Why Big Recording Room

By Alex Prayther

First, I'd like to say I agree with many of the views stated so far -- great players, great instruments, great mics, great gear and great ears are all vitally important to achieving that polished, "big-label" sound we all strive for. But there is one factor, while touched upon, hasn't been emphasized nearly enough, and that is the physical space itself.

Having had the opportunity to work in a multitude of production facilities, both large and small, I believe I can definitively state that the single most important factor in making a world-class record (given that the talent is up to the task) is a great-sounding room! Unfortunately for most home and project studios, that is the one area in that that are most lacking, and it is the most difficult to address.

Probably the best-sounding room I ever worked in was an studio that had been built into an old, Depression-era vaudeville theatre. It had wood and tile floors, thick tapestries lining the walls, and 40-foot high ceilings. We didn't have the latest, greatest gear to work with, and the mic collection was best described as "modest" by most professional standards, but it was the darndest thing... it didn't even seem to matter what mics we used, everything -- and I mean everything -- we recorded in that room sounded amazing. The acoustics were golden in there. It could be the softest solo piano or the loudest punk band you ever heard, it didn't matter! We didn't even use gobos most of the time -- we had lots of room to spread things out, and the isolation was so good, there was hardly any bleed. For rock bands, we'd always put up a room mic and pump the heck out of it with an 1176, and the whole mix would literally "boom" out of the speakers with hardly any processing.

I've worked in other big rooms, and I've worked in more than my share of small rooms; and the plain old fact is that small rooms suffer, no matter what you do. The low ceilings you find seem to be the most troublesome -- the sound has nowhere to "bloom" or develop, there are horrible nodes and cancellations, and the bottom end is difficult, if not impossible, to keep under control. No mic or board or monitor is going to fix that. They say that the best way to get a great-sounding record is to record great sounds in the first place, and that's true -- but sound occurs in space, and you need a great space to capture it.