--- title: "How to Choose a Recording Studio in Pakistan" description: "A practical guide to booking a recording studio in Lahore, Karachi or Islamabad: what to ask about the room, the monitoring, the deliverables and who owns the session afterwards." canonical_url: "https://elephantaudio.pk/guides/choosing-a-recording-studio-pakistan" type: "Article" date_modified: "2026-09-23T00:30:48.953Z" publisher: "Elephant Audio" publisher_url: "https://elephantaudio.pk" entities: - name: "Lahore" type: "City" same_as: - "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11739" - "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore" - name: "Pakistan" type: "Country" same_as: - "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q843" - "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan" author: name: "Abu Bakar Zahid" role: "Founder, Managing Director & Music Producer at Elephant Audio" url: "https://elephantaudio.pk/founder" same_as: - "https://www.linkedin.com/in/abubakarzahid94" - "https://www.youtube.com/@AbuBakarZahid" - "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12369947/" - "https://open.spotify.com/artist/1vsRY1hLmqEBXcx5xeKs0m" - "https://music.apple.com/us/artist/abu-bakar-zahid/1654787374" - "https://www.deezer.com/us/artist/190524117" - "https://on.soundcloud.com/EnpcD" - "https://www.instagram.com/abubakarzahid94/" - "https://www.facebook.com/abubakarzahid9400/" - "https://twitter.com/abubakarzahid94" - "https://soundsofpakistan.com/artist/abu-bakar-zahid/" person: "Abu Bakar Zahid" person_same_as: - "https://www.linkedin.com/in/abubakarzahid94" - "https://www.youtube.com/@AbuBakarZahid" - "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12369947/" - "https://open.spotify.com/artist/1vsRY1hLmqEBXcx5xeKs0m" - "https://music.apple.com/us/artist/abu-bakar-zahid/1654787374" - "https://www.deezer.com/us/artist/190524117" - "https://on.soundcloud.com/EnpcD" - "https://www.instagram.com/abubakarzahid94/" - "https://www.facebook.com/abubakarzahid9400/" - "https://twitter.com/abubakarzahid94" - "https://soundsofpakistan.com/artist/abu-bakar-zahid/" --- # How to Choose a Recording Studio in Pakistan ## How do I choose a recording studio in Pakistan? Judge a Pakistani studio on four things: whether the room is acoustically treated rather than merely soundproofed, what monitoring the engineer actually mixes on, which files you receive at the end, and who keeps the session. Price varies enormously; those four decide whether the recording is usable a year later. 4 questions that matter (room, monitoring, deliverables, ownership) · 48 kHz / 24-bit the file standard (film and broadcast) · ~70 music students nationally (at the country's only national academy, 2021) Why this is harder to judge here than it should be: Pakistan has real studios and no directory worth the name. Most working rooms are visible only through Instagram, which shows you the gear and the lighting and tells you nothing about whether the room is treated, what the engineer mixes on, or what you walk away with. The supply is also thinner than the number of listings suggests. The country's only national performing-arts academy carried roughly seventy music students in 2021, and there is no established audio-engineering pipeline behind it. A great deal of the equipment in Pakistani studios is better than the acoustics around it. So the useful questions are not about the console or the microphone list. They are about the room, the monitoring, the files, and who keeps the session. 1 — Is the room treated, or only quiet?: Soundproofing stops sound getting in. Acoustic treatment stops the room colouring what you record. They are different problems and most rooms solve only the first: - Ask what treatment is on the walls, not what the walls are made of. Foam on its own controls high frequencies and does almost nothing below about 300 Hz. - Clap once in the live room. A ringing tail after the clap is flutter echo, and it will be in every vocal you record there. - Ask where the vocalist stands. A booth is not automatically better than a treated corner of a larger room; an untreated booth is usually worse. - For a voice recording, the room matters more than the microphone. A modest mic in a good room beats an expensive one in a bad one, every time. 2 — What is the engineer actually listening on?: Every mix decision is made relative to a monitoring chain. If you cannot hear low end accurately you will mix it wrong, and the fault will not appear until the track is played somewhere else: - Ask what the mix is checked on besides the main monitors. A single pair of speakers is not enough to judge how a mix travels. - Ask whether it is checked on a phone speaker. For anything going to social, YouTube or a streaming platform, that is the venue — a phone loudspeaker puts out almost nothing below roughly 400 Hz. - Ask about headphones for tracking, and whether the singer can hear themselves comfortably. A bad headphone mix damages a performance before anyone touches a fader. 