The traditional use for a control room is to monitor and adjust sound throughout the recording and mixing process. Sometimes, however, including the control room itself as part of the live recording area can enhance the process in a number of ways. This month we talked with two veteran engineers to learn how they use the control room environment as part of the recording process.
Glenn Lorbecki
Glenn Sound owner Glenn Lorbecki.
Glenn Lorbecki is the proprietor of Glenn Sound in Seattle, a full service recording and audio services business open since 1995. Glenn Sound handles a myriad of projects including music, advertising, and post production. A few of the many artists who have recorded at Glenn Sound include Tori Amos, Third Eye Blind, the White Stripes, Garbage, Everclear, Dave Matthews, Bad Religion, Green Day, and Moby.
How do you use the control room as part of the recording environment?
We often will have the whole band in the control room, minus the drummer, who is alone out in the main live room. This allows us to get a very ambient drum sound and makes communication much easier. Headphones are optional, as everyone in the control room is hearing the same mix that I am. We use our iso booths to run the guitar and bass cabinets with the amp heads in the control room.
The close proximity of the players seems to often help insure that everyone is really on the same page as far as the arrangement, solos, song form and such. Basically, the communication goes way up. During the course of a session, a lot is communicated by facial expressions and body language, and by placing most of the group with the engineer in the control room, you create a more relaxed and communicative setting.
Two views of Glenn Sound's spacious Studio A control room which
is often used to record an entire band while the drummer performs
in the adjacent live room.
A different example that comes to mind was a commercial we were doing for MTV. They had brought in guitarist Lyle Workman who records with Beck, Frank Black, and Sarah Bareilles. They brought him in to create some solo guitar music for an anti-piracy spot. As is often the case with a celebrity session for the advertising world, there were about a dozen people who showed up in the control room to attend the session. What we did was to create a little stage area in the control room where Lyle set up.
We spent the entire day experimenting and he came up with some wonderful music. If he had been out in our live room and we were using a traditional talkback for the producers and clients, it would have been a nightmare, since you can't really read people as well on the other side of the glass. I think if you are doing pop or rock, having the immediacy that working together in the control room is a great way to enhance the rapport all around, as well as the feel of a track.
What are some of the things you need to take into account before trying to use the control room for such a purpose?
The acoustics of your control room become critical if you are going to use mics and record in that space. So just like your studio needs to be acoustically treated, if your control room is a square box without adequate sound treatment, whatever you record in it likely will sound that way. Acoustician Anthony Grimani (MSR, Inc.) has come up with some reasonably priced prefab kits using rock wool and fiberglass panels to treat control room spaces that seem to really work.
You also have to monitor at reasonable levels if you are using the control room for tracking. I keep it between 85-90 dB and can work more hours as a result. For tracking dates, I'll use our KRK 9000 monitors, while on other sessions I may use our KRK 703s or a pair of Mackie HR 824 Mk II monitors we recently added.
Three room views showing from (left to right) Dimension4 Prime, Project, and Pro sound treatment kits in home studio settings.
[Ed note: MSR offers three prefab ready to install kits, the Dimension4 Prime offers the basics with three absorbers, 8 wedge strips, 2 corner traps and 2 ceiling clouds for a suggested retail of $799. The Dimension4 Project offers a mid-level solution using composite absorbers, diffusers and low resonance bass traps. It sells for $1,799. At the top of the Dimension4 prefab control room sound treatment family is the Pro edition, which includes wood diffusers, bass traps and a set of absorbers for a suggested retail of $3,199.]
Barry Rudolph
Veteran engineer and gear guru, Barry Rudolph.
Heading 1,100 miles down the coast to Los Angeles, PSE contributor, veteran engineer, and gear guru Barry Rudolph echoed some of Glenn's ideas while pointing out a new piece of gear perfect for recording in the control room.
Do you often have artists recording right in the control room?
Using the control room more for recording has become pretty routine today. The days of the engineers being isolated are history – take for instance the situation at Abbey Road when the Beatles were making their classic recordings. Those engineers were on a separate floor, up above the studio, staring down on the musicians. There's also a memorable scene in the film biography of producer Tom Dowd, when Eric Clapton recalls Dowd being the first engineer who came down onto the floor to speak with and really relate to the musicians. Young engineers probably would find that comment curious, because today, everyone's input and opinion is equal. By working together in the control room we're all hearing the same thing which speeds up communication.
One thing I do find a bit limiting, though, is having the guitar player in the control room while their amp is in the studio. The guitar and strings are not able to react to the vibrations in the room the same way as if the player was nearby. I think you lose something there.
So what tips do you have to counter that?
One time when I was working at LA's Larrabee Recording, we had a large airlock directly off the control room we would sometimes use for isolating a singer. The problem was that when the singer came in for a playback, as soon as they opened the door, it set up a tremendous feedback howl in the main monitors. Over the course of an all-day session, the singer would get tired or forgets to say ‘I'm coming out now,' or the engineer was busy doing something else. To remedy that problem, the chief engineer and I took the alarm switch that was in the door jamb and re-routed it to a relay that shorted the vocal mic input to ground. So every time the door opened, the mic signal was instantly muted.
