The Live Room at Studio 637 has been a popular space for creatives and go-getters for years. We offer a space for ideas to come to life.
We’re excited about the new look of our studio since re-modeling. Get ready for a brand new backdrop for music videos and other projects. Introducing; The Wooden Slat Wall.
Beetle Kill Pine
Choosing the right wood for recording studios is imperative. The owners of Studio 637, Blair and Lindsay Lockwood, and their son Alex, Studio 637’s Sound Engineer, are native to Colorado, where the loss of trees due to wood-boring beetles is common. Sometimes the beetles can take out entire forests, killing the trees they feed on. Although these dying trees might appear to be obsolete, they actually take on unique patterns and colors from the holes created by the beetles. This makes beetle-kill pine a niche material, utilized by few in areas where the phenomenon takes place. Due to the small demand, the price of this kind of wood is cheap, making it easy to acquire. The Lockwood’s had a family friend who used primarily beetle-kill in his carpentry practice, which inspired us to obtain it for our Wooden Slat Wall in the studio.
To keep the community and Hermosa Beach culture involved, we had the wood installed by Raul at Cypress Millwork and Custom Cabinets.
Acoustics
Not only does the room appear more spacious because we removed equipment from the space, it feels like an open sound stage. The acoustic paneling on the ceiling coupled with the slats and spaces of the Wooden Slat Wall make for a controlled, lively sound.
During renovation we removed several items (“Space Junk”) from our live room, which made it sound like an echo chamber due to untreated, highly reflective parallel walls. Upon adding our first layer of absorbers, the reflections were absorbed too much, creating a completely dead room. Adding the wood slats and diffusion pattern on the ceiling brought the life back the room, but in a more controlled manner.
To make the sound come alive again, we added a wall covered by beetle-kill pine, which left us with the most warm, natural tone. The un-sanded wood boards left rawness in the wood, increasing the diffusive properties of our slat wall.
We’re all interested to see how clients take to the wall and use it creatively.
Alex Lockwood
Using wood with holes in it sounds odd, but as acoustic sound diffusers in our live room, beetle-kill pine is perfect. The beetle holes and boring chambers add to the sound diffusion, bringing life to our live instrument recordings. Fungus left behind the beetles gives the pine a gray/blue hue in certain areas. Aesthetically, the beetle-kill pine adds a gorgeous backdrop for projects filmed at the studio. For your next project, enjoy a natural background with depth and dimension that you won’t find anywhere else.
Contact us for more information about our recording capabilities, or read our blogs to learn more about what we do at Studio 637.
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