So You Wanna Build a Studio?

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So you wanna build a studio eh?

This page describes details of how I built my Recording Studio and contains plans for Helmholtz and Wideband absorbers used.

I knew this would be a challenging project, but I must say I was unprepared for the difficulty of the task at hand.

After doing it with some sucess, but also some problems acoustically previous to this attempt, I decided to really learn the science & do the maths so that the acoustics are at least as good as the professional studios I have had the good fortune to work in in the UK and limit the neighbour annoyance. To this end I purchased several books on Acoustics and did some serious reading and study. In the end I wrote a spreadsheet that does all the donkey work with all the absorbsion co-efficients and surface areas taken into account...This actually was a mission but the results in the end were perfect. Maths does work.

The next question was location. There were basically 3 choices. These were:

A spare bedroom — This has the distinct disadvantage of annoying the most sensitive neighbour, namely the other half, and would also possibly make no contribution to the value of the property as I would loose a bedroom & there would be a lot of alteration to do. Additionally unless serious effort & expense was made, soundproofing it would be difficult & acoustically to achieve the 1500 sq. foot recommended control room minimum, a double bedroom would be needed.

In the Barn — (This is the other half’s favourite) I could construct anything in there as there is literally a concrete pad and that’s about it. There are some down sides though, namely that you’d need wellies, a raincoat & have to negotiate a horse yard (with the possibility of horse excrement) & mud in winter to get to it. Not that good for clients. Secondly there was the substantial expense of starting all the construction from scratch. Add to this the fact that it is absolutely sweltering in there in summer & there is no ventilation, not even a window.

One of the Stables — (You can imagine what the other half thinks of that!) One of them is bigger than all the others and has it’s own external entrance. Although at about 1300 sq. feet is a teeny bit smaller than the BBC recommend is practical minimum, but it’s close. Also the firniture I intended to install would be good diffusers to help with the modal problems caused by smaller spaces. There is a solid concrete pad and the internal walls consist of concrete blocks to a height of 1.2 meters. The remainder of the walls consist of open studs with heavy wire mesh stapled to them on the inside of the room & tongue & groove nailed on the other side in interior facing walls. The exterior walls are brick with an air gap between the block & stud wall. There was also two serious design flaws with the stable in question, one of which was that the door is not large enough to get a moderately large horse in safely & was probably only suitable for foals.

For me the decision was fairly obvious, I just had to convince the boss, after reassurance that the space was large enough for all my gear & that I wouldn’t start pulling it to bits and then change my mind, the decision was made. The Horse (a nick name picked up in England), would indeed build his studio in a Stable. Ironic huh?

The Stable offered the following advantages.

The construction was such that there was enough there to be fairly easily adapted to my task and it would mean I would not have to start from scratch as I would in the Barn.
The size was slightly smaller than ideal but it was close & the planned firniture would diffuse well.
The existing concrete floor & blocks on all 4 internal walls 1.2 meters high formed a very solid base to build the rest of the structure & all the studs were in so I would just have to adapt them to my needs.
Access is good for clients & security is good with brick walls, plus the Stable block has it’s own independent power connection, so power billing is straightforward for the taxman.
The Stable is far enough away from the House & neighbours (65 meters) so that I would not have to make sure the studio was completely soundproof. I don’t know if Horses in the adjoining stables like Dance music, so I would have to make it fairly soundproof, but at least I wouldn’t have to make a floating room within the space available, with a substantial reduction in cost.

So many plans were created, & various configurations were played with. A design & layout was finally settled on and the first phase could begin. In the end a fairly strange concept was chosen & I made all the acoustic calculations to give 350ms Rev time flat response from 20Hz to 20KHz. Then estimates of the construction materials was made. (If you ever get to do this, in retrospect add up all the costs to a total & then triple it…I guarantee that this will be a closer estimate to the total cost than your original projection!)

Phase 1

Clean up the Shyte!

As you can see the inside of the Stable was like an errr…Stable. Check out the cobwebs! Remember also that I am actually allergic to Horses. Now that this project has ended I have been so over exposed to Horse dust that my allergy seems to have abated somewhat. This did not mean there was a lot of sneezing & teary eyes when doing a lot of this work.

First thing to do is get all the netting on the walls off.

My good olde friend nicknamed Shabby once told me if you want to do anything to your house it will cost you at least $150.00. I thought that taking the netting off the studs would be easy & only take an hour tops…Well the reality was after struggling for several hours with a hammer I had to go down & buy a set of big fencing pincers to get the hundreds of really big staples that were used to staple the netting to the studs off. This task alone took nearly 2 days.

Then all the studs & trusses were brushed down with a damp cloth to clean all the cobwebs, Spiders & horse dust off them. Next I removed the Horse feed tray that was masonry nailed to the blocks. It was during this phase that I discovered…the state of the wiring.

Horse feed trays tend to have Horse feed in them from time to time. This attracts some somewhat undesirable little blighters. The Ratties we had were not nice little educated fellows as in Wind in the Willows, these little bastards were using the air gap between the interior wall & the exterior wall as a motorway to the Horse feed tray restaurant. On the way they had a snack on the wiring.

