^ I'm not going to criticize his response because it's so far out there that I have to assume he was being sarcastic. Lol.
I think I read about a popular 80s band who recorded drums in a bathroom for a song before, though. If "80s hair band" is the sound you're going for, go right ahead!
There are also some top stars who record vocals in hotel rooms for mixtapes (Lil Wayne has done this), but their hotel rooms are bigger and just generally more suitable for recording than your peasant-class hotel room is.
Anyway, it's going to sound BAD. A small, untreated, mostly empty room. No absorption and extremely little diffusion. The particular flavor of "bad" will be "boxy".
I don't know who is going to mix it, but I call "not it"!
I know that's not what you wanted to hear.
On the positive side, though, your acoustics can basically only get better from now on!
To make the sound as "less bad" as possible, take that mattress and flip it so that it's standing alongside the wall right behind you as you record. That's right -- not behind the microphone, but behind YOU. The reasoning behind this is that your microphone's pickup pattern is directional -- it picks up mostly what it's pointed at. This means that the strongest reflections ("reverb") it's picking up are the ones bouncing off the wall from the direction the mic is pointed.
The alternative strategy to deadening the room (putting something absorptive behind the MIC) only works if you're right up on the mic.
When I say "right up on the mic" I mean you're so close to the mic that you're almost kissing it, to the point where the proximity effect is making you sound like a monster, and where your plosives ("p"/"b"/"t") are causing some major capsule distortion. This alternative strategy can also cause comb-filtering issues, where high-frequency sound waves are being absorbed, but lower-frequency waves are bouncing back into the capsule after only a millisecond or so, which leads to an EXTREMELY boxy, comb-filter-y, cheap sound.
Using the desktop stand that your mic comes with will create some issues as well. Putting a microphone's capsule right next to a surface (a wall, the ground, a desktop, etc.) will lead to even MORE of that boxy, small, comb-filter-y sound. You're letting sound waves bounce near the capsule extremely quickly, without much time for their amplitude to dissipate.
At this point, if you don't know what I mean by "comb-filtery, boxy sound", download a professional acapella from a hit song off the Internet. Bring it into your DAW.
Create a delay as a send FX, and send your acapella to it. Set feedback to 0%, Dry/Wet to 100% wet, and delay time to around 1-3 milliseconds.
Now, on your delay send, attach an EQ. One band: High shelf at around 550Hz. Gain reduction of about 7dB. Q of around 0.5.
This will approximate the recording conditions of a medium-sized closet treated entirely with 1" acoustic foam. This is what we call "boxy". This is the kind of vocal I hate having sent to me to mix.
-Ki
Salem Beats