3 — What do you actually receive at the end?: This is where most disputes happen, and it is entirely avoidable by agreeing the list before the session rather than after it: - The final mix, at 48 kHz and 24-bit — the film and broadcast standard — unless you have agreed something else for a specific reason. - Separated stems: vocals, music and effects kept apart rather than bounced together. Stems are what make a later change cheap instead of a rebuild. - An M&E version — music and effects with the dialogue or lead vocal removed — if the work will ever be dubbed, versioned or sold into another language. - Every duration you need. A cut-down is re-measured work, not a trim, because integrated loudness is an average across the whole piece. - The raw multitracks, if you want the option of remixing elsewhere later. Ask explicitly; it is not always included. 4 — Who owns the master, and who keeps the session?: Two different questions, and both get skipped. Ownership of the recording decides what you can do with it commercially. Custody of the session decides whether it can be changed at all in two years. A studio that archives sessions can reopen your record to fix a line, build an instrumental, or produce an immersive version later. A studio that does not means any future change is a re-record. Ask what happens to the session after delivery, and get the answer in the agreement rather than the conversation. ⚠️ This one compounds quietly. The decision to keep multitracks is taken years before anyone asks for a version that needs them, and by then it cannot be reversed. On price, and why nobody can quote you one honestly: Rates in Pakistan vary by an order of magnitude and no published rate card survives contact with a real brief. What actually moves the number is the same everywhere: how much use you are buying, whether players are live or programmed, how many versions and durations you need, how many rounds of revision are inside the fee, and whether the schedule is genuinely compressed. The most expensive mistake is not paying too much. It is scoping the usage too narrowly at the start and extending it later, when the leverage has moved. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is a bigger studio always better for recording vocals? No. What matters is whether the space is acoustically treated and how the singer is placed in it. A treated corner of a modest room regularly outperforms an untreated booth, because the booth traps reflections close to the microphone where they do the most damage. ### What files should I insist on before I book? The final mix at 48 kHz 24-bit, separated stems, and an M&E version if the work might ever be dubbed or versioned. Agree the list before the session. Recovering a stem set afterwards means reopening the session, and only a studio that archives can do it. ### Do I need a studio in my own city? For tracking a voice or live players, yes — someone has to be in the room. Mixing, mastering, editing and score are routinely delivered remotely, so the studio that records you does not have to be the studio that finishes the work. ### How do I tell a real studio from a good Instagram account? Ask for work that shipped: a campaign that aired, a drama that ran, a track on a platform you can open. Then ask what they delivered on it — mix only, or score, stems and deliverables. The second answer tells you whether you are hiring a room or a service. ## Related - [What to ask for from an audio post house](https://elephantaudio.pk/guides/audio-post-deliverables/raw) - [What moves the price of custom music](https://elephantaudio.pk/guides/what-custom-music-costs/raw) - [Original music production](https://elephantaudio.pk/services/original-music-production/raw) - [Mixing and mastering](https://elephantaudio.pk/services/mix-master/raw) - [Talk to the studio in Lahore](https://elephantaudio.pk/contact) ## Studio - **Studio:** Elephant Audio — Lahore, Pakistan - **Founder:** Abu Bakar Zahid — Founder, Managing Director & Music Producer at Elephant Audio - **Website:** https://elephantaudio.pk - **Contact:** abubakar@elephantaudio.pk