New Orleans is a major U.S. port of entry in the American South. It boasts large industries, many museums and world-famous seafood restaurants. The annual Mardi Gras is perhaps the best-known festival of New Orleans. Music, dance, and theater are part of people’s lives here. New technology has refined the music to a truly wondrous experience. A good recording studio contributes to good-quality music. A few tips to help you start on your small business of setting up a recording studio are described below.

What Comprises a Recording Studio: A recording studio is a soundproof room designed around the principles of room acoustics to record sound with precision and accuracy. The material used on the room’s surfaces absorbs and diffuses the sound. It may have an extra room designed for voice recording called a vocal room. Normally, it consists of three rooms:

1. Studio or “live room.” Here the sound for the recording is created.
2. Control room. Here the sound from the studio is recorded and manipulated.
3. Machine room. Here the noisier equipment that may interfere with the recording process is kept. The equipment includes:
• Mixing console.
• Multitrack recorder.
• Microphones.
• Reference monitors or loudspeakers with flat frequency response.
• Digital Audio workstation.
• Music workstation
• Compressors, reverbs or equalizers for outboard effects.

All rooms in a recording studio may have a reconfigurable combination of reflective and non-reflective surfaces, to control the amount of reverberations.

Working Of a Recording Studio: A professional recording studio has an isolation booth along with a control and a live room. All these rooms are soundproof and insulated from external sounds. For recording the distortion-free sound of musical instruments, these are kept behind a see-through Plexiglas gobo panel. It deflects the sound and keeps it from bleeding into the other microphones, allowing more control of each instrument at the mixing board.

The soundproof rooms and multi-track recording equipment have made it possible to record instruments and singers separately, at different times on different tracks, on a multi-track tape. A 2-inch analog tape is capable of containing 24 individual tracks. An audio mix is set up on a 24-track tape machine to record combined signals to print on master tape. Analog tapes capture sound waves in entirety, while digital recorded audio made on mixing console gives an illusion of solid sound waves.

Individual artists can use a project or home studio with multitrack recorders, synthesizers, and microphones to make inexpensive digital hard disk recording products. A keyboard can be used as highly realistic instrumental accompaniment.

New Orleans, being a major port and hub in the southern part of the U.S., is an ideal location to start your recording studio business. Setting up a recording studio requires specialized equipment and recording rooms, which should be done with due attention to detail.