. The further away, the more room ambience.

Most people today use the up close and personal approach of about 4-6 inches away counting the space between your pop filter and your mic. Professional singers that have a clue will use the "proximity effect" to control when to hit something hard and back off and when to be up close and intimate.

Once you start going beyond that 8 inch distance, you will start to pick up some of the room through the mic. This is actually one thing I never worry about because the up close and personal mic technique does not input enough room to worry about it unless like I said, you have a room that is literally adding sound to your recording.

I record my vox in a 12x12 room and put the mic anywhere I want. It makes no difference what mic I use and sounds the same with very little room sound making a difference. There is no room treatment in my room nor do I go far out enough from the mic to hear the difference. Don't buy into the hype...it's all bullshit. You get a good mic like a Neumann U-87 or something, then you can worry about room. Most mics under $500 will not make a difference unless you are 8 inches or more away from them.

What matters most in a vocal is choosing the right mic for the voice and the key the song is in. Just because a Nuemann is a killer mic doesn't mean it will work for everyone in every situation. As a matter of fact, for me personally when I sing, it sucks and I find myself only using it when I sing in the key of F# or G because it just does not give me the sound I'm looking for. So I may use an AKG or a Royer or an Equitek CAD.

It's the sound of the mic complimenting my voice and what I'm singing that makes the difference for my recordings. If I want to add in some natural room, I'll back off the mic and turn up the input signal a bit more or I just use an impulse and I'm golden. It all depends what type of sound you are looking for though.

If you think about it, everyone mentions how they deaden their rooms all the time...yet, they add in some reverb or something after, right? This is why I can't totally buy into all the stuff I hear. Do a test for yourself and you'll see what I mean. In a bedroom situation or small room, you can sing in a corner and it won't make a huge difference that you'll be able to hear on a recording with other instrumentation. That's another thing people do wrong. They make decisions based on how something sounds all alone. That is the worst decision an engineer can make in my opinion because there will be MANY times in your mixing endeavors that the instrument sounds that sound good by themselves, will not work in a mix with other instrumentation without surgery.

I can't tell you how many times I wasn't happy with how something sounded all alone...yet in the mix, it left me scratching my chin wondering how the hell it sounded so good. So my advice is get a good strong signal, experiment with different proximity and distances, experiment with heights as you don't always need to sing directly into the mic straight on and make sure the sound of the mic is accommodating the vocalist's timbre of their voice. Best of luck!

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by Danny Danzi

Most mics under $500 will not make a difference unless you are 8 inches or more away from them.

To be clear, this effect has nothing to do with the price of the microphone! The reason pulling the mic back sounds worse is you change the ratio of direct to reflected sound. Even a U-87 will sound boxy and off-mic when placed at a distance in a small room.

There's nothing inherently wrong with close-mic'ing stuff like a snare drum or guitar amp. But many instruments don't radiate sound from a point source. In particular, large acoustic instruments like cellos radiate different frequencies in different directions. So to capture the full sound accurately you must put the microphone farther away. This works well in a large room, but in an untreated bedroom there's often no one place you can put the mic that will sound good.

--Ethan

[Danny Danzi]

Originally Posted by Ethan Winer

To be clear, this effect has nothing to do with the price of the microphone! The reason pulling the mic back sounds worse is you change the ratio of direct to reflected sound. Even a U-87 will sound boxy and off-mic when placed at a distance in a small room.

But it does have to do with the price of the mic. If you go at a distance with a U-87 and then do the same thing with an SM-58, there won't be a difference? On the contrary, there will be. No one said it would be good, but there WILL be a difference and the 87 will be the one that captures a bit more room sound due to the quality, mic pattern control and the sensitivity of the mic. I was pretty clear.

Originally Posted by Ethan Winer

There's nothing inherently wrong with close-mic'ing stuff like a snare drum or guitar amp. But many instruments don't radiate sound from a point source. In particular, large acoustic instruments like cellos radiate different frequencies in different directions. So to capture the full sound accurately you must put the microphone farther away. This works well in a large room, but in an untreated bedroom there's often no one place you can put the mic that will sound good.

We're not talking about large acoustic instruments though nor are we talking about a large room. We're talking about a voice in a bedroom where the dude is probably going to be fairly close to the mic. Why would he want to capture the sound of a dead bedroom? This is my point. If the room is not the right room to do a vocal in, you don't want to have a far away prox effect anyway because you'd be introducing artifacts that you'll be stuck with if they aren't good ones.

The sensitivity of the mic as well as the quality and the options offered (figure 8 etc) are what will make the difference. Some of the cheaper mics though VERY good, don't have the same sensitivity which means they would not capture the room in the same way even at close range using a different mic pattern. And if so, you'd not hear enough of it in a mix once the other instrumentation came in. If you are using a close range mic placement, it matters not where you go in your room or if the room sounds bad or not. Do a few tests and see for yourself. The only time you'll notice something is if you're up against a wall or have a very reflective or verb oriented room. Other than that....it's all hype.

I've used all kinds of mics in my time from pricey tube mics to junkers, in big rooms, in vocal booths...the sound of the mic complimenting the sound of my voice is what made the difference moreso than any other aspect. The room I was in further enhanced my sound but without the right mic complimenting my actual vocals I would be stuck with a bad mic and the large sound of room ass. Which would you rather have? Purists will fight you to the death that the room needs to be pure. Then post up 2 different mic examples...one with a natural sounding room, one with impulses...watch them fail with flying colors.

For what this guy is looking for sound wise in my opinion, he's better off with a direct sound so it's clean and doesn't have the extra artifacts you can be stuck with. In today's times, there's nothing that can't be achieved with impulses. The signal and the sound is what's most important when you don't have the right mic or the right room to do this stuff with. Should he really worry about a room sound in a bedroom? I sure wouldn't.

[newkid]

Originally Posted by Vulconizer

A good idea is to try and find -

A) - the spot in the room that sounds the worst to you, if possible. Avoid placing the mic there.

B) - the spot in the room that sounds best to you, if possible. Try placing the mic there.

I would recommend staying out of the corners if you can. It seems that is where bass build-up occurs the most in untreated or poorly treated rooms and that may not be beneficial to your recordings. This can depend on what furniture and such you have in the room though. If you have to be in a corner, then facing out of it as was suggested is the way to go.

If you have a hard time finding an outright good or bad spot in the room, then just try keeping reflections to a minimum. The use of blankets or carpeting can help. Make sure to try and place them a couple of inches off of the wall or windows. They do a better job of sound absorption this way, I'm told.

I have read that having the blankets closer to your mic position can be a helpful thing as well.

Experiment. Go all Mad Scientist on it and learn what works best in your situation.

Not much bass in a vocal to worry about. Is there?

I suggested he try different spots with his mike and compare.

Ditto for rug and curtains to help minimise reflections.

Except for the corner we agree.

Angled to the other corner should keep other reflections bouncing around and not coming straight back as when standing on one wall facing the other one.

Standing part way along a wall but at an angle might achieve the same result.

I don't see any build up with that configuration. Usually a group lined up with walls, or speakers lined up with walls, would possible have more build up issues. No?