THE PROJECT STUDIO: PART I

CREATURE COMFORT IN THE STUDIO

by Richard Leiter

High-level professional recording studios are well-oiled pleasure machines. I love entering a studio for the first time: The equipment glows warmly, the faders await my fingers. The soft leather of an ergonomically exquisite chair embraces me as a cadre of attentive (but never, no never, obsequious) assistants ply me with gentle questions: "Was that timecode 30 non-drop, Mr. Leiter?" "Will we be going digital or Dolby SR today, Mr. Leiter?" "What flavor biscotti with your latte, Mr. Leiter?"

I can't help but giggle and squirm with delight. A fine studio is like a five-star restaurant: An elusive blend of service, quality, and attention to detail that makes you want to keep coming back and tell your friends.

And then you get the bill.

Yeow! Those $400 hours can really add up! But the joy! The comfort! How can we get that je ne sais quoi pro studio experience in our very own project studios — at a fraction of the cost? To answer this thorny question I turned to my personal braintrust, and they offered a panoply of astute tips.

YES, BUTT. . . .

Number one response to my query, by a wide margin, was: Get a great chair. And I don't mean a ten-year-old drum throne with a padded tush. Go to a good office supply store and really investigate. Get something that does more than go up and down. Try to find one with a seat that tilts and a back that goes in and out.

Now the bad news. (Are you sitting down?) This chair could cost between four and nine hundred dollars. Is it worth it? Well let's say the chair lets you work an extra 15 minutes a day, times 52 weeks a year, times the 20 chiropractor appointments you won't need, times the 40 great ideas you'll come up with because your back isn't killing you. Now, is the chair worth two new compressors? My derriere says: "Mais, oui."

ERGOMANIA

After the chair comes a deluge of suggestions all geared to placing the equipment in the most rational position for the human body to work with it. One suggestion that kept turning up was to have all your working surfaces (keyboard controller, computer keyboard, mouse/trackball, desktop, and console) at convenient but slightly different heights. This forces you to move that terrific new chair up and down frequently during the day and that lessens the strain on your lower back. If the chair is positioned high for a given task, you'll need a footrest to avoid back strain.

My friend David says he even puts some important, but less often used, equipment outside the U shape of his studio. (Everyone's project studio is more-or-less U-shaped. Let's face it: We're the U generation.) That means he's got to get up and stretch now and then, and that keeps him young and handsome. He's also outgrown the single U; he's got two seating areas. This way, if he's working with an engineer, he isn't actually forced to touch the engineer. This can be an asset or liability, depending on your relationship with the engineer.

GET PERSONAL

Ergonomics are very personal. You have to decide what your most important equipment is and get it close to you. My friend Judy likes to have her big video monitor up near the ceiling, so she needs a chair with a big tilt and a high back. That way she can almost recline as she's viewing playback. It's a pleasurable break in the intensity.

To my pal Jimmy, QWERTY keyboard and trackball placements are everything. He does almost all film scoring and hates to take his hands off the keys. So he's found a keyboard controller that has lots of open space on top where he can position his controller, remotes, and all his Mac input devices so that they're right beneath his various monitors.

GET EVEN MORE PERSONAL

The theme here is to do what's necessary to solve your individual problems. For example, my friend Garrett moved from a hill-house in Hollywood to a hill-house in Northern California. He's naturally earthquake-phobic, plus he's got a two-year-old daughter with dangerous hands. His solution to keep his unracked stuff from hitting the ground was to cover his working surfaces with Rubbermaid textured closet liner. It's amazing: Nothing moves! Nothing slides! And I'll bet there are a thousand people in California who are reading this and slapping their foreheads right now.

Another example: My friend Jim got these great new near-field stands that somehow interfered with proper imaging; the sound seemed to be better if he was four inches higher, but his chair wouldn't go that high. He couldn't bring himself to saw four inches off the new speaker stands, so he turned his monitors upside down (after swapping them left-right), which lowered the tweeters four inches and made the imaging . . . perfect.

And another: I got sick and tired of knocking over my mic stand and expensive mic everytime I stood up. The solution: a Luxo broadcast boom that attaches to my rack and swings the mic into any position I set and keeps it there. (Even during earthquakes.)

The key is personalization. If you only have five modules, you can keep them all at eye level. But if you've got 50, you'd better figure out which are most in demand and put them in the most convenient spots. You know that really cool DynoFlex Sibilance Descrambulator that you used once but it didn't even work right then? Put it way at the bottom underneath your patchbay cords. That way you'll never have to look at it and re-experience the shame and humiliation of wasting $1,200 on garbage you can't even re-sell. You see, ergonomics is everything.

ROOMS FOR IMPROVEMENT

Now that you've got your gear percolating, it's time to look at the room you're working in. There's bad news and good news.

The bad news is, if you want to soundproof your room cheaply, you're sunk. Forget it. Nothing cheap works. So if your neighbors' disco music permeates your walls (or your disco music permeates your neighbors') there's not a lot you can do about it short of buying or building an isolation booth, which still ain't cheap. Double-paning a window, if it overlooks a busy street, can be taken care of for around $600 and that will help some, but if you've got several windows and doors the cost will add up fast.

