My First Studio (1989)

This post will be more of a visual journey... For my second entry I am going to reach back to 1989. During that year my wife was nice enough to agree to allow me to build a full blown recording studio in two of the large downstairs rooms of the house that we were living in at the time.This was a 5000 square foot two-story house. So this  did not take a huge chunk out of the living space.

I had two fellow musician friends that went in with me on the project. One of them contributed a lot of the required building materials the other pooled his recording equipment with mine. At the time he and I were both unrepentant gear sluts (I still am) so this worked out well. In the end we ended up with a well equipped home based 16 track recording studio. Not bad for 1989.

The challenge was to turn two large rooms in a typical house into a full blown semi-professional recording studio. I was working as a computer engineer for Wang Laboratories at the time. I did not have unlimited resources, but i made decent money and had enough to do a real nice job as you will see.

Here I am with my buddy Hollywood. We are scoping out the control room window. It took a real leap of faith to grab a circular saw and cut that hole in a perfectly good wall. We ended up with a nice double pain angled glass control room window.

There was no affordable acoustical treatment in those day (on the budget that we had) so we had to improvise. The dead end of the studio room was finished in old style ceder shakes (roofing). Ceder is a very soft wood and the wedge shape of the shakes, when applied in rows, makes for a great (read: cheap) diffuser. You may also see some of the detail in the CR window in this pic.

If care is taken when applying the ceder shakes it makes a very rustic and pleasing finish and its' acoustical properties have a great cost/benefit ratio.

I'm a EE by training and I have always had an electronics bench wherever I have lived. Such as it was, here is what it looked like at the time. I built a lot of custom equipment and fixtures that were used in the studio construction in this shop.

As I said, custom fixtures. Here is the rack that was built for the recorders. All of the studio furniture was Formica on MDF construction. Very professional looking but a huge pain-in-the-ass to make. The recorders were an Otari 5050 1/4 in half-track mastering machine and a Fostex B-16 one-inch 16 track machine. They sounded great and performed flawless.

Here is a close up shot taken across the console looking at one of the effects bays. It was a Tascam 24 X 8 X 2 console. Considered upper end semi-pro at the time. It was a sweet board. Note the RCA patch bay. They don't make 'em like that any more, thank God.

Some of the equipment in that rack I still recognize.  That's a Yamaha SPX 90 near the top. An old MXR dual 15 band EQ below it. A pair of DBX old school limiters. A Delta digital delay. And a Lexicon LX series digital reverb. That is probably that most expensive piece of equipment in the room. It was considered a top-of-the-line digital reverb in its' day. I can still remember the sweet sound of that reverb.

And in the left bay is my old Apple IIc  computer running my first (very crude) attempt at digital DSP. It sounded like crap but I learned a lot writing that program. The D/A and A/D converters are in that small grey box to the right of the green-screen monitor.

Just off camera in the above pic was an old IBM PC running the DOS based version Cakewalk. Cakewalk was one of the first commercially available software sequencers. There was a companion ISA card that was installed in the PC that handled the MIDI I/O and there were also analog SMPTE in and out ports on the card as well. This allowed you print a SMPTE stripe on the multi-track machine (usually on an edge track - track 1 or 16). You could then put Cakewalk in sync mode and it would chase-lock with the Fostex multi-track tape machine. When you hit the PLAY button on the Fostex, Cakewalk would stay in perfect time-sync with the tape machine as it rolled. This allowed you add MIDI based interments to the mix without burning any additional tracks on the multi-track machine. For the money invested, that was quite a technical trick in 1989. I can still recall that look of amazement on the faces of my musician friends when I demoed this capability for the first time that they had ever seen it. And from what I recall, I remember that old DOS version of Cakewalk was a joy and a pleasure to use. Software was so much simpler back in those days. (Now I'm starting to show my age and just grousing I guess...)

I'll leave you with this closing shot of my friend Keith. Keith was a friend that I worked with at the time. He was not a musician and had never been in a recording studio. I do not recall what project was in progress when this picture was taken, but I do remember bringing Keith in and setting him down in front of the console and showing him how it worked and then said: "have fun!". That look on his face says it all. Keith was about as non-technical as a person could be, yet a few simple instructions and some rockin' tunes on the multi-track machine seems to be the recipe for big fun, proving that music truly is a universal language. We are all drawn to it to some degree. I have never met anyone who didn't like some kind of music.




Next time I'll share some of my more resent studio efforts with you. My MIDI studios...