One of those rooms......

mikyok

Platinum Member
Played a wedding on Saturday, the venue was a big stately home Ludlow way. The room had the best drum sound I have ever heard. The kit sounded uncannily like 'When The Levee Breaks'. Unfortunately it was crap for anything else.

Anyone else got any similar stories? Here's a pic of the room in question!
 

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Thinking that beautiful solid wood floor would definitely be of benefit.
 
What a beautiful room! My wife and I used to own a big 1903 home with rooms like that. I loved that house, but the upkeep was killing us. Had to let it go.

The reason your drums sounded so great there was because of the entryway directly behind you. Apparently it was just the right size that the sound waves emanating from behind your kit were aligning perfectly as they exited the room with the direct sound waves so that it acted as a sonic reenforcement and a perfect reverb effect. The crappy sound from the PA was happenstance as well. Square room, tall ceilings, practically no room treatment all adds up to standing waves galore. And those JBL Eon speakers (I presume) you were using as monitors were adding to the cacaphony by creating time delay with the main speakers. Add that to the aforementioned problems and . . . . well, you get what you had. Lucky you. At least if you need to record your drums some time in the future, you'll know exactly where to go!

Nice looking drumset, by the way.

GeeDeeEmm
 
The other PA system behind ours belonged to the venue and was just permenantly setup. We tried our floor wedges but made things worse.

The room we were in was one of many, I think it was the ballroom, the house (well palace really) was built by some Earl in the 18th Century and had lakes and secret gardens as well as a driveway that was about a mile and a half long as well as stables, fields and people driving about on golf carts to get from one side to the other! How the other half live comes to mind!

The kit looks nice from a distance, it's my workhorse Ludwig 60's BD 70's everything else, 1984 snare, drums aren't matching at all just recovered them in a cheap green sparkle. Unfortunately it attracts drunken idiots like nothing I've ever seen before!
 
Ludlow area, you say? I'm wondering if I may have played in that very room, several years ago... wherein, adding to the acoustic issues, I was the only person present not in fancy dress. :)
 
Ludlow - not a million miles from me :)

When faced with a room like this, less is absolutely more. The less sound you can drive into the room, the better the definition will be. Believe it or not, compacting the bass & guitar rear line as close to the kit as practical, & maybe even running a centred vocal PA, works really well. Essentially, you're trying to create as mono/single sound source landscape as possible.
 
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