Recording Facilities
The Conservatory of Music maintains eight digital recording studios, two mobile recording rigs, a 14-station digital piano lab, and a smart classroom. The studios are open seven days a week during the academic year and summer session and are connected via Ethernet and fiber-optic cable to the campus network. All studios are installed with industry-standard digital audio workstations.
Except where noted, these outstanding studios are available to all music students for recording projects; however, technical (operational) access is limited to qualified studio composition and studio production engineers.
Studio A: A fully automated studio (up to 224 digital tracks) with complete recording, MIDI sequencing, digital editing, and multimedia capabilities, augmented by inboard and outboard DSP hardware and software. The “live” room, which has an 18-foot ceiling, contains a grand piano and an excellent microphone collection.
Studio B: Uses the Jazz Rehearsal Hall as its “live” room. The hall has a 30-foot ceiling and a focusing sound shell for maximum acoustic presence. Most studio composition and jazz recitals occur here and are recorded live to digital audio. Studio B can accommodate up to 192 tracks of digital audio, MIDI, and virtual tracks.
The Green Room Studio: The workspace for first-year students in studio composition and studio production features up to 192 tracks of digital audio, MIDI, sampling, and editing capability.
The Recital Hall Studio: A full-function, direct-to-DAT and direct-to-CD recording studio, located in a dedicated recording booth at the rear of the Recital Hall. All student recitals are recorded by qualified studio production and composition engineers.
Mobile Studio: A simple, digital audio workstation equipped with Digidesign Pro Tools M Box and two-track digital-direct to hard-disk recording. The Mobile Studio is used mostly for recording orchestra, opera, and chamber concerts.
The Blue Room Studio: A powerful postproduction room, featuring nonlinear, object-oriented, digital editing software, along with 192 tracks of digital audio and full MIDI and sampling capability.
The Beat Suite: A relatively simple MIDI system of nine synth modules coupled to a single computer loaded with virtual MIDI instruments, MIDI sequencing software, and 24 tracks of digital audio. Designed to accommodate the production styles of “beat”-enhanced popular music and virtual instrument synthesis and sequencing.
MIDI Keyboard Lab: A 14-station piano/MIDI lab that is fully integrated with the campus computer network and equipped with Mac computers, a network printer, and sequencing and notation software systems. The MIDI Keyboard Lab supports secondary keyboard studies required of all music majors (except instrumental majors in the piano concentration).
Smart Classroom: Designed to bring the digital recording studio environment into a large classroom setting, the Smart Classroom integrates overhead projection, computers, and multiformat playback (DVD, VHS, CD, and mp3). The Smart Classroom accommodates up to 192 tracks of digital audio, virtual audio, and MIDI.
The Live Room: A live performance room linked to the Green and Blue Room Studios.
Vintage Synth Studio: A varied collection of keyboard and rack-mounted synthesizers dating back to the 1970s, used by students to experiment with analog and digital synthesis.
Updated June 10, 2008
