LIU Roc Nation

Overview

The Roc Nation School of Music, Sports, & Entertainment at LIU Brooklyn is a specialized program of Long Island University that offers training and degrees in music composition, production, and performance as well as marketing and sports management. The program was started by Jay-Z as an outgrowth of his company Roc Nation and as a way to provide practical, career-focused education in these areas and fuel the next generation of entertainment entrepreneurs. The principals at Roc Nation, including Program Director Young Guru, and LIU recognized the need for a world-class studio on campus to put the program on the map, and brought in WSDG to design it in 2020.

Program

The WSDG Design team was tasked with creating a professional level recording facility within existing space in the building that could serve the school’s recording and educational needs. WSDG created a full studio package that included the design of the facility, acoustic isolation and optimization, systems design, and technical interior design.

Design

The recording studio is LIU’s flagship recording space and is a full-featured, professional grade facility that is designed to rival the top studios in the world. No expense was spared in terms of design and technology in order to ensure that students at The Roc Nation School of Music could readily apply their engineering and audio production skills anywhere else in the world. Given that it was designed within an existing space, the WSDG design team took great care to make use of every inch available to ensure that it was comfortable and ergonomically accessible.

The studio consists of a large control room, a live room, a vocal booth, and three iso booths. The control room has a state-of-the-art console, monitoring, and outboard gear, including a full immersive Atmos setup and optimized acoustics that benefit from the use of REDIacoustics NIRO AI-powered process. It features an angled acoustic ceiling for optimal listening conditions at all positions as well as for allowing natural light into the space. The control room is also easily configurable for both teaching and standard production layouts, with ample sight lines between spaces to ensure intuitive collaboration between engineers, artists, teachers, and students.

The 550 ft² live room is large enough to record mid-sized ensembles comfortably and also includes access to natural light and sightlines. Variable acoustic control within the space is possible due to the use of heavy acoustic curtains over custom diffusers that can be drawn or hidden away for the desired effect. The space also has a deployable projection screen for small screenings and presentations. The studio’s lighting design makes extensive use of customized, linear LED lighting for a dynamic, ‘stormy’ motif.

The entire studio space has high clerestory windows to the exterior for ample daylight as well as large windows to the interior lobby from the control and live rooms to give full view of studio activity to participants and passing educational tours.

Photo credit: Joe Janisheski of Lightroom Studios