shame to have such a nice room and not use
it, and when you have a band in there, it’s
really fun to be in the middle and it’s easier
to interact as well, but it was kind of tricky to
design and I knew I needed help.”
Enter designer/acoustician Nicolas Grou,
who has designed a variety of recording spac-
es in Montreal and was referred to Kelly by
Guillaume Chartrain, co-producer on some of
the artist’s past records.
External noise wasn’t an issue, Kelly
explains. “There’s no one around and no real
noise from outside and I didn’t want to be
in a bubble. Sometimes I actually have the
windows open when I’m recording and it’s
fine; you only hear the birds and the wind in
the trees.”
Substantial interior acoustic treatment
was required to ensure the room was live
sounding in one direction and as dead as
possible in the other, where his speakers
faced. The latter part of the space is where
the room’s main bass traps are located. “Nick
came with his team to do the acoustic treat-
ment and it’s pretty damned good. This year
I scored my first movie [2017’s Innocent]. Not
a production with a really big budget and
we mixed the movie at my place, too, with
my surround system. Because of the size of
the room, it can actually sound like a small
movie theatre.”
Soon, he’ll begin work on his second
full-length feature film project: a partial
biopic of Celine Dion produced by Orange
Médias.
“Obviously, we started with this big box
of cement, so I think I had a nine-second re-
verb in here before we treated the walls.” Built
largely below ground, on average the walls
are between 2 and 3 ft. thick and packed with
a substantial amount of Roxul Safe ‘n’ Sound
insulation. “If you aim sound at the back end
of the studio, it just dies out in the massive,
custom built bass traps, but when you place
a source in the dead corners and put a mic
in the other part of the room, it’s got a nice
reverb.
“For [the bass traps] we used the same
insulation and hung it on wooden frames,
so it’s suspended like coats in a closet,” Kelly
says, adding that after analyzing the fre-
quency content of the room with Rational
Acoustics’ Smaart acoustic measurement
software, “It was pretty much flat down to 25
or 30 Hz. So it’s really a great environment to
mix in, in my opinion.”
Additional absorption was achieved by
applying industrial-grade black landscaping
fabric on top of the concrete and below the
rough pine that lines the studio walls. “It was
cheaper than any other fabric,” Kelly says, “and
I wanted an industrial look – the look and feel
of the unfinished wood and steel trim.
“We didn’t really worry about the floors
and ceilings at first,” he continues, explaining
that given the radiant water heating for the
floor, he preferred to keep it bare and add a
few area rugs here and there. “And, as Nick ex-
plained to me, the high frequencies are easier
to get rid of. It’s the low end that’s problem-
atic and more expensive to deal with. Then
the ceiling is the steel that they laid the
concrete on top of and, again, I wanted
to keep that industrial look with the
exposed H beams.”
There are fabric clouds on the
ceiling, but the amount of absorp-
tion applied to the walls enabled
Grou and Kelly to keep them fairly
low impact, visually speaking.
“They’re made of the same material
[we used on the walls] and are as thin
as possible to avoid blocking any of the
windows. It’s a rare thing in a studio to
have all that natural light and I think if you’re
going to spend all that time in there, at some
point, it’s something you really crave.”
After the initial treatment, Kelly f