The Studio Room We Keep For Composing

We keep one room at the studio that does only one thing. It is small — smaller than the edit suite, smaller than the live room — and for a while we treated that as a problem to solve later. It isn't. A small studio room for composing, kept clear of everything else the studio does, has turned into one of the few spaces whose value we never argue about. The score gets written there, and the room is part of how it gets written.

The temptation, every lease cycle, is to make it earn its rent twice: a composing room on Monday, an overflow bay on Thursday, a place to stack boxes the rest of the time. We have stopped doing that. We have made the case before for working in spaces designed for other things, and we still believe most of a studio can flex. This room is the exception, and the reason is not sentiment. It is acoustic, and it is about attention.

What we noticed

The first thing a small room does to music is lie about the low end. Sound on Sound's acousticians put it plainly: in small spaces bass is always the problem, and you can rarely over-absorb it. As Vicoustic's Jorge Castro tells SOS, "in small rooms, I've never heard people saying they have too much absorption of low frequencies." A composer writing against an untreated room hears a bass line that isn't there, or misses one that is, and writes to compensate. The correction then travels all the way to the mix, where someone has to undo it.

We noticed it first in the parts nobody scores carefully — the sustained low strings under dialogue, the synth pads that sat fine in the room and turned to mud on the dub stage. The room had been quietly editorialising. None of it was the composer's ear failing; it was a cube of air doing what cubes of air do, piling standing waves up at some frequencies and digging holes at others, worst of all in rooms whose dimensions are simple multiples of each other.

There is a faster diagnosis than any of this, and we run it in every new space. Sit where the writing happens and clap once, sharply. A clean room gives you almost nothing after the crack. A bad one rings back a short metallic "boing" — flutter echo bouncing between parallel walls. That ring is in every take you record in that room until you stop it.

What we changed, and what we kept

We did not chase a neutral room. You cannot buy one at this size, and the Audio Engineering Society's small-room tutorials are honest about that: a small room cannot be made flat by coverage alone. So we treated it the way SOS treats the rooms in its Studio SOS visits — bass traps in the front corners, broadband absorbers at the side mirror points, a couple more panels on the back wall and the door. Coverage stayed modest. The working rule is that treating 30 to 40 percent of the surfaces does most of the job, and past that you are just deadening the life out of the space.

What we kept was the room's single job. The composer's chair and the monitors sit on a thirds line, off the centre of the room, so the worst of the standing waves fall somewhere other than the listening position. And we keep it quiet enough to record into — a soft synth pass, a vocal idea, a cello the composer wants down before committing — without decamping to another room.

That last part is the closing argument. The composing room is not only where the music starts; it is the first place the sound is captured, and a room that flatters the writing but ruins the recording is two rooms pretending to be one. We scout the sound before the picture on location for the same reason we keep this room single-minded: the music, and the way it will finally be heard, is decided earlier than anyone thinks — often in a small room with the door shut.