The Recording Studio

Recording Studio Stuff

When people talk about “the sound” of a famous studio, they usually mean the room. Walls, ceiling height, floor material and shape decide how long a sound lingers and what it does to the microphones, before any equipment has a say. Studio designers and engineers have treated the room as part of the instrument for about a century.

This post looks at how that played out, using Wikipedia’s recording studio history and two Sound On Sound articles. Both of those are old magazine pieces, so I name their dates.

The era of the big live room

Wikipedia says that electric recording studios in the mid-20th century often lacked isolation booths and baffles, partly because records were made as live ensemble takes and the performers needed to see each other and the leader. Engineers of the time learned to use the leakage between microphones and groups of instruments, and became very skilled at capturing the acoustics of their particular studio.

That is why Wikipedia says many of the larger studios were converted churches, for their superb acoustics. It names George Martin’s AIR Studios in London and Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio in New York as examples. It also tells a story from sound historian David Simons: after Columbia took over the 30th Street Studio in the late 1940s, A&R manager Mitch Miller tweaked it to perfection and ordered that the drapes and fittings not be touched. Cleaners were told never to mop the bare wooden floor, for fear it might alter the acoustics of the hall.

A large studio hall with a wooden floor, rows of chairs and music stands set out for an orchestra, and a grand piano

Image: An orchestral recording session at Abbey Road Studios, London (2010) by David Boyle, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A big room is not automatically a good room

A January 1992 Sound On Sound history of Abbey Road says Studio 1 was 94 by 55 by 42 feet high and built to hold 150 musicians. Its acoustics were still troublesome, because with a large orchestra the absorption dried up the mid and top-end reverb time, leaving an imbalance against the bass. In 1958, the studio’s research division tried to fix this with 100 loudspeakers on the walls fed through magnetic delay drums, an attempt the article says was only partially successful.

The room you build: echo chambers

Wikipedia describes another way of using space. Many of the best studios had purpose-built echo chambers, often beneath the main studio. They were typically long, low rectangular rooms made of hard, reflective material such as concrete, with a loudspeaker at one end and one or more microphones at the other. A signal from the studio microphones was fed to the speaker, the sound reverberated through the chamber, and the microphone at the far end picked up the result, which was often used to sweeten vocals.

Sound On Sound ran a video feature in November 2022 on the original Studio Two echo chamber at Abbey Road, which it says has lent its ambience to everyone from Cliff Richard to the Beatles and was brought back into use in the 1990s. It is a good example of a room that was treated as an instrument and is still in use.

Then the booths arrived

Wikipedia says that in the 1970s, as the large record companies adopted multitrack recording, the emphasis shifted to isolation and soundproofing. Reverb and echo were added separately in the mix instead of being captured in the room. Its isolation booth article describes the basic design: a partly enclosed area in the live room or a small room beside it, soundproofed to keep outside sound out and inside sound in, and designed to reduce reflections from the walls so it sounds good.

So there are two philosophies. One records the whole room at once and uses the space as a part of the sound. The other isolates every source and builds the space afterward. Neither is right; it depends on the music.

What working producers say they want

In a May 1996 Sound On Sound article, David Mellor interviewed producers about choosing a studio. Stephen Street, who has produced The Smiths and Blur among others, said it has to sound right in the control room and that there must be a good playing area for the band to record in. He preferred wood rooms to stone rooms and wasn’t keen on studios with huge control rooms and tiny playing areas. Mellor’s own list is to look for freedom from outside noise, a pleasant acoustic environment to perform in and an accurate control room for judging the mix.

A famous room that began as a coffin showroom

Not every great room was built to impress. Wikipedia says Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, was founded in 1969 in a concrete block building from around 1946 that had previously been a coffin showroom. Producer Jerry Wexler provided the start-up funding. My own takeaway is that what a room sounds like matters more than what it started out as. Here is the main area of the studio today.

A recording room with a grand piano, guitars on the walls and framed records

Image: The main area of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio (2025) by Peter K Burian, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

If you want more on how rooms are tamed at home, the series post Acoustic Treatment vs Soundproofing: They Are Not the Same Thing covers what treatment can and cannot do.

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