Recording studio
A recording studio is a specialized facility for recording and mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally, both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.
Recording studios may be used to record singers, instrumental musicians, voice-over artists for advertisements or dialogue replacement in film, television, or animation, Foley, or to record their accompanying musical soundtracks. The typical recording studio consists of a room called the "studio" or "live room" equipped with microphones and mic stands, where instrumentalists and vocalists perform; and the "control room", where audio engineers, sometimes with record producers, as well, operate professional audio mixing consoles, effects units, or computers with specialized software suites to mix, manipulate and route the sound for analog or digital recording. The engineers and producers listen to the live music and the recorded "tracks" on high-quality monitor speakers or headphones.
Often, there will be smaller rooms called isolation booths to accommodate loud instruments such as drums or electric guitar amplifiers and speakers, to keep these sounds from being audible to the microphones that are capturing the sounds from other instruments or voices, or to provide "drier" rooms for recording vocals or quieter acoustic instruments such as an acoustic guitar or a fiddle. Major recording studios typically have a range of large, heavy, and hard-to-transport instruments and music equipment in the studio, such as a grand piano, Hammond organ, electric piano, harp, and drums.
Design and equipment
Layout
Recording studios generally consist of three or more rooms:- The live room of the studio is where instrumentalists play their instruments, with their playing picked up by microphones and, for electric and electronic instruments, by connecting the instruments' outputs or DI unit outputs to the mixing console as well as a place where vocalists may perform;
- Isolation booths, or sound enclosures are either enclosed or partially enclosed areas built out of boxes or partitions or are completely separate small sound-insulated rooms with doors, designed for certain instrumentalists. Vocal booths are similarly designed rooms for singers. In both types of rooms, there are typically windows so the performers can see other band members and other studio staff, as singers, bandleaders and musicians often give or receive visual cues;
- The control room, or production/recording room, is where the audio engineers and record producers mix the mic and instrument signals with a mixing console. From here, they can record the singing and playing onto tape or hard disc and listen to the recordings and tracks with monitor speakers or headphones and manipulate the tracks by adjusting the mixing console settings and by using effects units;
- The machine room, where noisier equipment, such as racks of fan-cooled computers, tape recorders and power amplifiers, is kept to prevent the noise from interfering with the recording or listening processes.
Amplified instruments, like electric guitars, synthesizers, drum machines and keyboards, may be connected directly to the recording console using DI units and performance recorded in the control room. This greatly enhances the communication between the producer and engineer with the player, as studio mics, headphones and talkback are unnecessary.
Recording studios are carefully designed around the principles of room acoustics to create a set of spaces with the acoustical properties required for recording sound with accuracy. Architectural acoustics includes acoustical treatment and soundproofing and also the consideration of the physical dimensions of the room itself to make the room respond to sound in the desired way. Acoustical treatment includes and the use of absorption and diffusion materials on the surfaces inside the room. To control the amount of reverberation, rooms in a recording studio may have a reconfigurable combination of reflective and non-reflective surfaces. Soundproofing provides sonic isolation between rooms and prevents sound from entering or leaving the property. A Recording studio in an urban environment must be soundproofed on its outer shell to prevent noises from the surrounding streets and roads from being picked up by microphones inside.
Equipment
A recording studio is typically equipped with a range of professional tools designed to capture, mix, and refine audio. At the heart of the studio is a professional-grade mixing console, which serves as the central hub for managing audio signals. To accommodate additional input sources, such as when miking a full drum kit and all channels on the main console are occupied, smaller auxiliary mixing consoles may be used to expand channel capacity.Microphone preamplifiers are essential for boosting mic-level signals to a usable level, and audio is usually captured using either a multitrack recorder or a digital audio workstation running on a computer. A wide selection of microphones is available, each chosen for its suitability with different instruments or vocal styles, and direct input boxes are used to connect instruments directly to the console or interface.
Microphone stands allow for precise placement of mics in front of vocalists, instrumentalists, or ensembles, while studio monitors and closed-back monitoring headphones are used for critically listening to recordings without sound leakage. Lighted signs reading "On Air" or "Recording" are often installed to signal when silence is needed in the studio.