The MW1 Studio Tool was designed by engineer and producer Michael Wagener and opens up dozens of creative possibilities.
Another tool that I really love for working in the control room during recording is the MW-1 Studio Tool. Rock producer Michael Wagener invented a single-space rack unit that allows easy interface between the hi-impedance world of guitars and +4 pro audio. Since I review new gear as part of what I do for a living, you realize over time that there are very few pieces of gear allow you to do something brand new. Most new products are a variation or an improvement on a class of products that already exist. The MW1 is unlike any other reamplification product that exists.
You can take a guitar into it and have three simultaneous outputs, for instance you can send the guitar from the control room to three different amps and a tuner with no signal loss. It's especially handy if you are working in the studio with a young band where the guitarist can play his part but may not be sure of what amp to use and how to use it properly. He plays the session with his Marshall, but when you start mixing the song, you really think, ‘I wish we had the sound of a Fender amp on that part.'
Rather than taking the time to test out different amps or get a sound out of a different amp, you can simply have a musician play the part recording it via the MW1's direct out, while also recording whatever amp he favors at that moment. Then, you can go back later and use the Studio Tool to send the +4 recorded signal to a Marshall, a Fender, a Vox AC-30 or any other amp you want to try. Or send it to three amps at once and pick the best one. You can also use it to play along while you double track to an existing track for a fatter tone.
The MW1 does what no other box does, also allowing you to play directly into a piece of +4 pro audio gear on the front end, then route that signal out to the amp of your choosing. For instance, I've used it to play right into an 1176 compressor, then route the signal back out the MW1 and into a Marshall amp. This allows you to create the ultimate stomp box! You could kludge something together using direct boxes and reversing them, but then you run into impedance problems and the headaches those can cause. Michael perfectly designed the impedance going in and out of the Studio Tool to make it a breeze to use in so many creative ways.
[Ed note: A few other points about the MW1 bear noting. Unlike many direct boxes, it is transformerless meaning it will not color your sound. It also delivers up to 30 dB of clean gain, as well as offering separate variable impedance which is perfect for fine tuning your instrument's tonal qualities before you send the signal to an amplifier. Once you've recorded a guitar, bass, keyboard or any other track, you then can have a lot more fun by sending it back out from your work station to an amp, Leslie speaker, stomp boxes, or any other hi impedance processor or amplification device. The creative possibilities are limited only by your imagination and your available time. The MW1 has a suggested retail of $995.]
Resources, time savers and recall sheets
If you haven't spent some time surfing around Barry's site (www.barryrudolph.com) you owe it to yourself to do so. It's loaded with useful tech info, a library of the many reviews he's written over the years and lots of useful links. The site's resources may be especially handy when you have the opportunity to work at an outside studio that has a collection of outboard gear that you may not have at your own studio. If that's the case, check out his links to 964 different recall sheets that use the oldest technology, pencil and paper, to precisely help you document settings for almost any piece of audio gear you might find in a studio.
(See the story links at the end of the article to find two downloadable PDF recall sheet examples: one for the Millennia Media STT-1 Origin preamp and the other for the classic UREI 1176LN limiting amplifier. Why approximate the setting that got your perfect sound? Just download the recall sheet for the gear you are using and keep the paperwork handy for your next session or in the event of a remix.)
Control room vocals
The last topic in this issue is recording vocalists in the control room rather than out in the studio. The first big advantage is that the singer doesn't feel isolated and alone out in the "fish bowl" with the producer and engineer standing in judgment. The next is that if the singer is having trouble working with headphones, you can let him sing with "naked" ears. Bring them into the control room and set up a cardioid or hyper cardioid mic positioned equidistant from left and right monitor speakers. By placing the mic in the null point in the mic's pickup pattern (the spot with the greatest off-axis rejection) you will minimize the monitor signal in the mic.
To further reduce monitor leakage, you can take one of two approaches. The first, which again is an old school technique, is to flip the phase on one of the monitor speakers, and under the advice of engineer Garrett Haines, then "try panning all of the sounds to noon (center), which will help ensure each speaker is getting the same information from every channel. Otherwise, you might not get complete cancellation."
The other approach is to record the vocalist in the control room using the monitors as noted above but without reversing the phase on one of your monitor speakers. Instead, take another pass of the track and record the mic on a separate track with a person standing in the exact same position on the mic, but with no one singing. Then, bring up both tracks equally in the mix and simply flip the phase of the second (non-singing) recorded track when mixing, which will cancel out the leakage found on the first vocal performance track. Try both methods and see which one works better for you.
No matter how you use your control room or mixing area during the recording process, it's another part of your engineering portfolio of possibilities and should be considered throughout the creative process.
