Question about the recording room in Ken's YouTube channel

genxmark

Hi. Ken redirected me to this forum for a question I had. I noticed the room the singer are in is small and doesn't have sound treatment. The back wall is brick and the other walls just look plain flat. The microphone is great, the singer is great, but I would think the room would need some treatment? Or does it just not matter? In my experience this would create some resonance and comb filtering issues when singer hits certain notes at certain volume levels. From what I hear in the YT videos there are no issues. Perhaps there is a fix in post processing? Thanks!

Wigs

@Klaus_T @highmtn Any idea about this?

highmtn

Ken likes live rooms. Rooms with a little bit of natural reverb. The room he's using now has a high ceiling and has wood flooring and ceiling, and no sound treatment on the walls. There is a small carpet on the floor, but the room is mostly reflective wood.

The room is actually bigger than it looks in the videos. I was surprised at how big it actually is when I saw it in person for the first time.

There are a lot of people who spend a lot of money making their recording rooms very dead, acoustically speaking. Ken likes a very LIVE sounding room.

One of the reasons people want to record in a dead sounding room is because they want to edit and slice and dice the vocals, recording maybe one word or note or syllable at a time. You don't have to do that if you can sing well enough to get full takes without splicing together a Frankenstein of overdubs. A dead room makes it easier to hide edits. Then you smear the cuts over with artificial reverb. Room resonance may make it more difficult to chop up bits and pieces of audio to collage them into a composited verse or chorus.

There is a lot of misinformation about how buying expensive acoustical treatments is what you need to get great recordings. Ken has a few, but not many, pieces of acoustical tiles in his control room, but only a few Persian carpet throw rugs in his vocal studio. If you are close enough to the mic, you get very little room sound in the mic, compared to the level of the vocal. It sounds so natural, you don't notice it.

If you do have acoustical issues, like standing waves or objectionable resonances, you may need to do a lot of treatment, or start over with a room that is better suited for recording.

Ken's studio in Hawaii (which was covered with lava about 3 years ago) had hard floors, ceilings, and walls, all wood. The room was very, very LIVE. His mixing room was like that, as well. He made hundreds of awesome recordings and mixes in that studio.

OliviaWenya

Just wanting to add to the above From personal experience, another reason you want a dead room is because it's easier to get consistant audio from multiple different locations. Proven with rona.

Matching room resonans etc. would be a lot harder than throwing up a bunch of acoustic treatment

genxmark

that's great information. I did more tests with my singer and brought her to an open field (no walls = no reflections). Sounds like there is some natural harshness in her voice anyways, kinda like Adele has. It wasn't comb filtering after all. She just had some natural harshness in certain notes. Upgrading my recording chain (with tube pre-amp and tube mic now), things sound like 80% better. My room is 12 x 11 ft bedroom with carpet. I agree about the distance from the microphone. There are times the singer is about 1 foot away. Perhaps we should try closer more often. Good points about the editing, doing longer takes, and the application of reverb. I can see how that can hide it in most pop recordings.