Whether a recording studio is a sprawling, state-of-the-art professional recording facility frequented by household name recording artists, or a home studio used by a budding home recordist, the aim of the equipment in the studio is the same: to capture musical performances and store them on a chosen medium.
Function
Recording studios are facilities designed for making high quality sound recordings. As such, they are usually designed with input from an acoustician who can manipulate sound reflections and diffusion to ensure that the recording space has ideal acoustic properties.
People usually think of recording studios as places where hit records are made, but as well as recording performing artists, recording studios also function as a place of business where radio jingles and soundtracks for commercials are made, and voice-overs for TV shows and films are recorded.
Types
Recording studios come in all shapes and sizes, from large, fully staffed, multi-rooom professional facilities with huge mixing consoles and racks of high-end effects processors, to small bedroom studios consisting of a computer and a tabletop digital interface. In between, there are small and mid-sized project studios, often with a single owner-operator in charge of the studio booking, and acting as the producer and engineer.
Features
The main room of a recording studio is where the musicians set up their equipment and play. In small studios and home recording set-ups, the mixing console or digital audio workstation (DAW) will also be in this space. In larger studios there's usually a separate sound-proofed control room which houses the mixing console, the power amps and outboard effects processors like compressors, limiters and EQ units. The control room will also have high quality monitor speakers that the engineers use to monitor and mix the recorded tracks. There may also be several isolation booths where noisier instruments like drums and guitar amplifiers are usually housed to avoid having their sound bleed onto other recorded tracks.
Recording medium
Once upon a time, the recording medium was analog tape, and although there are some recordists who still swear by analog tape recordings, and insist that their sound quality is far more pleasing to the ear than digital, their use necessitates the use of bulky reel-to-reel tape machines that require skilled maintenance to function properly. By contrast, digital recording offers far more recording and editing options and require far less space. Consequently, most studios now use computer-based digital audio workstations as their recording systems, with the music files stored on hard drives.
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Types of microphones
While electric instruments like electric guitars and keyboards can be plugged directly into an interface to get the signal onto the computer's hard drive, acoustic sound sources like voices, percussion and acoustic guitars need to be amplified by microphones. Most studios will have a selection of both condenser and dynamic microphones. Condensers are ultra sensitive (and a little delicate) and are well suited to a wide range of tasks, providing a wide frequency response. They're generally favored for recording vocals due to the finely detailed sound they can deliver. Dynamic microphones don't have quite the same quality performance, but are more sturdy and are more adept at handling extreme sound pressure levels (SPLs) that could damage fragile diaphragms in condensers. This is why they're often used to record more explosive sound sources like drums and electric guitar amps.
Misconceptions
Many people think of a recording studio as a sprawling complex with multiple rooms and mountains of elite equipment; a place where hit records are made and significant amounts of money changes hands. While this is sometimes true, the age of reasonably inexpensive and readily available state-of-the-art recording software has enabled a legion of home studio hobbyists to record music of comparable audio quality to the top pro studios in the business, all from the comfort of their own homes. Since basic computer-based digital audio workstations only really require a reasonably fast processor (at least 1GHz), a digital interface to connect microphones and instruments to the computer, and recording software like Pro Tools or Logic Pro, the space required can be as small as a computer desk in a small office or bedroom. Moreover, some of these home recordists have made significant inroads into the music business, gathering significant critical acclaim with recordings made in home studios.
