Whitepapers

White Mark Limited is a company dedicated to designing and realising the finest recording, pre and post production studios, performance and communication suites. The company is made up of engineers and designers who have a considerable amount of experience in the field, as we hope is demonstrated by the contents of this web site. Behind the exciting interiors and work spaces that we have created and hope to create in the future, lie firm ideas as what we are doing and why. 

A couple of images persist in the mind when studios are being planned. These are both born of discussions with clients, recording engineers, maintenance people and artists and have become something of an acid test for the innovations and lateral design directions that emerge during project discussions. Recording studios, and many other work environments, must work on many levels; first and foremost they need to function as expected, they must impart to those who use them the confidence to forget the mechanics of the environment and concentrate on the creative job in hand. But, they must also inspire, if not inspire directly then assist the process of inspiration should it need to be forthcoming from elsewhere. 

The first image is of a junior assistant on ‘the’ big session. It is two o’clock in the morning, the audio tape with the potentially suspect timecode has finally arrived from the live gig in Athens and has to be married to the studio work and the video supplied from the local TV company. The first string maintenance crew are off ill and cannot be contacted. The machine room layout, the ergonomics of the flexible patch system installed two years previously, when the studio was designed, must allow him/her to see what is going on. It must let the session proceed as if this was the most normal occurrence ever. The artist, producer, engineer and client must have confidence born of the ease with which all is made to work effectively and in as short a time as possible. The assistant engineer must be able to understand the machine room and have confidence that it was put together well and never hums or fails to lock for reasons best put down to poltergeists. 

The technical systems must, in short, be well engineered and intuitively presented. 

The second image is of a musician who leaves home for the studio on a miserable, wet Tuesday at 11.00 am. The car breaks down, the kids are late for school, the mortgage needs paying. The artist arrives at the studio and is expected by the assembled crew to perform a song that has been performed forty times in the last week. The performance must reduce otherwise sane people to tears in twenty years time when they hear it and they remember the first time they heard it. 

The studio must be a place apart, a special place where confidence in the technical systems is fundamental but where the environment is designed to a level where the mundanaties of life outside can indeed be left outside. 

The studio must be beautiful. 

In this section of the web site we hope to place writings that reflect experience of projects and issues as they arise. We will update the entries with articles that will give an insight as to how we go about our design work and the basic philosophies that underpin it. If there are comments on the content, please feel free to mail us, we would like to hear from you.

• Surround Sound for Postproduction 
• Surround Sound at Strongroom 
• Earthing and Screening 
• A Project Studio; Design Considerations