Recording Studio

Recording Studio Stuff

“Recording studio” is one phrase covering a surprising range of places. A teenager’s spare-room setup, a room built to record film dialogue and a truck parked outside a concert hall all record sound, but they are built for very different jobs.

This post sorts the main types by what they are for. The definitions come mostly from Wikipedia, with named sources for each type.

The music studio

This is the one people picture: a live room, control room and booths, set up for singers and musicians. Wikipedia’s recording studio article says these range from a small in-home project studio to a building that can hold an orchestra, and that studios may also record voice-over artists, Foley and the soundtracks that go with them.

The project or home studio

Wikipedia calls a small personal studio a project studio or home studio, often built around one artist’s needs or used as a non-commercial hobby. It dates the first modern ones to the mid-1980s, when affordable multitrack recorders, synthesizers and microphones appeared, and says today’s are built around software-based DAWs on ordinary computers. Its article on home recording adds that the practice is widespread among voice actors, narrators, singers, musicians, podcast hosts and documentary makers.

The same article warns about one weak point: untreated rooms have an uneven frequency response, so mixing decisions end up based on a sound that is “colored”. Loud instruments are the other trouble spot. Wikipedia says acoustic drums and amplified electric guitar are hard to record at home because they are the loudest instruments.

The voice-over booth

Voice-over, according to Wikipedia, is a technique in which a voice narrates or comments on a production from outside the action. The article says it is used in radio, television, film, theatre and other media, and that the voice-over is read from a script. My own gloss: a voice booth is a small, dry space where as little of the room as possible reaches the microphone.

A silver microphone on a stand with dark acoustic foam behind it, set up for recording speech

Image: A microphone set up for voice-over recording in a booth by Binksternet, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

ADR rooms

Wikipedia’s article on dubbing explains automated dialogue replacement, or ADR. It is the process of re-recording dialogue, by the original actor or a replacement, in a sound booth after filming. The reasons include improving audio quality, for example when set microphones picked up wind or passing traffic, and changing lines. Actors repeat the lines while watching the picture and trying to match their own filmed performance. In the early days of sound film, a loop of film was played repeatedly while the voice actor performed the lines, which is where the term “looping” comes from.

Foley stages

Foley is the reproduction of everyday sound effects added to films, video and games in post-production. The article names it after Jack Foley, who started in the silent-movie era at Universal Studios. Typical Foley sounds are footsteps, clothing swishes, squeaky doors and breaking glass, and Foley can also cover unwanted set sounds such as overflying airplanes or traffic. Wikipedia says the best Foley is so well integrated that it goes unnoticed. The article calls the places where this happens a Foley stage or Foley studio.

A man leaning over the floor with a boom microphone and props in a padded Foley room

Image: A Foley room at the Vancouver Film School Sound Design Campus (retouched by User:Quenhitran) by Vancouver Film School, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Radio and podcast studios

Wikipedia says radio production studios, where interviews are taped for later broadcast, are very like recording studios. On-air studios use the same isolation principles with extras for live use: a telephone hybrid to put calls on air, a dead-air alarm for unexpected silence, and a broadcast delay to drop anything from coughs to profanity.

Mobile and remote recording

Some jobs need the studio to come to the music. Wikipedia’s article on remote recording describes trucking studio-quality equipment to a venue and connecting it to the concert microphones, often in a purpose-built truck that works as a rolling control room. It lists two reasons: performers respond to the audience and are not distracted by the recording process, and a venue such as a church or ballroom offers an acoustic space a studio cannot. It says engineer Wally Heider, beginning modestly in 1958, developed and popularized the remote truck in California in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Choosing the right kind

This part is my own suggestion rather than something from the sources. If you want to record a song with a band, you want a music studio with a decent live room. If you are narrating audiobooks, you want a quiet, dry space and a good microphone more than a console. If your project is a film, dialogue and effects work is a specialty of its own, and it is worth asking whether a studio does it before you book. For a first project at home, the series post Home Recording Studio Basics: The Big Picture shows what a basic setup involves.

Sources