There’s No Place Like Home

Consider the hierarchical social structure of the standard B-flat professional studio with you as artist. In the control room there is a producer, an engineer, a tape-op, a gopher (also possibly an A & R rep, a couple of Significant Others, and . . . ) peering through the glass at you and your fellow musicians, who have the unenviable task of performing your music repeatedly until it is properly captured on tape or disk. While bottled up for the control room’s viewing and listening pleasure, you are supposed to be creative! The change of setting, the piles of equipment and the separate control room often impede the flow of creative ideas, making the studio a difficult place to record.

The tunes you want to record were likely composed and practiced in a very different setting, one that was comfortable. The comfortable couch, the view out the window, the golden retriever, the fridge – whatever physical and psychic comforts you are used to are noticeably absent from the typical pro studio arrangement. Such studios, of necessity, have things like offices with bulging rolodexes, gold records and celebrity photos on the walls and acoustic treatment on everything (some of which cost more than your entire studio, including the fridge). And it goes without saying that all those eyes peering at you through the control room glass are no substitute for the crowd that helped you through the turnaround in this tune last night. Off the live stage you have to provide all the energy yourself. Not only do you need the usual 110%, but you’ll have to do it without the help of a supportive crowd. The odd, muted silence within those headphones between takes feels unnatural and just isn’t as stimulating as the shouts, whistles and applause of the live gig. The studio/control room setup is a markedly different environment, yet musicians are supposed to ignore all this and just play their hearts out.

“Now This Won’t Hurt a Bit.”

As if being in a strange place wasn’t enough, you are often squished into a confined space, in a certain orientation, with more microphones than could possibly be necessary or good for you staring at you and your instrument from all sorts of interesting angles. Gobos and blankets surround you and your fellow humans to ensure that no sound, no fresh air and no fashion trends can get through. A dentist’s chair provides about the same psychic comfort. Warnings such as “Try not to move when you play” and, “If you have to breathe, do it quietly” are followed by instructions from the producer like, “Knock the solo out the same way you did last Saturday night at the Humongodome, only make it dreamier, y’know what I mean? And try to remember what you play so we can double it later, man.” Placed in this strange world surrounded by equipment designed to permanently store your every squeak, it is amazing anything very creative or exciting happens at all. The mics, headphones and that enormous tape machine with all those meters remind you of the importance of every recorded note. Unlike live gigs, listeners will hear this solo back over and over and over, if they want to. They are not interested in excuses about how bad the vibe was in the studio. They will scrutinize, analyze and possibly cannibalize the parts note by note. And they will probably put on a Steely Dan CD next. Better make it good. Better make it better than good. It is a good rule of thumb that the parts you commit to tape should be approximately the best you have ever played in your life! If you have any microphonophobia at all, then the sterile, gear filled studio will be a very scary place.

Big Brother Is Watching You

All of the above is made worse still by the all-seeing, all-hearing omnipresence of that great studio innovation: the control room. There just isn’t anything like being an exotic animal behind glass at a zoo under the public scrutiny of the control room. Your objective, as stated by the producer, is to “Be creative Babe. You’re beautiful!” Understandably, the only creative activity going on in your head has to do with imagining what they are saying in the control room: “Why is he frowning? Why are they all suddenly laughing hysterically?” The separation of the artists from the producers, engineers, fans and bystanders creates a communication bottleneck: talkback.


Constrained, generally one-way communication is controlled by the engineer. Some engineers are good at it. Some definitely are not. Even in the best of situations, there will be frustrated and not very articulate conversations between the control room and the studio. Heightened anxiety and insecurity for the artist is a common result. Many, many good ideas are cut-off, squashed, trapped, suppressed and withheld by the talkback switch.

Meanwhile, Back At The Home, Sweet Home

Where the pro studio generally exacerbates these anti-creative factors, the home studio really shines. Consider atmosphere. While the home studio doesn’t give you Madison Square Garden sell-out crowd, it does offer many of the little amenities that do make you more comfortable, such as the couch, window, golden retriever and fridge mentioned above. It is an understandable desire to lock yourself in the studio. It prevents distractions and keeps you productive. But while it might make sense to work without telephonus interruptus, you do yourself a disservice when you also deny yourself the twinkie and root beer just because you are ‘in the studio.’ Allow yourself these comforts. When you are not recording with a mic, open a window and let in the outside noises that identify this place as home. Take a break and fold the laundry; you can still brainstorm ways to fix that drum fill without quantizing. And above all, let the dogs in. Pet them. Talk to them. Have them check the very high frequency content of your mix. By emphasizing the home in home studio you can keep yourself (and your colleagues and clients) comfortable and creative.

Your lack of gear can also be an asset to your creativity, if you keep in mind that necessity is the mother of invention. A single SM57 is not nearly as threatening as a stereo, X-Y configured pair of bulky U47’s with power supplies, pop filters and a maze of blankets and baffles. At home, isolation means leaving the living room and going into a bed room – not a Gobo in sight. Also, the “I have enough tracks, microphones, outboard gear, etc. to do anything I want to” syndrome that comes with state-of-the-art equipment is often a curse. One loses track of the immediate goal, pursues endless tangents and may ultimately never produce music. Making the best with what you have is a healthy mindset. Working with equipment you have mastered and whose limitations you understand, you’ll find yourself actively working around weaknesses with clever solutions, focusing on the music with a clear, achievable goal in mind. If it sounds bad, blame the gear and the room and do another take. If it sounds good, take the credit, “A great sounding performance recorded under the worst of conditions. I’m amazing!”

Oddly enough, the home studio’s greatest asset may be its lack of a separate control room. If you plan never to work in a formal studio, you don’t need to read the side bar on Com Mic Etiquette so much as exercise your regular communication skills. If you listen well and communicate ideas clearly, you can work really successfully as a producer, engineer or artist in a home studio. If you are an overbearing, conversation-dominating jerk, you’ll be as unpopular in the studio as you are everywhere else in your life. The point here is that in the home studio with no control room to gum things up, there are no new social rules. Without a control room, you can set and maintain a relaxed atmosphere. Recording becomes more like rehearsing, more like composing, more like just sitting around jamming – more like creating. It is no coincidence that some of the big studios are exploring more integrated recording environments, placing the control room within the studio. It does too much to foster creativity to be ignored.

Do Your Homework

Awareness of the challenges of being creative while recording lets you assert your home studio’s place in the food chain. At the very least, your home studio is likely a powerful preproduction tool. Depending on your audio capabilities, it might also be the place for tracking, dubbing, mixing and mastering. More likely, thoughtful use of your home studio equipment and atmosphere and clever exploitation of its creative assets will empower you to make better use of the studio. You can enter a professional studio with a full creative palette. Before the monstrous hourly rate kicks in at Mega Sound, you and your players will have worked out the grooves, the sounds, the words, the solos, the parts; you will have explored all the variations that your muse suggested in the home studio and found the arrangement that you know works best. Take that to the pro studio and record it with laboratory precision, but do so knowing for sure that it sounds great. The mics and meters in the fancy studio become, not forbidding critics of your art, but faithful friends who capture your music for sharing with others, and selling records!

Happy tracks!