More than 1,000 of you have had a look at the video below, a tour of CBC Radio Vancouver’s radio drama studio:

The guy in charge of this room, Chris Cutress, posted a comment here with some more details on the room, and I thought I’d post them here.

Hi Tod: I was away doing a remote music recording when you visited studio 3.

We actually record telephone in the small area outside of the studio before you enter the studio proper. The “best room” is called the “dead room” and we do exterior scenes and readings / narrations in that room due to the lack of room bounce [dead ambient].

You passed a window in the dead room hallway which we open and use to mic interior car scenes by having the microphone record the bounce off the window rather than mic’ing the actors directly.

The 1/4″ recording tape can be used for fire or rain [we usually do that from cd now] but it is most often used to represent the sound of grass. We use 2″ tape for the sound of long grass or underbrush. If you had had the time to uncover all the sfx foley pit you would have seen different sizes of stone, dirt and sand as well as recording tape for different live footstep effects. The platform over the pit makes a good wharf when the sound of lapping water is added to the scene.

In the main studio we record interior scenes and use the overhead mic to add room or depth to the sound. By doing this we can create space without needing to add electronic reverb or echo [although we sometimes do that when required].

The little area before the kitchen / bathroom area is our locker room where we do school hallway scenes as its sound is midway between dead and the reverberance of the main room. We call it the locker room because we have metal school storage lockers along one side of the wall. The chairs are stored there do the construction slated to occur in the two back rooms.

At the top of the stairs is our bedroom. It has two small couches which can be used to mimic the feel and sound of a bedroom. It has an intimate sound when close mic’ed but is different in sound texture to the dead room.

The main studio microphones are Neuman U87’s which are all over 25 years of age. In the dead room we use one Neuman U87 for narrations and readings with a pair of Sony C48’s for our stereo pickups. In the kitchen we use an AKG 422 stereo mic which has been removed to safety during construction. I hope that fills in what you missed during your private tour.

Sweet. Thanks Chris!

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