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Welcome to Sound Advice. Sound has been my life’s work. I want to share my years experience and knowledge as a world-class engineer, studio designer and builder. My goal is to demystify acoustics and bring practical solutions to the masses. As this section grows, I’ll share my thoughts on issues like:
Let’s get started— Here is a simple statement, yet it is very profound.
There are those that may dispute this. Still it holds great truth and
is the cornerstone of my beliefs. The studio needs to be a safe, comfortable, flexible environment whether it is a commercial, full service facility, a composer’s room or project studio. A private place where the artistic muse is supported. The primary concern in creating this environment is ergonomics, how the facility serves people, enabling them to make qualitative judgments and providing a variety of settings for recording. Design with costs in mind. Most of our clients have a limited budget: their reach exceeds their grasp. As a result, we embrace the Philosophy of Growth Potential. We break down the scope of improvements into manageable stages. Our clients are best served spending their available budget on one stage that will work instead of spending all of their money in a way that won’t translate or can’t be upgraded in the future. When I’m designing studios, the client primarily drives the process. I have satisfaction and pride in my work, but I’m not building the studio for me. Getting to know the client, how they work and what they want is my focus, just as it was when I was recording: Find out what the client needs and make sure they get it. I build a facility that fulfills its function, is comfortable, great looking and represents good value for the money invested. MY BIGGEST LEARNING EXPERIENCE In my career, I have had the fortunate experience of being able to learn from other’s knowledge and mistakes by working in or remodeling their studios. Some were brand-new spaces, some were successful, and some were deficient. Others were long-established rooms that were being upgraded. In rooms with history, you find out what owners and clients like about a room and what they would like to improve. Then we take the room apart and get to see the nuts and bolts of what causes effects and deficiencies, a tremendous learning experience. PRINCIPLES OF ROOM DESIGN As a result, the studio needs to be a safe, comfortable, flexible environment whether it is a commercial, full service facility, a composer’s room or project studio. A private place where the artistic muse is supported. The primary concern in creating this environment is ergonomics, how the facility serves people, enabling them to make qualitative judgments and providing a variety of settings for recording. Design with costs in mind. Most of our clients have a limited budget: their reach exceeds their grasp. As a result, we embrace the Philosophy of Growth Potential. We break down the scope of improvements into manageable stages. Our clients are best served spending their available budget on one stage that will work instead of spending all of their money in a way that won’t translate or can’t be upgraded in the future. When I’m designing studios, the client primarily drives the process. I have satisfaction and pride in my work, but I’m not building the studio for me. Getting to know the client, how they work and what they want is my focus, just as it was when I was recording: Find out what the client needs and make sure they get it. I build a facility that fulfills its function, is comfortable, great looking and represents good value for the money invested. MY BIGGEST LEARNING EXPERIENCE In life, it’s a skill and gift to be able to learn from one’s mistakes. Better still is being able to learn from others. In my career, I have had the fortunate experience of being able to learn from other’s knowledge and mistakes by working in or remodeling their studios. Some were brand-new spaces, some were successful, and some were deficient. Others were long-established rooms that were being upgraded. In rooms with history, you find out what owners and clients like about a room and what they would like to improve. Then we take the room apart and get to see the nuts and bolts of what causes effects and deficiencies, a tremendous learning experience. PRINCIPLES OF ROOM DESIGN In determining how to proceed with a studio design, the first questions to answer include:
