Studio Reverence: What a Big SSL Room Taught Me in One Hour

Yes, you read that correctly. Reverence. Not reverb, not reference, not resonance, not revision, but reverence. It’s a word you rarely hear in conversations about music production, and I’ve come to think that’s exactly the problem – at least for me.

Table of Contents

Arriving for the session

From the street, the studio didn’t look like much. It was a nondescript commercial building in Victoria BC, the kind of place you could drive past every day without wondering what went on inside. That turned out to be part of the magic.

You came in through a quite secure steel exterior door into a comfortable reception area, the sort of waiting room that tells you someone has thought about how you feel before you’ve played a note. Past that was an enclosed, climate-controlled machine room. It held a 2-inch analog 24 track tape machine, racks of amplifiers and the distribution gear, all humming quietly at a carefully controlled temperature and humidity. Even the equipment had its own room, and it was better looked after than most musicians I knew.

If you’ve never seen one of these machines in motion, here’s an Otari MTR-100 at work. Imagine that in a climate-controlled room, waiting for your take:

Then you stepped into the control room, and everything changed.

It felt expensive in the way only a properly designed room can. It had the look and feel of a slick new LA or New York room from the ’90s, and as I recall, it was designed and built by the Westlake team from LA. A big SSL 4000 G console stretched out in front of me, with large main monitors mounted in the soffits above. Closer in, a pair of three-way Genelecs sat on top of the console, right beside the obligatory Yamaha NS-10Ms, which were ready to tell you the unflattering truth. Looking over the console, you were facing an air-gapped double window into the main performance space, with at least two isolation booths beyond it.

I remember standing there in the control room for a moment longer than I needed to, taking it all in. I couldn’t find the right word for what I was feeling then. I can now. It was reverence.

Genelec 1038B three-way studio monitor — A Genelec 1038B three-way monitor, similar to the pair that sat on the console. Photo: CLI, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Yamaha NS-10M nearfield studio monitor with white woofer cone — A Yamaha NS-10M, the white-coned nearfield that sat on nearly every console of the era. Photo: CJ Sorg, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One hour, borrowed

I wasn’t there as the artist. Sometime around 1993 or ’94, I’d been hired for about an hour to play some saxophone overdubs. I knew exactly how special the opportunity was for the artist, though. He’d been approved for FACTOR funding grants, and that funding was the only reason a project like his could be recorded in a room like this. Nobody treated the time casually. On short notice, he even talked his friend Coolio, who was performing in Vancouver at the time, into lending us one of his outstanding backing vocalists for the session. That’s the kind of energy a room like that creates: people stretch to meet it.

For me, in addition to the musical preparation for my upcoming session, my prep included cleaning and inspecting my beloved saxophone thoroughly, and working through a short list of my current favourite reeds of the day: choosing my best two of each sonic character – traditional cane for a classic, warmer sound, and synthetic for more cut, bite, projection, and consistency. I chose not my favourite, most comfortable neck strap for the session, but the one with the least noisy design. I also wore clothing without jangly zippers or other hardware. I made sure I was hydrated and well-rested, knowing I’d be under pressure to do my best work in a short time with minimal opportunity for extra takes.

In a funny twist, one of the two studio engineers turned out to be a client of mine from my day job selling consumer audio/video equipment – I recall he only lived a block away from my place of business. He’d bought his surround sound gear from me and we had verbally exchanged audio geekery more than once. It’s a small island.

What stuck with me

Although I wasn’t at the studio long enough to learn much at the engineers’ elbow that day, what I took away was simpler and stuck with me longer: what a privilege it was to work alongside highly skilled people in a technically ideal environment.

The studio’s etiquette didn’t need to be explained, and nobody needed reminding. You didn’t put a drink anywhere near the desk or on top of the rack. You didn’t touch what wasn’t yours to touch. You were ready when the red light came on. Everyone understood it, and everyone respected it.

On the drive home after the session I barely noticed the road. I was just trying to process everything I’d taken in.

Why that room changed how we worked

It would be easy to say the gear did it, and the gear certainly helped. But looking back with a few more decades behind me, I think three things created that feeling, and none of them was a piece of equipment.

Scarcity. Rooms like that weren’t available whenever you felt like it. You booked them, sometimes months ahead, and you got a fixed block of time. When it was over, it was over. Your next chance might never come.

Stakes. The clock was running, and somebody was paying for every minute: an artist, a label, or in this case a grant. Stakes like that sharpen you. You prepare your parts before you arrive. You listen harder. You commit to a sound and a performance instead of saying “we’ll fix it later,” because later costs money.

