There are good studios, there are bad studios, and there are ugly studios. Choice is good, but make sure that what you want is really what you are going to get.

The” cream of the crop” studios cater to your every need. They record your music, cook your dinner, detail your car, cut your hair, massage your aches, and make you CDs at the end of the night so you can listen in your car on the way home. Some of these studio names will ring a bell. StarStruck Nashville, Record Plant LA, Emerald Nashville, Chung King New York, Hit Factory New York, Masterfonics Nashville, Capitol LA, Ocean Way LA & Nashville, Criteria Miami, Fantasy Berkeley, Crescent Moon Miami, Sound Kitchen Nashville, and others that I apologize for not remembering during this spur of the moment rant. This is where everyone wants to record and mix, if they could afford it.

At the low, project studio end, we have the guy with a few ADATs or Pro Tools and an 02-R or two, trying to make his own record for a few pennies on the dollar. These studios are O.K. too. Sometimes I am involved in projects that are done in these studios. Bela Fleck and Take 6 are two examples. In these studio environments you can usually work your own schedule, because nobody else is coming in after you, and the pressure is a lot lower because you don’t have anyone standing over you with a stopwatch, charging you by the hour.

If there are acoustical anomalies in a project studio, you figure out what they are, and work around them. You don’t mind turning off the air conditioning or unplugging the refrigerator before you record an acoustic guitar. If the guitar doesn’t sound right, you try recording in the bathroom, or the laundry room, or in the garage. You are paying next to nothing for the recording time, and you add a few hassles. No big deal.

The problem is the studios in between these two book ends. In the middle range there are three categories:

First, you have the project studios where the owner needs to make some money to help pay for his equipment, so he makes the studio available to his friends. On one level, this is O.K. If everyone knows the parameters. If the friend knows not to expect a commercial facility, and is willing to put up with the hassles. The friendship will end real quick, though, if the mixes your friend did get to mastering and sound like they were mixed in a sewer pipe. The other aspects to watch out for is zoning and businesses in your house. Some communities will allow you to have a business in your house, and one employee. Other communities allow no more than a desk for a home office and won’t let you have more than two phone lines. You can’t have more than three cars in front of your house without a “party permit.”

The second level is the studio that consists of a Mackie or 02-R and three ADAT or DA-88 machines located in an office space somewhere. I would classify these more as demo studios than actual commercial recording studios. There are tons of these around the country, especially in Nashville. You can’t expect to go into one of these studios and crank out the same quality of album that you can in a real commercial studio. The recording acoustics are marginal, the control room sounds iffy, and mostly, the engineer has usually not had enough experience hearing what good recordings sound like to be able to compensate for the studio’s shortcomings. These studios work out well for demos, because they are just demos. You get your ideas on tape for a producer or artist to hear the song, not to hear how great the guitar sounds.

The third group consists of studios who think they are in the league with the big boys. They usually try to charge rates that are about half of what the big studios charge, but you usually get about 10% of the quality. Sometimes you see the ads that say “2 inch 24 track (or 24 track digital), Neve console( or SSL), automated mixing. We beat all competitors prices!” These are the places you have to watch out for. I’d rather record in the back room at Circuit City.

A few times I have recorded in rooms like this, but only because of some weird schedule conflicts. The artist is on his way to Europe for a 375 week tour, but for three days he will be at his mother’s house in Elephant’s Breath Montana. Find a studio, he needs to re cut the vocals on three of the songs you just mixed and the CD plant is holding the presses waiting for the new master. Fine, if you have enough experience in the studio, you can deal with it. You can tell if something is broken, and work around it. You know what the mix is supposed to sound like, and you can compensate for the weird reflections you hear in the control room, and the sound of the traffic going by outside. You can get done what you need to get done.

Woe is the unsuspecting artist or song writer who is new to the recording process and stumbles into one of these places. You have heard the phrase “you get what you pay for.” Well, the artist calls around and finds a studio that sounds like it is what he needs. The studio is not cheap, but they are not charging a house payment a day, either. He has found studios for less money, but he is willing to spend a little more because of the name brand recognition, “I cut my album on a Neve.”

Even if he goes down to the studio and looks around, the wood panels and giant speakers in the wall convince him that everything will be fine. When he brings in his band and starts recording, he wonders why the drums sound like a cardboard box being hit with a cat. The engineer, who came with the studio because it probably is the engineer’s studio, says, “Drums are fine, your just not used to a ‘Pro’ studio.” The bass has no low end because that module is not working quite right. The vocal sounds so nasel that the singer makes an appointment for reconstructive surgery. When the artist mentions the other studios that he thought about, the engineer/owner will always tell horror stories about how he had to personally fix everything that ever came from there.

Some of these studios used to be “Name Brand” studios, 30 years ago. It has the same tape machines and the same console, and they haven’t been maintained since. See that module with the paint worn off the eq knob? That is because you have to hit it there with your shoe to get the eq to cut in, or sometimes it goes on or off when loud audio goes through that module.

Bottom Line

I could have told you the bottom line sooner, but then my column would have been too short.

The bottom line is this; ask someone else who has worked there. If you don’t know anybody, ask the studio for a referral list, or a list of CDs that were recorded or mixed there recently. If they can’t give you one because their client list is confidential, then you can’t give them your business. If the studio is good, other clients will be glad to brag about what they did there.

Any studio will allow serious potential clients to come by before a session listen to a CD or DAT so you can hear the control room. If you can’t get in to listen, it is probably because they don’t want you to hear it.

If you get stuck and have to work in a substandard studio, make sure you hire an overqualified independent engineer. He will know if someone is trying to pull the wool over your eyes, or in this case, the packing blanket over your ears.