Modern designers are moving away from the concept that the console has to be the central focus of the room. For instance, in the Composers’ studio, the console might not be the sweet spot or center of the mix position. The keyboards and computer monitors are in the center and the console is off to the side. I built a studio for composer David Lawrence—David works with an engineer. As a result, he required two workspaces, a composer’s station and a mix position. Eldorado is a good example of breaking the mold and satisfying the clients. The solution? Two control rooms sharing the large studio that could work independently of each other. The main control room is a traditional multitrack configuration and the smaller room is a production space with two separate isolation booths. During large and complex tracking sessions the second control room also serves as additional isolation rooms. During production the second control room is used for editing, and overdubbing. During down time from Studio A lockouts additional clients have a Control Room with a great studio! SHAPE AND SIZE OF THE CONTROL ROOM—our most common shape incorporates a diagonal line on the front wall. The benefits are clear: the longest line in a square is a diagonal. It makes the room feel bigger, removes square corners and gives you a long line to work with on the front wall. Most of the record is made in the control room. I am always campaigning to make the control room the larger footprint. A comfortable and non-fatiguing control room is key, as well as the ability to accommodate overdubbers. THE TRACKING ROOM is what’s left over. We expand the tracking rooms after we have the ‘true’ dimension in the control room, which is 20 plus feet speaker delivery length. Isolation booths are a requirement. I try to accommodate at least one. CONTROL ROOMS The main criterion for acoustics in Control Room design is the time delivery of the speakers. We need to eliminate reflections less than 20 milliseconds from the source (often referred to as the Reflection Free Zone in the listening environment). Any reflection that arrives within 20 milliseconds of the original sound is interpreted as the sound of the original. Any reflection after 20 milliseconds is perceived as the acoustics. As much attention that frequency response receives, it is not the primary consideration. The ability for the listener to determine the location, timing and source of a sound is most critical in making the room accurate and comfortable. I will elaborate on this later in ‘Hidden Fatigue Factors’. I don’t believe that a ‘flat’ room is the ultimate goal. Flat response is nearly impossible to achieve due to room dimensions and other global factors. To insure that the music will successfully move from the studio to the outside world is the most important part. In smaller rooms I try to emulate the sound of a car, in medium size I try to emulate the acoustics of a nice sounding office or living room. This helps as most evaluation of artists’ work is done in the car or in the office. Large rooms, 20’ and longer, are capable of full frequency response, and are generally easier to achieve a great sound. LIVE ROOMS Overall volume (size and SPL) is a major consideration. The overall acoustics of the room are just as critical—the room should sound like it looks—a big room should sound big, a small room should sound small. Trying to get a small room to sound big and vice versa are acoustic blunders. Sometimes, we work in really small rooms (some under 6’ x 6’), especially in project studios. The goal is not to have everything sound like it was recorded in a closet or a bathroom. In restrictive environments, we try to neutralize the acoustic as much as possible so that it is natural but with no significant reverb time. THE BEST ENVIRONMENT TO BUILD IN In looking for an ideal location for studio construction, we recommend Stand-Alone Structures. All in all, they are more economical to construct. Retrofitting an existing structure to accommodate modern building methods, the weight and bulk of sound-resistant construction, building codes, etc. is quite complex and can be more expensive than new construction. HI-FI OR LOW-FI I have learned that the product that comes out of the studio sounds like the studio. A dull room does not make bright recordings. A bright room does not make dull recordings. Mistakes and poor sound lead to production mistakes and poor quality. Just as a small room will not sound like a big room, the sound of the studio manifests itself in every detail. “If you want to make great sounding full frequency recordings, work in a great sounding full frequency environment”. I admit that there are wizards out there that seem to defy the environment. The truth is that this is accomplished by incredible effort and struggle. Luck has very little to do with it. The phenomenal effort that it takes to overcome deficiencies is a tribute to the creative power of the human spirit. This being said, imagine having better tools at your disposal. The proverbial better mousetrap. An accurate and comfortable, non-fatiguing environment leads to easier effort, which leads to more and better ideas. Ideas are the life of studios. COMMON PROBLEMS & DESIGN BLUNDERS Hard, reflective shaped ceilings and soffits. This is perhaps the most difficult condition. It baffles me why they ever built more than one of them. Historically, the design became popular in the early 70’s. Self-contained bands were driving the music business and as a result, the need for control rooms to play louder became important. