Live Room Build
Regrown Recordings recently added a small live room to the facility!
With the addition of this room, Regrown has vastly improved its recording resources for acoustic instruments such as full drum kits, percussion, strings and more - as well as for live recordings with small groups such as duos, trios, podcasting and more!
This room was hand-built by Regrown founder, Matt Barba, to have a flat, desirable response for recording acoustic instruments and vocals, while maintaining the professional-yet-DIY vibe that Regrown clients have come to love about the space.
Making music has never been better at Regrown, and many clients that have already had the opportunity to record in the new room have been pleasantly surprised by the feeling they get while playing with their instruments, as well as the resulting tight, punchy sound we are able to capture from an otherwise small and underestimated space. This is all thanks to the careful thought and planning that went into the design.
Interested in the details??
At about 10’ 3” square (about 105 ft. sq.), with ~8’ ceilings, this room began as a blank slate with a lot of undesirable flutter echo.
The dilemma was this: How do we design a small room to have a desirable sound, without sacrificing so much space that it would be uncomfortable to perform in? The first, and most “grand” aspect of this room was then conceived. A large, asymmetrical absorption wall - the shape of a triangle - that would cover almost all of the back wall, leaving space only for the window and about a foot of space between the bottom of the structure and the floor. This would provide a simple asymmetrical surface between two of the parallel surfaces in the room, as well as a large and deep surface for absorption. This is the most broad-band absorption surface in the room, aside from the next grand acoustical feature, the “mega-cloud.”
The “mega-cloud” was the second grand conception of the room’s acoustical design that contributes tremendously to its overall tonality and tight, dry broadband absorption. Having already had low-pile carpeting on the floor, the ceiling was the only side of these parallel surfaces that was adding undesirable reflections back to the room. We understood that much of this room’s use would be radio-style podcast recordings, as well as recordings with large acoustic instruments like drums, we needed to strive for a dry and very controlled sound wherever possible.
This cloud was designed to “replace” the ceiling with a broadband absorption, aimed particularly at loose lower frequencies that can often cause issues in smaller rooms. At about 8’ square, this cloud hangs from the ceiling with about a 4” air gap, followed by 8” of insulation to tackle the lowest possible frequencies without eating away too much ceiling height. This, along with the asymmetrical wall, contribute tremendously to the characteristic ‘tightness’ of the room by eliminating mid-to-high frequency flutter, as well as controlling lower frequencies.
For the remaining surfaces in the room, 6” deep panels of varying widths were implemented to complete the absorption scheme, and provide the final steps of control that contribute to the tonality and tight feel of the live room.
Maximizing functionality in a small space has always been a priority at Regrown, and finding unique ways to do so always come up during the building process. For this room, a unique feature that will be expanded upon has come about by mounting 5/8” microphone stand threads into the wooden structure of the mega-cloud. This gives a few options for mounting the telescoping boom arms of microphone stands onto the ceiling to capture sources like drum overheads without sacrificing floor space with unruly tripod stands.
We have also managed to mount a small flat screen in the room to display the ProTools session or any other duplicate or extended monitor capabilities of the studio computer, as well as a small 1080p security camera above that to allow people in the control room to monitor the live room. This is important visual feedback that allows fellow musicians, engineers and producers to give performance suggestions and help performers through a session much more efficiently than if we could not see them.
Tie-lines for microphones and return lines for headphone cues, and more are mounted to the wall underneath the flat screen, all of which tie into the control room’s patch bay. Along with it is a custom panel with USB ports, Ethernet connections, HDMI and 3.5mm audio connections that tie into the control room for other connections that may come about during the course of a session that need to feed to or from each room. This enables a high degree of flexibility for using different instruments, computers, synthesizers, sequencers, controllers and other devices with the existing system.
Want to know anything else about the room? DM Matt on Regrown’s Instagram page! I’m always happy to talk more about the facility.