Having quality instruments, microphones, and recording gear is definitely important in achieving the highest quality recorded sounds for custom drum recording. But without a well-designed tracking and control room, it won't mean much. If you want to ensure excellent drum sounds from an online recording studio service, it really helps to have some understanding of their room situation.
A proper live room for tracking drums should ideally be large, so that the sound waves can mature and early reflections are minimized. Of course, smaller rooms can benefit from creative sound control devices such as absorbers and diffusers, but there's nothing like the sound of real drums in a large live room for maximum clarity and impact.
Here's why: When "trapping" a smaller room with acoustic devices you end up with drums that tend to sound boxy and small. Because the air around the kit is literally being absorbed and controlled, the kit never gets to "breathe", producing a dry and boxy sound with your drums. This is most easily heard in the Overhead and Room mics. Also, the smaller footprint also emphasizes lower midrange frequencies -- you know, the ones that that produce those nasty nasal tones you can never really dial out once recorded. The low end also has no room to naturally expand, thus rendering your kick sounds anemic. This all means small drum sounds.
Regardless of room size, a live room must have a decent balance of hard surfaces (reflection) and soft surfaces (absorption). Importantly, the reflective surfaces should be broken up as much as possible, i.e. few parallel surfaces. This again produces the most natural recordings even amongst the many individual elements of a close mic'd drum kit. The separation and clarity the drums will exhibit in a properly designed space is a revelation to hear. Once you hear your drum tracks this way you'll never go back.
The control room is just as important as the live room, because for an engineer to get good drum sounds he needs to be able to hear accurately. Merely placing good equipment in a sub standard room is not good enough. You'd never cook a fancy meal in a dirty kitchen, yet why do so many engineers choose this route? Because properly designed rooms aren't cheap to design, cheap to build, or cheap to implement!
Good speakers are good speakers. They were designed and manufactured under strict tolerances and in well-tuned environments. They are made to be used in proper spaces that won't skew the acoustic frequency response and dynamic output, much like a Ferrari is designed to be driven on a race track. Putting one in traffic during rush hour would be compromising its performance characteristics. It would also compromise and skew the driver's opinion of the car, thus rendering his judgment incorrect.
Performance speakers in a poor room ends up with the same results. Every day, recording engineers listen to their expensive speakers in flawed rooms and end up making very poor EQ and mic placement choices through no fault of their own. Their speakers and room in concert are lying to them. And they don't know it! Thus, your drum tracks are flawed and incorrectly balanced - inhibiting you from producing truly stunning mixes of your precious material.
As there are many online recording studios offering drum tracks, there are many different types of room being used. These rooms range from closets and bedrooms in houses to large, professionally designed rooms in commercial recording studios.
Obviously going with rooms designed professionally for the purpose of recording is generally going to be the best idea. Such rooms are designed to be acoustically "flat". This means that the room dimensions and construction are such that no frequencies are boosted, or attenuated, by the room itself and have the geometric properties previously discussed.
Before we look at professional rooms, lets take a general look at the many session drummers who operate in a home studio situation.
It is possible to get great drum sounds in a house. I have been on recordings done in houses that sound amazing. Some famous artists have made recordings in houses with excellent results, such as The Rolling Stones' "Exile On Main Street".
But more often than not, home studios have huge acoustical issues that proprietors may not even be aware of. Usually they have tuned neither their tracking room nor control room. Often they just "deaden" things in the room, controlling some high-frequency issues by over-using soft materials but doing nothing for low-frequency issues.
Then there is the other end of the spectrum: professionally designed tracking and control rooms in a commercial recording studio.
For an example of a modern standard in studio design, one can look to rooms by the great Vincent Van Haaf. Van Haaf is the designer and architect of rooms in many studios, including the famous Conway Studios of Los Angeles. The main idea of the Van Haaf approach involves the use of geometry and space. There will be no parallel surfaces. A control room should be symmetrical from a central line for the purposes of exact stereo imaging.
Van Haaf likes air to be the absorber and diffuser instead of relying on soft, diffusive materials (or as he puts it, "absorption by cotton ball"). This concept applies to both the live and control room.
Those are the basics, but the icing on the cake of Van Haaf's control room design approach is the ceiling design. It involves designing the room like a big speaker horn, in which the ceiling is angled up and away from the monitors. This kind of design ensures the entire room will be a sweet spot.
As you can see, the design of the control room and tracking room of a studio has as much to do with sound quality of your drum tracks as anything. It is probably the most important factor after the expertise of the recording engineer.
It is worth noting that many drum recording services use the same rooms as tracking room and control room. This is generally to be avoided.
The point is to inquire about the rooms being used if no info is given on the website. If a site records in a house, you don't need to rule that service out but you must investigate the properties of the rooms.
Ask about dimensions, and request some pictures if none are provided on the website. If you like what you see, you will want to ensure the pictures displayed are indeed the tracking and control rooms being used.
Los Angeles-based session drummer Shay Godwin provides master-quality, radio-ready online drum tracks for any style of music. In addition to being a session drummer, Shay Godwin is a live/touring drummer for major-label and independent artists. Shay has recorded and/or performed with James Blunt (Warner Records), Charlotte Martin (RCA Records), Butterfly Boucher (Interscope/A&M Records), Thomas Ian Nicholas (independent), Paul Freeman(Arista Records), Al McKay (of Earth Wind and Fire), Rama Duke (Hollywood Records), legendary Persian artist Siavash Ghomayshi, Slow Motion Reign (Capitol Records), The Dirty Diamond (independent), and countless other artists.
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