The influence of the room you’re working in is inescapable but Julian argues there are some cases where it’s not particularly relevant…

As audio engineers we spend a great deal of time worrying about the acoustics in our mix rooms. But that isn't the only way in which your room affects your productions. Here are three ways to consider.

Monitoring

The influence of your room on your monitoring system is of course very important and it is the first way which comes to mind for most when considering the influence of the room in which we are working. While we may have monitor speakers with a ruler flat response it is inevitable that there will be a room in between those speakers and our ears and it's impossible to exclude the room in which the mix is happening from the equation when using loudspeakers for monitoring. We all know that acoustic treatment is extremely important in getting the most out of your monitoring. Though that isn't to say that everybody does it. Adequately addressing issues in the mid range and high frequencies is achievable for most, although with so many people living or working in rented spaces the ability to do things as simple as screwing an acoustic panel to a wall isn't possible for everyone. Treating issues at the lower end is more challenging as the size of of the absorber needed to address issues is directly linked to the wavelength of the frequency to be absorbed, which in the case of deep bass is considerable.

Rooms can always be improved, but the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect here and while very significant improvements can be achieved with amounts of treatment which are both practical and within reach of most, the fact remains that unless a significant amount of work and investment has happened, your mix room will influence your mixes. To what extent this matters of course depends on the room but it's still a source of colouration.

Using headphones is a way to escape the influence of your room but it's still a fact that a lot of productions go all the way from writing, through recording, mixing and even home mastering exclusively in a single room. This has potential to compromise your work. But the influence of your room doesn't stop with monitoring and mixing.

Recording

The other place in which the nature of your room has a direct influence on your recording is the tracking space in which you capture sounds. Engineers who regularly work with ensembles, for example in classical music, are extremely aware of the influence of the room on the captured audio, working as they do at greater distances from the sound source than is common in other styles.

For engineers working in more contemporary styles, the principal place in which more distant miking occurs is in capturing room mics on drums. In most styles close miking is very much the norm on other sources, although there are notable exceptions. Miking guitar amplifiers from a distance isn't common, the default position for electric guitars is extremely close to the speaker but more distant sounds are still fairly common, Queen and the Rolling Stones come to mind. A nice example of more overt use of breaking from the norm on sources where close miking is usually expected can be found on the Elbow track Picky Bugger in which the vocal alternates between a close miked sound and a striking use of a distant off mic vocal (listen at 1.10). The influence of the room is unmissable and extremely deliberate in these cases.

The example of the drum room mic is interesting because, when one is used it is there specifically to capture the sound of the room. Often called an ambience mic this mic should be placed beyond the ‘critical distance’ - the point beyond which the level of indirect sound exceeds the direct sound. Polar pattern can be used to help exclude direct sound but if you want to imitate a ‘Levee Breaks’ drum sound, no amount of compression will help if your room is dry! 

If your studio is a single room affair in which tracking and mixing happen in the same space, then if the room is adequately treated the acoustic will be fairly dry. One of the more challenging sources most people record is vocals, and the prevalence and popularity of ‘refection filter’ type products illustrates this. Close mics on drums and electric guitars tend to be very close indeed. However a vocal recorded from two or three inches away can sound too close. Professional studios with well constructed vocal booths allow dry recordings to be captured from much further away and the difference in sound can be significant, but we associate a dry vocal with sounding professional and the way your tracking space accommodates miking from slightly further away has consequences further down the production process.

Close Miking And Your Room Sound

Which brings me to my last point. The influence of the room on monitoring and capture are well understood. However the often repeated maxim that we should get the sound right at source plays a significant role here as, certainly for pop and rock styles, close miking is the default choice. Much of the point of close miking is to exclude the sound of the room and capture as dry a sound as possible. Because of this the sound of the room isn't particularly relevant. Far more significant is the choice and placement of the microphone. Because of this one might question the value of talking about "the sound in the room" and using a judgement about how the instrument sounds in the tracking space when making decisions around capture. Far more relevant is the sound captured by the microphone as that is the sound which will make it onto the recording.

Drums are a special case here as while the majority of many drum sounds are built from the contribution of close mics, overhead and room mics still play a significant role in the sound of a drum kit. Likewise with acoustic instruments, extremely close miking is usually undesirable. Apart from the fact that close miking only captures the sound of part of an instrument and in the case of something like an acoustic guitar the sound is produced by the whole instrument not just a small part of the belly, acoustic instruments and vocalists tend to move during a performance, something which isn’t the case with guitar cabinets or kick drums (or at least not intentionally!).

If the instrument doesn’t sound good in the room, that is a definitely a red flag that something needs to be fixed before you can hope to capture something which will represent itself as well as it can in a recording. A good sounding amp which is sounding great in the room can inspire and influence what will hopefully be a great take. However that isn’t to say that the sound of the instrument in the room is what you are trying to capture. A drum recording from 10 feet away probably isn’t your finished drum sound and the sound of that sweet sounding valve amp from across the room isn’t what it will sound like once it’s been captured by a 57 an inch away from the speaker cloth. The room is important, but it’s not quite everywhere.