That Is Not A Studio

About 5 years ago, I wrote a diatribe about motorcycle helmets, titled “That’s Not A Helmet.” After hearing a friend’s description of a few hours in a local “recording studio,” a lot of the thoughts behind that motorcycle rant came back to me.

First, a recording studio should be an excellent acoustic space. If it is not that, the best you could call it would be a “practice space that also stores some recording equipment.” Let’s be honest with why people want to call an overdub space, lousy practice room, or even a living room “a recording studio.” Money. Money. Money.

1) Money spent by the wannabe recording engineer on equipment that far exceeds both the talent of the user and the acoustic capabilities of the space. If you spend $5,000 on a half-dozen high end preamps and an outragesously cool A-to-D interface and your acoustic space is like any of the spaces I’ve collected in the pictures in this rant, you’re fooling yourself. You don’t need 100dB S/N or 126dB of dynamic range, because your crappy space has a 55dBA noise floor. No manufacturer currently selling equipment makes a preamp that is anywhere near as awful as your recording space. $200 is overkill for your room.

2) Money being made by boutique and so-called pro-level manufacturers over-selling equipment to people who don’t need anything near high-end, wouldn’t know how to obtain high-end performance in a pro studio with a professional assistant, and who have almost infinitely more money than sense or talent. While I saw some of this when I was teaching at a music college, I’ve seen way more of it since living in what is essentially a retirement community in southeastern Minnesota. Every little rich kid in this 16,000 person town seems to have a “studio.” That universally means they have thousands of dollars worth of equipment and instruments crammed into a spare bedroom or basement family room space. At the most, they might have spent $200 on an Auralex kit, which they mindlessly applied to the walls in odd places. Everyone in the supply chain saw these suckers coming and sold them on the idea that “there is money to be made in those recording hills.” Trust me, there isn’t. As a brilliant and experienced friend often says, “The only way to end up with a million from a recording studio is to start with three.” You won’t even make minimum wage renting your space to friends and suckers and if you ever knew how to calculate ROI you’ll have to completely ignore that knowledge if you want to stay sane.

3) Money being made by the various vanity distribution channels from CD Baby to YouTube to Spotify. Every one of those characters will be telling you that “you too can be a rock star.” You can’t. You won’t. And you shouldn’t be.

I’m no saying that you can’t make great music in a non-studio environment. You absolutely can. It’s just a lot harder to get great acoustic sounds in a lousy-to-mediocre acoustic environment. My real complaint is that calling a bedroom or basement rec room a “recording studio” degrades the phrase in the same way calling a garbage man a “sanitation engineer” pisses on the training and education required to actually be an “engineer.” Find another word. I call my workspace “our spare bedroom” or “my office.”