Fascination Street Studios
DRUM Room
The new Fascination Street Studios
Jens Bogren teamed up with acoustician Jens Eklund of Holonor in 2017 to design the new Fascination Street Studios. The power of two Jenses combining forces was almost too much to contain. However, it resulted in a world-class studio complex with unparalled attention to detail! Featuring 5 control rooms and 2 live rooms painstakingly crafted to Jens Bogren's personal and incredibly meticulous specifications, Fascination Street Studios is the real deal for recording drums.
But what are those specifications? What makes for a great drum room? Why?
Well, gather round sound nerds – creating a world-class drum sound starts with science…
Size Isn’t Everything
Although, this is typically what people with small drum rooms would say!
However, the most important thing to a powerful, larger-than-life sound when recording drums is the ambience. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but often this is achieved by recording in a room with a long reverb decay time. Rooms with a long reverb decay time are usually on the larger side. The sound can travel around the room for longer periods of time before hitting the surfaces in the room, losing energy and decaying. However, a big room alone does not a great drum room make.
Sound is a fickle thing and it likes to keep on bouncing, if it can. This becomes a problem when sound bounces between two parallel walls – creating undesirable effects like standing waves and flutter echoes.
- Standing waves are a build up of specific frequencies, caused by sound waves with wavelengths related to the distance between parallel surfaces. The sound waves bounce back and forth and build upon eachother between the surfaces.
This leads to an imbalance in reverb decay times and audible resonances.
- Flutter echoes are related to standing waves, but happen more frequently with impulse sound sources – like drums. Flutter echoes are caused when short bursts of sound bounce between two parallel surfaces with a period greater than 50ms. With this phenomenon the sound waves passing backwards and forwards across the room can be heard as a quick ‘flutter’. Essentially the opposite of a smooth decay tail!
Angles Everywhere
So how do you fix this? You have two main options: absorb the sound or diffuse it. Absorbing the sound stops the sound from bouncing off the surfaces in the room and reduces the decay time. This rules it out as a method for crafting a ‘lively’ sounding drum room. Diffusing the sound allows it to keep bouncing, with every reflection spreading the sound out. As it is spread out, it cannot head straight backwards and forwards between two surfaces.
Diffuser panels can also be used effectively to spread the sound out. However, these panels need to be deep to have an affect on lower frequencies (due to their longer wavelengths) and thus reduce the usable space inside the room.
Therefore, the live room at Fascination Street Studios features an intricate room layout and design which ensures that no two surfaces are parallel. Sound waves have no choice but to spread out and decay randomly, providing an extremely smooth and balanced decay. Perfect for recording drums!
High Ceilings
But why the tall ceilings? As well as increasing the size of the room, lengthening the reverb decay, the high ceilings have another important function. Early reflections are the first sound waves that reach the listener (the microphone) from the source (the drums). This excludes the direct sound from the drums to the microphone.
Now, consider the live room had the same width and length dimensions, but a reasonably standard ceiling height of 8ft (2.4m). When recording drums, the early reflections bouncing off the ceiling would reach the microphone much quicker than the reflections from other surfaces (excluding the floor) due to the much shorter distance.
This would result in a disconnection between the early reflections and ultimately result in a strange sounding reverb decay. The 23ft (7m) high ceiling ensures that the early reflections from the ceiling are more closely connected to the early reflections from the other surfaces in the room. This results in as smooth and lush a reverb as possible.
Material Things
The final piece of the puzzle comes from nature: wood.
With its design, if the live room were constructed from bricks or concrete the reverb decay time would be extraordinarily long. Excessive reverb decay times are not a drum sound’s friend. Think of talking in a large cathedral or hall, the sound becomes muddled, smooshed together and hard to distinguish.
Wood offers a dual quality of reflection with a small amount of absorption. This allows some of the energy from the sound waves to be dissipated, thus slightly reducing the reverb decay time to a controlled length.
Absorption coefficients (a measure for how much sound is absorbed by a material) also often differ with different frequencies. Wood offers a much smoother and natural absorption profile when compared to brick or concrete – adding the final cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. To further help control the low frequencies, the big, black half-dome behind the drummer’s position is actually a giant bass trap filled with highly insulating material.
Needless to say, nothing was left to chance when designing Fascination Street Studios!
Where Science Meets Art
So the science is sorted – but what about getting the best performance from the musician? The musician often has just as much of an affect on the quality of the final sound as the room. So, careful thought went into catering for this in the design of the live room.
To keep sensitive artists “in the zone” a large window offers expansive views of the nature outside and allows all-nourishing sunlight to fill the live room during the day. Wait, we know what you’re thinking – don’t worry! The window is also divided into different angled sections to ensure that it doesn’t create any uncontrolled reflections that might otherwise upset the acoustic balance in the room.
Strung from the high ceilings is professional lighting rig with full stage lighting and this isn’t just for show. Many bands find that they perform best on stage and want to replicate this atmosphere in the studio. The extensive lighting setup is complete with a remote RGB controller, just like you’d find in a venue. This means that, whatever an artist’s needs, they can feel comfortable and perform at their absolute best in the studio.
For more intimate drum recording sessions, large acoustic panels can be rolled into position in the room. These block the paths of the sound waves within the room, absorbing them and drastically reducing the reverb decay time. With these panels, the decay in the room can be tailored to the session; from completely bombastic drums sounds to fairly dry, close sounds.
World-class Clients
Meticulous is an understatement; Fascination Street Studios was designed with an obsession for incredible sound. It’s no wonder that huge names such as Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy, Ihsahn, Eloy Casagrande (of Slipknot) trust Fascination Street Studios and Jens Bogren with their productions.
To harness this incredible live room for your own music, check out Trivium Drums. Trivium Drums is the first drum library recorded at Fascination Street Studios and the results speak for themselves!
