J. Anthony Allen walks through a professional recording studio's control booth, explaining signal flow, the patch bay that connects all analog gear, and the three types of microphones: dynamic, condenser, and ribbon. Learn how preamplifiers boost and shape audio before it gets recorded.
Hey, everybody.
So in this class, we're going to be talking about how to use a room like this. This is the control booth in a professional studio. The idea here is that you'll be able to go into any professional studio
and know your way around quite well
after watching this course. My idea is that this is a class you can take to learn your way around a studio when you go into one, and also a class you can keep as a reference so that you can pull this stuff up as you're in the studio. For tips on how to work different pieces of the gear, and most importantly, how it all works together.
Okay, so in this section, we want to look at signal flow. That means how the audio routes through the two rooms. One thing to keep in mind is that the whole idea of the way this is set up in any studio is that you never, ever have to crawl behind the desk. Okay? The desk is all wired together.
So most recording studios are going to have at least two rooms, if not more. So there's going to be a live room, which is the room we're in now, and then a booth or a control room. There might be multiple live rooms filtering into one control room.
Preamps do two different things for us in a recording studio first. And arguably most importantly. Well, yes, most importantly, they take a week. So there are three main kinds of microphones and three groups of microphones that we have. Dynamic mics, condenser mics, and ribbon microphones. So we'll go into more detail about each of these in a minute. But dynamic mics, everything in the studio is connected to the patch bay. Okay? Everything. Everything that's analog, I should say, is connected to the patch bay. So the idea here is that you'll never have to crawl behind the desk. Every modern studio is going to have a patch bay like this. It might have more stuff, it might have less stuff stuff. But our goal here for the next couple videos is going to get you to understand kind of how to navigate it. Because once you get good at these and how these work, if it's got more stuff, it won't really matter.
Okay, so what do the different mic pre do here? I'm playing just a simple sine wave through the computer. Okay. So this is what the spectrum looks like. If you can't read the spectrum, don't worry about it. Just note that this is the fundamental pitch that I'm playing. And then look what comes over here, Sam.