The good news is, there are inexpensive ways to make your room itself sound sweeter. First of all, play some music and listen to the room. Is your bass boomy? There's lots you can do: If you've got a big area within the room (like a skylight or high ceiling) that's causing a standing wave, break it up by hanging carpet panels. Or if you're using a pre-amp with EQ, just turn the bass down. This works amazingly well and doesn't cost a penny.

Another tip is to move your speakers and equipment away from the walls and corners. Not only does this improve tone and imaging, but it will let you get behind your console and racks to make repairs. If you absolutely have to have your speakers up against a wall, put something absorptive, like a pillow, between them. The sound change is subtle but remarkable.

I DON'T WANT TO TAKE YOU HIGHER

The other big problem is too much high end. It's like being in a room with too many mirrors: The sound gets glary. Your neck hurts and your crisp, edgy mix sounds like cold oatmeal on other systems. Your sound is probably bouncing off some highly reflective surface in the room, like a wall or a window. Rough up that surface! You can buy panels of acoustic foam — which are groovy but expensive — or you can make your own panels of sofa upholstery or macramé or anything that sucks up sound. You don't have to treat the whole room, either; very often if you simply treat the wall that's opposite your speakers, you'll get the desired results.

One great way to diagnose your room is to listen through headphones. You'll immediately hear the difference between the flat headphone sound and all the little embellishments that your room is creating. And while we're on the subject of headphones. . . . I'm assuming you'll spend a hundred bucks and buy some decent cans. Two warnings: Don't play them loud, you numbskull, or you'll begin hearing unwanted noises at unsettling moments. The other thing is, definitely do use them as a break from your speakers and to fine-tune the panning. But don't mix on them exclusively. Headphones are seductive, but they'll break your heart. Mix on your speakers. That's reality.

A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

It's time to talk about live recording. We've already made our peace with the fact that we're never going to have the soundproofing we so dearly desire. That, in a nutshell, is a big part of what you pay the big studio bucks for. But there are ways to make the room that you're in sound decent.

In fact, many rooms are pretty good recording environments to begin with. You don't want to record in a sound-dead, anechoic chamber. Not only will your tracks be lifeless, but your singers and musicians will complain — an annoying sound in itself. The key to making the room sound neutral is to avoid parallel surfaces. And to help you on your road to acoustic recovery, here is the previously unpublished recipe (thank me later) for . . .

J.V.'S HOME-COOKED BAFFLES

Ready? Get a standard sheet of half-inch plywood. Using Elmer's, glue that to a sheet of soundboard — a half-inch thick, soft, fibrous material. That's what it's called; ask at your lumberyard. To that, glue a sheet of indoor-outdoor carpeting, and staple the overlapping ends to the plywood. (The carpeting comes in textures like wide-wale corduroy and fashion-forward hues like ecru and taupe.) And . . . voilá! A diffuser-baffle.

You'll notice that the baffles will bend a bit when the glue dries. This is good, because the curved surface will further eliminate parallel problems. You can rest these up against the wall, make little stands for them, or even hang small versions from the ceiling. These are called "clouds" or "goboes" and can turn a high-ceiling acoustic nightmare into a very usable recording area.

YOU GOT A PROBLEM, BUDDY?

Now that you've got the basic principles, let me tell you about three vexing problems that some pals of mine had, and some very clever solutions.

My friend Joe's studio is right next to the freeway and he's plagued by radio frequency (RF) noise. ("One Adam-12, please investigate dancing postal workers and advise.") Local experts told him that the only solution was to build a copper cage entirely around his studio. Gulp. We're talking thousands. Through the miracle of other-people-who-know-more-than-you-do, he found copper paint. Sure it weighs a ton and costs $300 a gallon, but it worked. And now you know.

My friend Jon, who has an urban studio, had a terrible hum. Expensive isolation transformers helped, but what really did the trick was a $10 grounding stake that he got at Home Depot. Sure, it took him all day and a whole bunch of blisters to sledgehammer the thing into the ground, but it worked. And now you know.

One more. Studio magic to delight your loved ones: Same friend runs his fancy-schmansy speaker wire through his artsy-fartsy cable wraps. He gets the speaker wire to the amp and doesn't know which end is positive. He suspects he'll never be able to tell by listening if his speakers are out-of-phase. So he touches the terminals of a 9-volt battery to the speaker wires and the speaker cone pops toward him. This will only happen if the positive battery terminal goes to the positive speaker terminal. If they're reversed, the speaker will move away from you. Bingo. Jon hooks up his wires and pops open a cold one.

THE LITTLE PLEASURES OF LIFE

Two lessons here: The first is one that the industry has been learning for the last 50 years: Namely, these little improvements that often seem like luxuries are actually cost-effective improvements in the work environment. Comfy chairs and fuzzy walls can make a difference in your bottom line.

The other lesson is to acknowledge your friends, which in my case include the generous and savvy Jim Aikin, Miriam Cutler, Jon Lowrey, Jim Lum (Mazel Tov), Jim Mandell, Judy Munsen, Garrett Parks, Joe Paulino, David Schwartz, John Vigran, and a special thank-you to Jimmy Hammer.

This article appeared in Keyboard's February '98 issue.