You do not need a control room to make a serious record. You need a room worth recording in, enough inputs, a way for everyone to hear, and a plan that survives contact with eighteen musicians.
Universal Audio set Fab Dupont a specific challenge: build a studio from scratch inside a performance space using Apollo interfaces, then record a string orchestra and an electric guitar in it. This is what that actually involves.
Choose the position by ear, not by convention
The first decision was where in the venue the orchestra would play. The obvious answer was the stage. The chosen answer was the floor.
Three reasons: the reverb was better off the stage, players had more room between them, and cameras could move around the ensemble. There was also a large instrument permanently occupying stage space.
Walk the room before you commit. The place a venue is designed to put performers is optimised for an audience, not a microphone.
Plan your channel count against real interfaces
Eighteen string inputs plus a main array plus room mics plus guitar adds up fast. The rig here was three Apollo interfaces of different channel counts plus a four channel outboard preamp, all clocked together, running into a laptop.
Two planning principles worth copying:
Keep related sources on the same device. The three main array microphones all went to the same interface, deliberately, so their preamps matched.
Number things so you can remember them under pressure. Fab built the input list specifically to be mnemonic, grouping sections so that channel numbers mapped predictably to positions in the room. On a fast day you will be reaching for channels from memory while people wait.
Solve monitoring before you solve anything else
With eighteen players who need to hear a direct guitar that is not in the room, headphones are not an afterthought. The setup here used several headphone amplifiers to provide eighteen channels, and twenty pairs of identical headphones so nobody was hearing a different tonal balance.
If your musicians cannot hear properly, none of your microphone choices matter.
Keep the floor clean
Cable runs were planned so the control position sat where the venue's own infrastructure already was, keeping runs short. Everything was tidied before the musicians arrived, partly for safety, partly because a conductor tripping over a cable ends your day, and partly because cameras were running.
Line check everything, by name
Before anyone plays, scratch every microphone and confirm it against its channel name. Every session that skips this loses time later hunting a problem that was visible in the first two minutes.
On this session the line check caught a broken connection and a buzzing DI that was fixed with a ground lift, both before the orchestra arrived.
Expect to change the plan
The setup that goes up in the morning is a hypothesis. Once players arrive and you hear the ensemble through the console, you will move microphones, add microphones, and change spacing. Extra cello microphones and an additional soloist microphone were added mid session here, using preamp channels deliberately kept spare.
Build the plan, then leave yourself room to be wrong.
The whole build, from gear coming out of the car to the first take, is documented in 6 Strings and Classic Strings on Puremix.