Threshold. Getting there took effort. You drove across town, walked through reception, passed the machine room, and only then reached the control room. Each step separated you a little more from ordinary life. By the time you sat down, the day job, the bills and the to-do list were all on the other side of several doors. That room existed for one purpose only.

Put those three together and reverence follows almost automatically. You don’t have to decide to take the work seriously. The environment decides for you.

What tape actually demanded

If you started recording after about 2000, it’s hard to picture how much the tape itself raised the stakes. Here’s how a session on a 2-inch 24-track in 1993 compares with a typical home DAW setup today:

Illustration of a 2-inch 24-track analog tape machine — Sources are listed at the end of the post.

Illustration of a laptop running a DAW with an audio interface — Sources are listed at the end of the post.

	1993: 2-inch 24-track tape	Today: home studio DAW
Tracks	24 per reel, and that was it	As many as your computer can handle
Recording time	About 16 minutes per reel at 30 ips (around 33 at 15 ips)	Limited only by drive space
Media cost	A new reel of 2-inch tape still costs about US$375 today	Practically nothing
Undo	None. Record over a take and it’s gone	Unlimited
Bouncing tracks	Every bounce added hiss and dulled the top end (generation loss)	Copies are identical to the original
Every pass of the tape	Heads and guides slowly magnetise and can partially erase high frequencies; tape and heads wear	Playback causes no wear at all
Consistency	Machine cleaned every morning, demagnetised each session and aligned with costly test tapes	Sounds the same every time
Speed stability	Wow and flutter of about ±0.04% even on a top pro machine	Locked to a digital clock
Mix recall	Notes, photos and console automation	Saved with the project, recalled instantly

None of this made tape a bad medium, and plenty of great records came off those machines. But every one of those limits made each decision cost something, and that’s exactly what kept everyone in the room focused. A 1993 issue of Sound On Sound listed more than twenty problems with analog multitrack, from crosstalk and dropouts to print-through and tape wear. The engineers worked around all of them, session after session.

How quickly it all changed

Year	What happened
1982	Otari introduces the MTR-90, a 2-inch 24-track that became a studio standard through the ’80s and ’90s
1987	SSL introduces the 4000 G console
1991	The first Pro Tools system ships: four tracks, about US$6,000, plus the Mac to run it
1993	My hour at the studio. That same year, the 8 track Alesis ADAT was described as the only affordable digital multitrack
1997	Pro Tools reaches 24-bit and 48 tracks, and starts replacing tape in many studios
Today	A laptop, an audio interface and a plugin folder do what that whole building did

The room I have now

Fast-forward to today. I’m fortunate to have my own small, purpose-built, soundproofed studio. By home-studio standards it’s a serious room, and I don’t take that for granted.

But it also does more-than-double duty. It’s where I do IT work for clients, edit video, occasional gaming, and yes, even do my taxes. The same chair, the same screens and the same mouse handle a Cubase mix in the morning and a spreadsheet in the afternoon. Most home producers have it far tougher: the studio is a corner of the spare room, the office, or the baby’s nursery, and the DAW lives on the same laptop as work email.

None of that is a complaint. The tools we have at our fingertips now would have seemed like science fiction from that studio’s control room. Software emulations of the console, the outboard gear and the tape machine cost less than an hour of studio time did back then. I’ve used Cubase for more than 25 years now, and I wouldn’t trade that freedom for anything.

One box, one effect

Effects were a big part of that difference. In the early ’90s, almost every effects box did one job, in mono or in stereo. If you wanted reverb on the vocal, a delay on the guitar and a chorus on the keys, you needed three units, the cables to patch them in and enough sends and returns on your mixer to reach them.

In the latter half of the ’90s I bought one of the few exceptions to that rule: a DigiTech Studio Quad (the original, not the later Quad 4), which I later upgraded with DigiTech’s official V2 chip swap. It could work as four independent mono effects or two stereo ones, and I still remember the thrill of patching that single box into my mixer, first a late-’80s Tascam 8-channel and later a first-generation Mackie CR-1604, the first of a handful of Mackies I’d go on to own, and getting what used to take a small rack of gear. That kind of flexibility simply hadn’t existed at the home-studio level before.

