The Effects of a Recording Studio on Music

recording studio

A recording studio is a specialized facility for sound recording and mixing. They can 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 an entire orchestra of 100 musicians.

In a recording studio, there are two main rooms: the live room, where instruments and vocalists play and sing; and the control room, where sound engineers operate professional audio for analogue or digital recording to route and manipulate the music. Both of these rooms are specially designed by an acoustician or engineer to achieve the optimum acoustic properties needed for good quality sound.

The effects of a recording studio on music are far-reaching. They can change the way music is composed and recorded, by allowing for the creation of new genres. For instance, dub music was born in the studio by producers like King Tubby who used intense audio manipulation to create songs that were unlike anything else on the market.

It also changed the relationship between musicians, engineers and producers. As the role of each became less clear, authorship of a song was diffused. The power struggle between the three facets of production was also intensified, and the role of the producer became more important in music making (Born 1995; Chanan 1995; Cox & Warner 2004).

When preparing a home recording studio, it is essential to control reflections of bass frequencies. These reverberate off walls and interact with the original sound wave, creating points of bass buildup and null alternately. This can be controlled by utilizing absorptive materials such as foam panels, rockwool, or glasswool.