A production room on a residential street in Burbank cannot hold a drum kit, for acoustic reasons and for neighbour reasons, and no amount of treatment changes that. The working answer is a split session. Book a large room in North Hollywood or Van Nuys for half a day and track the kit there, then bring the multitrack back to Burbank for overdubs, vocals, editing and mix. Both of those are roughly ten to twenty minutes away outside rush hour. The whole method depends on three decisions made before the drum day, and if they are made badly the files do not line up.
Why can a Burbank production room not take drums?
Two separate reasons, and only one of them is about sound.
The acoustic reason is volume in cubic metres. A kit hit properly puts out well over 110 dB SPL at the player's ear, and the low mid energy needs distance to develop. In a room with a ceiling around 2.6 metres, the first reflection off that ceiling arrives within about 8 milliseconds of the direct sound, which is close enough to comb-filter the overheads rather than to sound like a room. You can absorb the top end and make it dull. You cannot make it big.
The neighbour reason is regulatory. North Burbank around North Catalina Street is single-family housing with detached garages, built close together. Los Angeles and Burbank both handle this through nuisance provisions rather than through a fixed decibel table: LAMC Section 41.57 prohibits "loud and raucous noise" and weighs the hour, the place and the circumstances instead of publishing a number. In practice that means a drum kit at 9pm is a complaint, and one complaint on a residential street costs more than a room rental.
There is a third detail specific to this part of Burbank. Hollywood Burbank Airport is close, and departures are audible. For a close-miked vocal that is a non-issue. For open room mics on a kit, it is one more reason the kit belongs somewhere else.
What do North Hollywood and Van Nuys actually offer?
Space that was built for something else.
North Hollywood and Van Nuys are neighbourhoods of the city of Los Angeles, not separate cities, which matters for anything involving permits or noise since both fall under the same municipal code. Burbank and Glendale next door are their own cities with their own rules, and people mix this up constantly when they start calling around.
The useful geography is the light industrial stock. Around the NoHo Arts District, near Lankershim and Magnolia, and in the older commercial blocks of Van Nuys off Oxnard and Sherman Way, there are single-storey buildings with ceilings over four metres, concrete floors and roll-up doors. Those three features are what a drum room needs, and they exist there because the buildings were warehouses and machine shops before anyone put a kit in them. Rehearsal complexes in the same blocks often rent hourly to tracking sessions during the day, when their evening band traffic has not arrived.
Roll-up doors deserve a specific mention. Load-in with a kit, hardware and cases is the part that eats the first hour of a session, and the difference between a roll-up at floor level and a flight of stairs is thirty minutes of session time you are paying for either way.
How long is the drive, and when should you book?
From North Catalina Street in Burbank, the NoHo Arts District is about five miles, and central Van Nuys is roughly nine or ten. Outside peak hours that is around twelve minutes and twenty minutes respectively, using Burbank Boulevard or Victory Boulevard westbound rather than the 170.
During peak it stops being a five mile drive in any meaningful sense. Book the kit in for a 10am or 11am start. Load-in happens after the morning commute, tracking runs through the middle of the day, and the drive back with drives and cases happens before the eastbound afternoon build. A 4pm start looks fine on a calendar and turns into two trips inside the worst two hours of the day.
What has to be agreed before the drum day?
Three things, in writing, before anyone loads in.
Sample rate and bit depth. 48 kHz and 24 bit, agreed with the room in advance. A room that normally works at 44.1 will happily record your session at 44.1 and hand you files that need conversion before they can sit next to anything else. Agreeing this by text message the night before takes one minute.
A common start point. Every file starts at the same place, ideally with timecode, and every take carries a count-in of at least two bars. Broadcast Wave Format files carry an origination timestamp in the bext chunk, and if the room prints BWF rather than plain WAV, the takes drop into the Burbank session in the right place instead of being nudged by ear.
Nothing printed on the way in. No compression, no EQ, no tape emulation, no gate on the toms. Ask for the raw multitrack plus, if they want, a rough with their processing as a separate reference. A gate printed to a tom track is a decision that cannot be reversed, and the person who made it is not going to be in the room when the mix happens.
Two smaller ones worth asking about: whether the click is printed as its own track, and whether the room mics are on separate channels rather than summed. Both are free at the time and expensive to want later.
What does a drum day cost in hours?
Setup and tuning takes 90 minutes to two hours before a usable take exists, and that is with a drummer who tunes their own kit. Tracking runs four to six hours for three or four songs. Breakdown is another 45 minutes. So a "half day" for drums is realistically seven hours door to door, and booking four is how sessions end with two usable songs and an argument.
The economics are the reason to split rather than to book the big room for everything. Large tracking rooms charge for the space and the engineer whether you are recording a kit or a tambourine. Overdubs, vocal comping, editing and mixing do not need that space at all, and a production room is better for them: a small treated room with good near-fields is a more accurate place to make decisions than a live room with an unfamiliar monitoring path.
What comes back to Burbank?
Everything except the kit.
Bass, guitars, keys, any traditional instrumentation, lead vocals, stacks, editing, tuning, mix. In practice that is 80 to 90 percent of the hours on a record, done in a room where the monitoring is known and where nobody is watching a clock that costs a hundred dollars an hour.
The handoff itself is simple when the three agreements above were made. A drive, or an upload, with the raw multitrack, the click, the room mics, and a text file naming the takes. If the drive arrives with files at 44.1 and no count-in, the first two hours in Burbank get spent on things that should never have needed doing.
Frequently asked
Can I use programmed drums and skip all of this? Often, yes, and for a lot of pop the programmed kit is the right sound rather than a compromise. This applies when a real kit is the point of the record, which is usually rock, live-band arrangements, and anything where the fills carry the performance.
Can we track drums at the same time as bass? Yes, and it usually helps the feel. Put the bass amp in an isolation booth if the room has one, or take a DI and reamp later in Burbank. Bleed from an amp into overheads is the one thing that will lock you out of changing the bass tone afterwards.
How far ahead do rooms book? Weekday daytime is easier than evenings, since evenings are rehearsal traffic. A week ahead is usually enough for a Tuesday afternoon. A Saturday is not.
If you are planning a record that needs a real kit
The split session works, and it works better when the drum day is planned around what happens afterwards rather than on its own. Send the arrangement, the tempo map and how many songs you want to cut, and I will tell you how many hours the drum day actually needs and what the room has to print so the rest of the record does not fight it.
Production, overdubs, vocals, mixing and mastering happen at North Catalina Street in Burbank. Full credit list at /credits, background and contact at /about.