What to look for in a Connecticut recording studio

Within an hour of New Milford there are library recording rooms, bedroom setups charging real money, project studios doing genuinely good work, and full commercial facilities. They are not interchangeable, and the websites all look roughly the same.

Here is what actually separates them, in the order it matters.

1. Ask who is running your session, by name

This is the whole thing. The room matters, the gear matters, but the person behind the desk decides whether your record is good.

At a bigger facility, the person who answers the phone is often not the person who will engineer your day. Ask directly. Ask what else they have worked on and whether it sounds anything like what you are making.

2. Listen to something that came out of the room

Not a photo of the console. Audio. Ideally something in your genre, and ideally something where the source material was about as good as your band currently is.

Any studio that cannot or will not send you a link is telling you something.

3. Find out what is actually in the building

There is a large practical difference between a studio that owns a full backline and one that expects you to haul yours. Ask specifically:

• Are there drum kits, and are they tuned and maintained or shoved in a corner?
• Is there a real isolated vocal booth, or is the vocal cut in the same room as everything else?
• Are the amps owned or rented in for the day?
• Is monitoring calibrated, and is there more than one set of speakers to check on?
• Can you track a full band playing together, or only one part at a time?

4. Ask whether one session runs at a time

Multi room facilities can be excellent, but you should know if another session is happening while yours is. It affects noise, it affects load in and load out, and it affects whether your gear can stay set up overnight on a multi day booking.

5. Establish where the session actually ends

Tracking, mixing, and mastering are three different jobs and they are not always the same price or even the same building. Plenty of people walk out of a cheap tracking day and then discover the record is nowhere near finished.

6. Check whether they do anything beyond audio

If you are releasing music you will need photos, video, or performance clips within about a week of finishing. A studio that can shoot while you are already set up and already sounding good saves you a second production day and a second fee.

7. Understand the money before you book

Hourly, daily, or per song? Is there a minimum? Does a day include mixing or is that separate? What happens if you run over? Is there a deposit, and is it refundable if you have to move dates?

None of these questions are rude. Anybody who treats them as rude is a person you do not want handling your record.

8. Go and stand in the room

Photographs flatter rooms enormously. Twenty minutes in the actual space tells you whether you would be comfortable spending fourteen hours there, whether it is genuinely quiet, and whether you like the person you would be spending those hours with.

If a visit is not possible, at least ask for a walkthrough video where somebody talks you through it, rather than a gallery of stills.

A short version

1. 1Who is engineering, by name.
2. 2Hear something real that came out of the room.
3. 3Confirm what gear is genuinely in the building.
4. 4One session at a time, or several.
5. 5What finished means, and what it costs to get there.
6. 6Whether they can shoot as well as record.
7. 7See it in person if you possibly can.