Music is an attractive and inspiring hobby, which in the past few years has become an opportunity to monetize thanks to Yandex.Music and iTunes. Let us recall that 10 years ago, in the notorious 2007, musicians went out of their way to record their record and upload it to the wall on VKontakte in the hope that it would spread across the vastness of the social network.

Tragically, the music was really good, but the quality of the recording forced the track to be turned off. In this article, we dive into the activities of a real recording studio, in which you can create a high-quality album, and we thank Andrey Shtyl , head of the Taiga studio, for a detailed explanation of how the recording kitchen works.

What you need to think in advance

When you finally decided to open a recording studio, you need to think in advance of all the possible tasks that can be solved in it, for example:

- record sound;
- hold a rehearsal;
- having a lesson;
- shoot a video clip;
- accommodate an orchestral group;
- make voice acting;
- record a soundtrack.

These are the tasks set for the Taiga studio by its founder: “... only at the preparatory stage, the guys and I studied a ton of literature on the net and watched dozens of hours of videos on Youtube to roughly estimate the estimate and determine the parameters of our brainchild.


The Hatters recorded their video for the song "Winter" at the Taiga studio

How to find a room

The next important step is finding a room. In St. Petersburg, for example, there are a lot of commercial premises for rent that can be adapted for a recording studio. As the founder of the Taiga studio says, “we were looking for a room for only 2-3 weeks, and we were guided only by Vasilievsky Island. We didn't care about walking distance from the metro, the main thing is a spacious room where you can experiment with space. "

The houses along the university embankment of Vasilievsky Island belong to most of the 19th century, and therefore have exceptionally thick walls between apartments. This contributed to the fact that in the future, less money was spent on sound insulation. Although this is more soundproofing from neighbors than between rooms.

Working with acoustics

And even now, real rock and roll is still a long way off, because the third stage is to set the necessary acoustic properties for the entire space. At "Taiga" it was decided that it was impossible to save on this, and it was necessary to immediately install everything necessary: ​​use diffusers (soundproof panels) of two types and combine them with each other in different rooms:

- in the control room, foam rubber with gaps is used,
- in the main room, Skyline wooden diffusers are combined with foam rubber,
- the entire area (walls and ceiling) of the recording booth is covered with foam diffusers.

But such an accurate calculation does not oblige one to abandon experiments. The sound engineer has developed his own scheme, from which comfortable rooms are often excluded:

- a dry voice (a voice as if on a studio recording, when nothing superfluous is heard) it is better to record in a booth;
- room effect with a slight echo effect can only be achieved in the main room;
- for long tails of reverberation (echo), the microphone is taken out of the studio - into the corridor or an adjacent room.

https://basc.berkeley.edu/author/Effects-of-Classical-Music/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bazedon