Effects and routing, then and now

	Mid-’90s home studio	Today: home studio DAW
Effects per box	Usually one effect, mono or stereo. The 1996 DigiTech Studio Quad was a rare exception, handling up to four at once	Every plugin instance is its own effect, as many as your computer can run
Channel inserts	Insert jacks on only some channels (a Mackie CR-1604 had them on 8 of its 16)	Insert slots on every channel
Aux sends	A CR-1604 offered seven sends per channel, but only four could be used at once	Sends on every channel, routed to as many effect tracks as you like
Effect returns	Four stereo returns, plus any spare channels you could free up	As many return (FX) tracks as you need
Same effect on several sources	Share one unit through an aux send, with one setting for everything	A separate instance, with its own settings, on each channel
Changing the routing	Re-patching cables, song by song	Drag and drop, saved with the project
Recall	Write down every knob position and preset number, or lose it	Every setting saved and recalled instantly

Sources are listed at the end of the post.

To put that in perspective: at last count, my main studio PC’s Cubase installation registers more than 1,300 plugin effects and virtual instruments, collected over those 25-plus years. Many of them emulate the classic hardware you’d have found in a pro studio back then: consoles, compressors, EQs, reverbs and tape machines. A room like that had a carefully chosen rack of outboard, each piece expensive and handled with care. I have an embarrassment of riches by comparison. Abundance like that doesn’t tend to breed reverence. It’s more likely to breed casualness, not to mention a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) dose of decision paralysis from time to time.

What abundance costs

The catch is that three key things that created reverence now tend to be gone by default in a home studio setting. There’s no scarcity, because the studio is open all the time. There are no stakes, because the clock isn’t running and undo is unlimited. And there’s no threshold, because work, life and music share the same room and often the same screen.

I noticed this most clearly in one small, slightly embarrassing habit. A few times, I’ve saved over a previous mix revision a bit too quickly and then regretted it. Why did I do that? Partly because saving is effortless, and partly because I’ve lived through data loss and saving became a reflex. In the old days, committing a mix wasn’t one keystroke. Printing to the two-track, labelling the reel and deciding which take was the master all required a moment of consideration. That decision was treated as consequential because it felt consequential. Now the same decision takes a split second, and sometimes it gets about that much thought.

If only I knew then what I know now

I wish someone had told me, standing in that doorway, that the feeling wasn’t just a perk of being in an expensive room. It was a tool. And with a bit of intention, you can recreate it almost anywhere.

Here’s what I’ve learned to do in a studio that also has to be an office.

Pause before you begin. When I come into the room meaning to have a creative session, or a proper mixing or mastering session, I don’t sit down and open Cubase right away. I take a short, quiet meditation first. It’s a mental clearing of the noise: the client support tickets, the invoices, whatever the day has been. I’m creating a calm, almost zen-like space inside myself that supports creativity and focus. That’s my threshold. The room doesn’t change, but I do, and that turns out to be what matters.

Make saving a decision again. These days I’m trying to treat a mix revision the way we once treated a printed master. I save it as a new, clearly named version instead of writing over the last one. Storage is cheap; regret is not. Adding that small step brings back the moment of consideration the old workflow built in.

Give the session edges. A session that can last forever usually drifts. Deciding in advance what I’m working on and roughly how long I’ll give it restores a little of the scarcity and stakes that the studio clock once provided.

What the gear can’t do for you

None of this needs an SSL console, a machine room or a design team from LA. It needs the same thing I felt in the doorway at that gorgeous studio in Victoria: respect for the room, the craft and the time, however humble the room may be.

It’s also important to remember that the big studios didn’t make the music. The people in them did, and the rooms helped by making them show up differently. Our home studio spaces often can’t do that for us anymore, so we have to do it ourselves.

So the next time you step into your studio, whatever it looks like, take a moment before you begin to think back to the good ol’ days. Not out of nostalgia, but to bring back a little of that reverence. In my experience, it’s what made the difference in the quality of every creative decision that followed.

Epilogue

The studio, which originaly opened as Zero Gravity, was later sold and partly refitted as Electric City Sound. I’m not sure whether it’s still in business today, but in 2014 Shaw TV’s The|Seen filmed an episode there, with live performances and a look at the room’s design and analog focus. It’s worth a watch if you’d like to see what one of these rooms looks like:

For a practical, step-by-step version of these ideas, see How to Bring Big-Studio Focus to Your Home Studio Workflow on MusicTech.blog.

Sources

Featured image: an SSL 4000 G+ console, similar to the one at the studio. Photo: Richardwolffe, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped. Other photos as credited in their captions.