page_title: Recording studio
section_title: Layout
hierarchical_section_title: Recording studio / Design and equipment / Layout
caption_attribution_description: Neve VR60 - 60 Channels with full Recall and Flying Faders (v3.00) sweet mixing desk. About 60 channels!
context_page_description: A recording studio is a specialized facility for sound recording, mixing, and audio production of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.
  Recording studios may be used to record singers, instrumental musicians, voice-over artists for advertisements or dialogue replacement in film, television, or animation, foley, or to record their accompanying musical soundtracks. The typical recording studio consists of a room called the "studio" or "live room" equipped with microphones and mic stands, where instrumentalists and vocalists perform; and the "control room", where sound engineers, sometimes with record producers, as well, operate professional audio mixing consoles, effects units, or computers with specialized software suites to mix, manipulate and route the sound for analogue recording or digital recording.
context_section_description: Recording studios generally consist of three or more rooms: 
  The live room of the studio where instrumentalists play their instruments, with their playing picked up by microphones and, for electric and electronic instruments, by connecting the instruments' outputs or DI unit outputs to the mixing board (or by miking the speaker cabinets for bass and electric guitar);
  Isolation booths are small sound-insulated rooms with doors, designed for instrumentalists (or their loud speaker stacks). Vocal booths are similarly designed rooms for singers. In both types of rooms, there are typically windows so the performers can see other band members and other studio staff, as singers, bandleaders and musicians often give or receive visual cues;
  The control room, where the audio engineers and record producers mix the mic and instrument signals with a mixing console, record the singing and playing onto tape (until the 1980s and early 1990s) or hard disc (1990s and following decades) and listen to the recordings and tracks with monitor speakers or headphones and manipulate the tracks by adjusting the mixing console settings and by using effects units; and
  The machine room, where noisier equipment, such as racks of fan-cooled computers and power amplifiers, is kept to prevent the noise from interfering with the recording process.
  Recording studios are carefully designed around the principles of room acoustics to create a set of spaces with the acoustical properties required for recording sound with precision and accuracy. This will consist of both room treatment (through the use of absorption and diffusion materials on the surfaces of the room, and also consideration of the physical dimensions of the room itself to make the room respond to sound in a desired way) and soundproofing (also to provide sonic isolation between the rooms) to prevent sound from leaving the property. A recording studio has to be soundproofed on its outer shell as well, to prevent noises from the surrounding streets and roads from being picked up by microphones.
  A recording studio may include additional rooms, such as a vocal booth—a small room designed for voice recording, as well as one or more extra isolation booths for loud guitar stacks and extra control rooms. Even though sound isolation is a key goal, the musicians, singers, audio engineers and record producers still need to be able to see each other, to see cue gestures and conducting by a bandleader. As such, the "live room", isolation booths, vocal booths and control room typically have windows.
caption: Neve VR60, a multitrack mixing console. Above the console are a range of studio monitor speakers.
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