Tim's Water Closet

By Tim Dolbear - www.timdolbear.com

The Drum Room. When I worked at Goodnight LA Studios, we had an exercise room off the main room, well maybe it was a large booth, but exercise equipment had taken over it... When we tracked drums, we would leave the door cracked to that room to let the sound slip in and captured it with a stereo pair of mics. The room was a very lively room and worked as a good drum room verb to tuck in under the drums in the mix.

At Eclectica Studios in CA, we has a small bathroom off the live room the was tiled, so I did the same there. But moving to Austin I knew I'd loose that room, so I set out to make a perfect drum room verb. A short, bright, dense, depth, to bring up under the kit in mix down. Now this is not the short main drum verb, nor a long over all verb in the mix, this is something always there and is a PART of the kit.



Making this verb was interesting, thus why I am writing about it. The short tile room verb patch I created using UA's Realverb and was the closest I got to the real thing. I A/B the real thing with the emulation for days and could not figure out how to get the density up but to decay so fast on such a small room.



The Answer was to place a compressor AFTER the Reverb plugin. The result is my channel preset in Samplitude called Tim's Water Closet.



So mess around with running reverb into a 4:1 compression with about 5-7db reduction on hard hits, you'll be surprised!.

The link below, you can hear the results, there are 2 verbs, the Water closet which is short and tight and the second over all verb, but with out the Water closet, the Samples don't sit well together in the room, : http://www.eclecticarecordings.com/audio/dr1.mp3