The single biggest step in transforming a 'project studio' into a fully fledged recording studio is when you finally have a separate control room and recording studio. This is when you can monitor the performance through your nearfield monitors, see the musician through your heavy glass window and truly begin to enjoy the process of engineering. Finally, you can twist all of those knobs in private! Ah the joy! And although there is a ton of available articles on control room acoustics, it seems that the recording studio - where the actual recording is done - is rarely discussed. This paper hopes to offer insight and ideas on what you should consider when creating your recording space.

What is the perfect recording studio?
A recording space should be flexible. In other words, it has to be able to adapt to a drum kit on Monday, a clarinet on Tuesday, a Marshall stack Wednesday and a voice-over for overdubs on Thursday. But how can one room do it all? Simple… think in terms of the live-end dead-end concept - LEDE - add a pinch of creative thought and apply it to your room. You really can't go to far wrong.

First, think about the room itself. If is completely untreated you can be sure that when you put a drum kit in the room, it will resonate like crazy and likely be difficult to get a nice tight sound. At the other extreme, if the room is too dark or overly treated, all of the instruments you record will sound dry and unnatural. This means that you will constantly be adding artificial ambiance' to the tracks. It comes down to balance.

This is where the LEDE concept has merit; you can have one end of your room treated with 60% of your acoustic budget while the other end could be treated more sparsely with the left over 40%. When recording drums, you could get a more controlled effect in the dead end and a more ambient sound in the live end. For voice recording, the dead end would eliminate much of the ambiance and let you add the effects as needed. Acoustic instruments such as guitars tend to sound more natural when the room acoustics are included. You could therefore position the guitar in the center of the room and have an omni-directional mic in the live-end to capture the space. There is no right - it is a matter of creatively using the space at hand.

How much material should I use?
Generally speaking, you are better to start with less and add more as you go. Start by recording in your room so that you can hear what it does. If you find that you are experiencing strange tones, you likely are hearing phase cancellation due to room modes causing a comb-filtering effect and therefore, you should consider adding more acoustic treatment.

One of the cool things about the Broadway panels is that the impaler clips make them both easy to put up and easy to relocate. Most successful studio owners start with a couple of boxes of Broadway panels and begin by creating the dead space. As you are putting panels up on the wall, nothing will happen… another panel - still nothing and then wham! All of a sudden the room will change. It will tighten up and you will hear it immediately. Stop. You are now ready to go over to the live end. This time, just think in terms of eliminating parallel surfaces. The Primacoustic Scatter Blocks are great for this as they can be placed in a random fashion around the space to tame the ambiance. Remember, this end is live.

Budget Light Medium
Live-end Dead-end Live-end Dead-end Live-end Dead-end
A 12'x14'x8' (ceiling)
B 13'x15'x8'
B 15'x16'x9'
A 16'x18'x10'