Studio One is the largest control room in the Music Technology area dedicated to tracking, editing, and mixing music. Originally designed around a three-quarter ton 64-fader analog console, the environment first featured the world’s first Digidesign 64-fader D-Control surface. Don’t believe other studios claiming they have the first. We signed agreements and purchased the first two before the world and even most of the employees at Digidesign knew of the console. Now the control room is recognfigured with two Slate Raven MTi touch screens. In addition to the touch panels, audio preamps, MIDI interfaces, audio interfaces and Pro Tools software integrate seamlessly into a high-end production workspace.
Studio one has an expanded ProTools|HDX system including four Avid HD IO audio interfaces capable of 64 simultaneous inputs and outputs. There are 94 microphone inputs in the studio spaces surrounding Studio One that can be patched into 42 channels of microphone preamps. Microphone inputs from the Choral Rehearsal Room can also be directly patched. Inputs and Outputs from the Instrumental Rehearsal Room and Sursa Performance Hall can be accessed via a 32 channel Whirlwind ESnake.
Soundhouse A, Soundhouse B, ISO A, ISO B and a few rooms in between contain microphone, line level, cue send, video and CAT5 connections to Studio One via patchbays adjacent to the control room in the North Machine Room (NMR).
Traditionally in recording studios, the room with the recording console is called the control room and the space where the musicians play is named the studio. In the Music Technology area, control rooms and called studios and the space to place musicians are called soundhouses. Other rooms for creative production and evaluation of sound, llike media labs, DAW rooms, and the critical listening room are also called studios. All of these studios are important to the development of the music technology student and are named with a studio number. We did not limit the name “studio” to only the recording spaces.
The name soundhouse was carried over from the previous music engineering technology studios on Bethel Avenue. Cleve Scott named the main recording space a soundhouse because of its purpose beyond the boundries of the traditional recording studio space. It was a creative space for traditional and experimental music. Its functionality borrowing from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis text written in 1626.
“We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.”