Dracon said:
???? What do you mean??? How did the darkness of the room affect you?
I'm just interested in finding out. The reason I ask is 'cause I live in beige world in my house (I rent and don't feel like painting one more house), and I dislike the starkness of beige.
The all-black bedroom recording studio (including the carpet) was neat for a while, but I had the windows blocked off with heavy, heavy black drapes. It was illuminated by a 100W ceiling fixture, and the gear's LED's, backlit LCD's, etc, and a desk lamp. It was really dark, and often it would be difficult to find the edge of the table I had my gear on, just because late at night I'd be exhausted, yet still trying to slap down a few tracks. It affected me in a negative way, in that it was difficult to see anything when tired, and overall was a little depressing. Might have been life circumstances at the time combined with it, but I really didn't enjoy recording in that room all that much, and as a consequence, I recorded very little until I repainted it back to a more traditional beige.
Your body needs sunlight to stop the melatonin (the sleep hormone in all of us). If you go from a dark bedroom to a dark workplace and never get more than a few minutes a day of sunlight (especially in the winter months), part of your body is still sleeping, so to speak. If possible, sit in the morning sun for a few moments while you savor some orange juice, allowing the sun to stop the sleep mode.
Your skin also uses sunlight (the UV rays actually) to produce Vitamin D, of which you need a lot of. If you get no sunlight at all, you need to drink approximately ten glasses of vitamin D fortified milk each day just to get the minimum that you need. This is also cumulutive, meaning that you can't just get sun for one day (or drink 10 glasses of milk) and make up that deficiency, you need a fairly regular diet of sunlight.
Since your car windows are UV-blocking assuming it was made after 1990, sitting in the car in traffic going to work doesn't give you any vitamin D producing sunlight whatsoever.
Vitamin D deficiency, well, allows for depressing and sleepiness, among other things.
Who wants to be depressed or sleepy while writing music? Recording facilities whether its a small walk-in closet or a huge 20K sq ft structure, needs to be acoustically pleasing, visually pleasing, and ergonomically appropriate. If you lack one or more of those three categories, you're going to find your recording space a distraction, a hinderance to your creativity. And then to the degree that the space is lacking, you've hampered your potential and ability to create your finest work.
Years ago, while in corporate America, I had close to 300 people working for me at various levels, and I "broke the rules' ergonomically as far as floor layout as well as cubicle size, and for this, I gained tremendous productivity from just about everyone. The lower in rank a person in my organization was, the closer to the windows I put them. The reason for this is I believe that sunlight is good. The ability to take a 30 second break and look out the window at the water, boats, and heliport that was right there, was a relaxing break. The higher ranking folks (managers, and directors), I put closer to the center of the floor we occupied.
Cube dwellers (staff, supervisors and managers) also received large 10'x8' cubes. Why? Because I don't believe anyone can be productive to their maximum ability by being shoe horned into a 3'x4' cube with a desktop computer, a file cabinet, and stacks of paper everywhere. I believed that the productivity gains of people's performance, which has a measurable dollar value attached to it since people draw a salary, grossly exceeded the cost of the increased square footage, even at NYC prices.
I also had the walls repainted every 2 years, to keep everything clean and fresh. While corporate realty services dictated the color themes, there is something nice about freshly painted walls, clean elevators, enhanced security in the main entry ways to protect people's stuff, whether it be corporate assetts or personal belongings. I think in the 5 years we were there, one laptop and two mice disappeared.
Anyway, I'll stop the long winded speeches, these are things I strongly believe in, and were a strong influence in how I laid out my home studio. I don't really need four 19" VGA monitors, two would have been just fine, but having a larger desktop (6400x1280) makes for a lot of room to spread things out on the screens for editing purposes. Adobe Premiere and Sonar Pro look great spread across four monitors, and make it easy to find everything quickly. Less flipping windows open and closed, I can have everything I use regularly open and available immediately. Same reason why my console table is so wide... while its rare that I'll wheel my chair all the way to the left or the right, as I can control the little mixers on either side via midi, I could slide down that way if I wanted to. There is a space buffer between me and the entry door on the left, and me and the exit window (grin) on the right. I don't feel cramped or compressed in any way. I can slide back about 6' and bang my chair on my gear racks, so there is space behind me too. I wish the ceiling was higher (I moved it up from 6'2" to almost 8' in places, 7'6" in most places, which is tolerable), and I wish the front ceiling slant that I have my console table under didn't exist. I do plan to dormer the front at some point, but I'm waiting for the 1941 slate roof on the front of the house to need replacing, and at that time I'll dormer the nose of the room giving some height there, and install some nice windows.
Many years ago, I owned (or co-owned) three different pro studios, and the nicest one to record in was made out of an old two story warehouse, which had no second floor, so all the space was incporated into the recording studio. The live room was gorgeous, it was big and spacious, tall ceilings, wood everywhere. The nicest feature of the life room however was the motorized skylights installed "way up" on the ceiling. Because this building was two stories, and the other buildings around it (around being several hundred feet away) were one story, all throughout the spring and fall months we'd keep the skylights fully open, allowing in fresh air. We were located off the beaten path enough that we didn't have any real traffic, so there was no noise, and no fumes to speak of. So everything not only looked good, sounded good, but also smelled good. Behind this building was a huge field of wildflowers, which during the spring smelled wonderful for those without allergies (like me, unlike my partner).
Anyway, random thoughts....