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the speakers or the amps to create the volume levels needed. So the baffle was increased and the ceiling was made hard and shaped. The necessary loudness resulted, but with less accurate sound. EQ’ing the monitors exacerbates the problem. Even at that time, few people were mixing records in these rooms using the large monitors. It was impossible to make qualitative evaluations that would translate to the outside world. However, you’re still tracking the record in them so they exert an influence on the sound. The goal of the acoustic designer should be to make rooms as accurate as possible. Making them loud is easy with the equipment we have available today. It’s not so simple to make them translate to the outside world. Improperly imposed shapes. This has to be the most common of misconceptions, one I see everyday. Inexperienced designers and do-it-yourselfers, create harmful and often more expensive shapes in the belief that this is how a studio should be. As shape is added to the room, it does help control flutter, and changes the standing wave characteristic. (It is important to note that every room, no matter which shape, has what is commonly referred to as “standing waves”.) But shape also increases the reverb and reflection times. This increase requires more and better acoustic treatments to overcome, often more than would be required to eliminate flutter in a rectangular room. The most damaging imposed shape in the Control Room is the parabolic reflector. It can be achieved by a concave shape or a triangle. It has the effect of focusing sound energy from a large area and beaming it back into the room. By example, think of domed or peaked ceilings. Often what is perceived as shape of the walls is really the shape of the absorbers. It is common for us to cover the corners with a diagonal absorber, or have varying depths of absorbers on the walls. Making these shapes with hard walls has a completely different and often disastrous affect. Too much glass in the front of the control room. This is often unnecessary and creates acoustical problems. Additionally the ‘fishbowl’ effect is not conducive to making records. Remember: the studio is supposed to be a safe, private place. Studio owners and architects like it, but the producers and the artists don’t need it. The control room is a hub of activity, much of it that has little correlation to what is happening in the tracking room. You have the producer, engineers, label people, friends, hangers-on, etc. Reactions in the control room frequently have nothing to do with the band. An intimate relationship exists within the studio that is key to the comfort of the artists and results in great performances. A big window looks good in pictures, but if you’re the talent in the room, your view is of people’s feet and the back of the console. Where is the aesthetic appeal of that for the artist? Not very inspiring. As an engineer, I liked the window…until I made three records. HIDDEN FATIGUE FACTORS: Bad Acoustics. This may seem obvious, but there are other factors. Our brain is always trying to determine where a sound is coming from: this process is instinctual and constant as we work to resolve directionality. As a result, speaker delivery and timing is critical. We all hear space, time and direction very much the same. Frequency response, we hear very subjectively. Therefore the more universal way to approach control room acoustics is from a perspective of space and time. Your brain will not accept an unresolved perception—it must have resolution. Since perception of direction is a part of our survival instinct, we are constantly processing the direction of sound. When the origin of sound is confusing, the result is fatigue. Air Conditioning. At the console, 8 to 10 hours of sweating and freezing as the AC goes through its cycle wears you out. It is a common mistake to focus the airflow on the mix position. We send the airflow around the perimeter of the rooms, resulting in a constant climate at the console. Lighting. Look at studio pictures: Most control rooms don’t have enough lighting above the console. Generally, you’ll find one row above the mix position. This means there will always be deep shadows. The engineer will shift around, finding the right light every time they reach for a knob, which takes more energy. Privacy. There has to be some sense of privacy. In the recording studio, there is precious little time or space to catch a private moment. We need to consider privacy in the design of shared common areas and in the production environment. Constant monitoring of your behavior or the sense that everything you do is public is also fatiguing. Furnishings. Great chairs are an absolute necessity. It amazes me that people would spend $ 10,000 or more for a great seat in their car, which they may occupy an hour a day, and then refuse to spend $500 -$1,500 in a chair they will occupy for more than eight hours everyday. Hard floor surfaces around the work area are very popular and practical. Carpeting is a drag (literally), not ergonomic and difficult to maintain. Moving around on the chair to make adjustments takes more effort. Placement of the Outboard Gear. Proximity and placement of outboard gear needs to be where you can hear to make critical judgments. CHECK BACK - I will continue. |
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