MONITORS & MONITORING – WHAT'S RIGHT FOR YOUR STUDIO
A hard look at the art and science of hearing your music right
In studios of all types and sizes, every decision made—levels, EQ, compression, reverb—is based on what the engineer hears in the studio monitoring system. And that’s not just the speakers, but also the physical environment—the room itself. It can be easy to forget just how critical…
A SUCCESSFUL RECORDING SONGWRITER’S PATH TO A PRODUCTIVE HOME STUDIO
A successful recording songwriter’s path to a productive home studio.
The feeling of being in a room in perfect silence, not preoccupied with potential mistakes, brings a type of focus that I rarely find on stage. It could be the most meditative experience a music-maker can have if it weren’t for the two very distracting factors…
AN ACOUSTICS PRIMER
Get Started With the Fundamentals of Sound and Acoustics...
The latest and greatest gear may get all the attention, but if the acoustics of your studio aren’t suitable, all the toys in the world won’t make for great-sounding recordings. Let’s examine the basics of acoustics, look at issues that can affect our recordings, and discuss practical approaches…
MONITORING: ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
The basic principles of control room design.
Most of the articles we read on acoustic design of control rooms and studios seem to center around materials we might use to treat wall surfaces, including some tips about using those materials for fun and profit. In this article, I’d like to take a different approach, and present what I believe to be some basic principles of control room design…
ROOM ACOUSTICS FUNDAMENTALS
Basics of nodes and standing waves...
Getting your music room to sound good can be a confounding and frustrating experience if you don’t take some basic physics into consideration. There are some fundamental principles of acoustics that apply to all small rooms with parallel walls. Once you are aware of the behavior of sound waves in these spaces, it becomes much easier to understand…
STUDIOS IN URBAN SPACES
Building a studio at home...
As the definition of “recording studio” has changed much over the past several years, we now find recording facilities in places we never imagined possible. Churches, radio stations, rehearsal halls, and of course musicians’ private homes frequently house some sort of project studio…
SUBWOOFERS AND BASS MANAGEMENT
Managing the low end in your studio.
When talking about speaker systems, once upon a time we would use words like “mono” or “stereo” or even “quad” to refer to how many individual “channels” or speakers were involved. Now instead, we hear numbers like 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, and even 10.2 and beyond…