CARL SAFF: My name is Carl Saff. I run a business called Saff Mastering here in Chicago. I’ve been doing mastering on and off for the past eight years since about 2000, and I’ve been full time doing mastering for the past 18 months. The business started out as a part-time venture that I did in my spare time and has evolved into a full-time business, and I’m now happy to say I’m booking several weeks in advance. So, the business has really taken off in the last couple of years, and I’m excited to be doing the work.

Small rooms like this need lots of absorption. They tend to have big mode problems and I definitely had a few when it was untreated. But one of the things that we did with the get-go with the actual design of the room, something that was designed to be integral to the room, was the ceiling. It was a big challenge.

When I first moved into this house, I thought about putting a studio down here and delayed and delayed and delayed because the ceiling height is not great. But then, John Sayers, who runs a home studio design web site, gave me the idea of doing a fabric ceiling, and the nice thing about that is not only does it increase the height of the ceiling because you don’t have to drop down your dry wall ceiling, it dramatically improves the acoustical height of the ceiling.

So, basically sounds can, if you put, as I’ve done, insulation absorption material in between the joists and then put fabric over the joist, basically sound has to travel -- it can travel up through the ceiling that you see here and then it bounces back from the sub-floor which gives you one additional foot of ceiling height where sound is concerned. You can still always stand down here if you’re under 7 feet tall. But the sound basically has -- it has the effect of having much higher ceilings from an acoustical standpoint, and that was key because I really wondered how we were going to get acoustics even close to right with the dry wall ceiling. I’m really glad we didn’t have to do it. And as soon as I found out that I didn’t have to have a dry wall ceiling, it immediately became possible for me to think about putting this studio down here.

So, that’s what we did here with this ceiling, which is entirely fabric, attached to the joist and then actually held in place by tension at the wall points, and then above that is absorption material. So, the entire ceiling is an absorption zone.

The material you see actually facing us is a black insect netting that is available cheap in giant rolls from Home Depot. It’s also handy because the ceilings are concrete and will always be that way, and so I needed something to avoid standing waves between the ceiling and the floor, so to have the ceiling be an absorption zone is great because then I don’t get standing waves between the ceiling and floor that I would have had otherwise.

The other thing that we did from the outset with the design of the room was make sure that the side walls were not parallel. So, the entire room is a trapezoid stage, which cuts down on standing waves side to side in the room, and the only parallel walls are the front and the back wall that may be the only real mistake we made just because we do -- I do have a modal issue between the front and back that’s why I designed these simple bass traps. There’s one here and there’s one at the front of the room, and between those, for the most part, the modal issues that I have between those two walls are kept in check. It’s not perfect. It’s hard for a small room like this to be close to perfect, but it’s certainly workable and it sounds better than I could have ever imagined. And I’m really happy that we did a lot of homework before we started building and really I can’t imagine a more ideal space given the confines that we had, or rather the restrictions we had in terms of how big it could be, how much space I could use, and the shape possibilities available to me. I really don’t think we could have done a better job.

When the time came to think about getting into mastering full time and building a career in the field, I definitely thought about getting spaces outside of my house for all the obvious reasons. One is I could build it theoretically perfectly with the help of an acoustician. It certainly just has a little bit more of an air of legitimacy when your studio is not in your home.

But one of the things I felt was really lacking that is generally lacking in the country, but especially in Chicago, is I really didn’t feel like there was a solid, affordable mastering option especially for independent artists and artists doing self-released records. I didn’t feel like there was an affordable option for them that also offered access to great monitoring, great analog gear, reasonable experience, an experienced engineer, and I wanted to provide that. And I decided that one of the only ways that I was going to be able to do that was to at least start with a studio in my house.

And so, with the help of some brilliant acoustics advice from various people including John Sayers online, who has a brilliant forum on acoustics. An acoustics professor from Columbia, I got some brilliant input that allowed me to do the studio in my home and keep my rates very low, and I feel like that’s a benefit to the local independent music scene that honestly I’m very proud of. I’m very happy that I offer a service that is affordable to virtually anyone. And it was always one of the goals, and so people often tell me I’m too cheap. I honestly don’t feel that way. I am in no way hurt by my rate, I’m doing just fine, and very happy to afford -- or rather offer affordable mastering for independent artists that also involves great analog gear, great monitoring, and most of all excellent customer service.