To shape the sound further, engineers may employ outboard effects units such as dynamic range compression, reverbs, and equalizers. Music stands are also commonly found in the studio to hold sheet music for performers during recording sessions.
Instruments
Not all music studios are equipped with musical instruments. Some smaller studios do not have instruments, and bands and artists are expected to bring their own instruments, amplifiers, and speakers. However, major recording studios often have a selection of instruments in their live room, typically instruments, amplifiers and speaker cabinets that are large, heavy, and difficult to transport or infeasible to hire for a single recording session. Having musical instruments and equipment in the studio creates additional costs for a studio, as pianos have to be tuned and instruments and associated equipment needs to be maintained.Digital audio workstations
General-purpose computers rapidly assumed a large role in the recording process. With software, a powerful, good quality computer with a fast processor can replace the mixing consoles, multitrack recording equipment, synthesizers, samplers and effects unit that a recording studio required in the 1980s and 1990s. A computer thus outfitted is called a digital audio workstation, or DAW.While Apple Macintosh is used for most studio work, there is a breadth of software available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
If no mixing console is used and all mixing is done using only a keyboard and mouse, this is referred to as mixing in the box. OTB describes mixing with other hardware and not just the PC software.
Project studios
A small, personal recording studio is sometimes called a project studio or home studio. Such studios often cater to the specific needs of an individual artist or are used as a non-commercial hobby. The first modern project studios came into being during the mid-1980s, with the advent of affordable multitrack recording devices, synthesizers and microphones. The phenomenon has flourished with falling prices of MIDI equipment and accessories, as well as inexpensive direct to disk recording products.Recording drums and amplified electric guitar in a home studio is challenging because they are usually the loudest instruments. Acoustic drums require sound isolation in this scenario, unlike electronic or sampled drums. Getting an authentic electric guitar amp sound, including power-tube distortion, requires a power attenuator or an isolation cabinet, or booth. A convenient compromise is amplifier modeling, whether a modeling amp, preamp/processor, or software-based guitar amp simulator. Sometimes, musicians replace loud, inconvenient instruments such as drums with keyboards, which today often provide somewhat realistic sampling.
The capability of digital recording introduced by ADAT and its comparatively low cost, originally introduced at $3995, were largely responsible for the rise of project studios in the 1990s. Today's project studios are built around software-based DAWs running on standard PC hardware.
Isolation booth
An isolation booth is either a partially enclosed area in the live room or a completely separate small room built adjacent to the live room that is both soundproofed to keep out external sounds and keep in the internal sounds. Like all other recording rooms in the sound industry, isolation booths are designed to minimize the amount of diffused reflections from walls, creating a good-sounding room. A drummer, vocalist, or guitar speaker cabinet, along with microphones, is acoustically isolated in the isolation booth. A typical professional recording studio today has a control room, a large live room, and one or more small isolation booths.All rooms are soundproofed by varying methods, including but not limited to, double-layer 5/8" sheetrock with the seams offset from layer to layer on both sides of the wall that is filled with foam, batten insulation, a double wall, which is an insulated wall built next to another insulated wall with an air gap in-between, by adding foam to the interior walls and corners, and by using two panes of thick glass with an air gap between them. The surface densities of common building materials determines the transmission loss of various frequencies through materials.
Thomas A. Watson invented, but did not patent, the soundproof booth for use in demonstrating the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell in 1877. There are variations of the same concept, including a portable standalone isolation booth and a guitar speaker isolation cabinet. A gobo panel achieves the same effect to a much more moderate extent; for example, a drum kit that is too loud in the live room or on stage can have acrylic glass see-through gobo panels placed around it to deflect the sound and keep it from bleeding into the other microphones, allowing better independent control of each instrument channel at the mixing console.
In animation, vocal performances are normally recorded in individual sessions, and the actors have to imagine they are involved in dialogue. Animated films often evolve rapidly during both development and production, so keeping vocal tracks from bleeding into each other is essential to preserving the ability to fine-tune lines up to the last minute. Sometimes, if the rapport between the lead actors is strong enough and the animation studio can afford it, the producers may use a recording studio configured with multiple isolation booths in which the actors can see each other and the director. This enables the actors to react to one another in real time as if they were on a regular stage or film set.