I first noticed this when I saw a flash & heard a crack when inspecting my handiwork one evening with the lights off. Inspection the next day revealed that they had done their work well. All of the lighting wiring would have to be replaced. In fact the blighter had done his work to an exemplary standard, actually he became fatally obsessed & made one nibble too many. It had happened many years ago. It sunk its teeth into a wire behind the building paper and had been fatally stimulated as a result. When I was checking the wiring behind the building paper the desiccated mummy of Pharaoh Rattie was unearthed & had to be suitably disposed of.

Half of the Stable was full of firewood. Weary of spiders & other creepy crawlies, I slowly removed it all and finally was able to give the floor a sweep for the first time.

There is a similar law to "what goes up, must come down"; it is "what goes in, must come out". This rule definitely applies to Horses.

I decided that the olde Power Washer needed a bit of exercise. It was at this point that I discovered serious design flaw number two of the stable.

The water & power was connected to the washer & the washing was begun. Jetwashing is always a messy business but Jetwashing years of Horse excrement of the floor is exceptionally so. It was not long after starting that I noticed that something strange was happening. Stables are usually designed so that the drain towards the door for obvious reasons, it makes sweeping all the "what goes in, must come out" stuff much easier as there is usually quite a bit of it. Well not in my case. I soon found myself ankle deep in 75mm of a smelly brown slurry of water & Horse Shyte with nowhere for it to drain. The slope of the floor was actually away from the door, which had a sill on it. Even if the floor sloped the correct way, the liquid cannot escape past the sill. If anyone knows a quick way of draining a situation like this please let me know! The only solution was to mop it all up by hand into a bucket, which was a very slow & messy job.

Finally all the shyte, dust, cobwebs, netting & firewood was gone & two sealer coats were applied to the floors & blocks. This believe it or not was the first acoustic treatment, the blocks would allow sound to be transmitted through them unless a thick coat of sealer was applied & they tend to absorb more bass if not painted.

Phase 2

Keepin it Quiet.

Although I was not going to attempt to totally soundproof the room I wanted an STC of about 40-50dB reduction in noise through the walls to stop the Horses from loosing condition from boogie’in on down to the vibes coming from the studio.

So the following approach was made, I’ll slam as much mass (in the form of 3 layers of plasterboard, I call it sledgehammer engineering) in between the inside of the studio & the rest of the stable block as possible & then see if that’s enough. If it is, then I’ll just go on and treat the internal surfaces. If not then I’ll build another wall inside & check it again. I was fairly confident that what I had estimated would be enough. First thing to do was build all the stuff to hang the plasterboard off. This meant noggining the internal stud walls & building a ceiling capable of not only holding 3 layers of plasterboard but also a rather large array of Helmholtz resonator & wideband absorber panels.

A series of 100mm x 50mm battens was attached to the ceiling trusses with steel ceiling ties & joist hangers, which probably was way over the top, but last thing I wanted was the hole lot to come down on me & all my gear at some later date. So further sledgehammer engineering was employed. A layer of plasterboard was cut into suitable size pieces and glued & screwed on top of these battens (to prevent the pervasive Horse dust from compressing the Fibreglass insulation). The Fibreglass insulation cut to size & placed in the cavity & secured with string (possibly the worst job in the world), & two layers of plasterboard placed on the inside face of the ceiling. In the walls pieces of plasterboard were cut to fit into the inside of the stud cavities & glued to the tongue & groove. Fibreglass insulation was then placed in the cavity on top of this & two layers of plasterboard were laid on the inside surface of all walls after all the electric’s had been wired up. All gaps & electrical boxes were thoroughly filled with acoustical flexible sealer & expanding foam filler.

As per usual this task took far longer than estimated. Finally it was done and the first coats of sealer could be applied. This proved adequate soundproofing for the situation as the nearest house is 65 meters away and the Horses would just have to learn a few wicked dance moves, although quitely:-)

Phase 3

The acoustics of an empty swimming pool.

Flutter echo city. It sounded like a comb filter. This was to be expected though. I was going to make it worse as well as I was going to put in a wooden floor, which would make that almost perfectly reflective as well. There was method in this madness. If I put carpet down I would have to compensate for the bass lift, as the carpet would absorb a lot of treble. The wooden floor would reflect more or less flat. I chose this as it would make the roller chair run smoothly & the rest of the acoustic treatment would be a lot more straightforward. A friend imports a Sonex type foam panel and sent through some absorption coefficients for them, great at the top end but rubbish at the bottom & hideously expensive, but that was expected as Sonex itself is the same. The plan was masses of panels of 100mm Duct Liner Fibreglass at 48 Kg per cubic meter mass. The experience of the ceiling insulation coupled with the cost though meant that this was going to be expensive & messy. There was an alternative. Autex Industries do a plastic equivalent called an Autex Audio Blanket with an identical mass & thickness but not quite so good absorption coefficient at the very lower end. This was however much more cost effective & much nicer to handle. Autex was selected as the treatment & sabin calculations were done to get the reverb time to the 350ms desired time. I calculated the suitable Helmholtz resonator frequencies taking into account the axial mode resonaces of the room & worked out the amount needed to compensate for the low-end deficiency in the Autex.

It’s one thing to say, I’ll need 34 panels of 600mm x 600mm x 100 of Autex on the ceiling & walls plus 16 panels of 600mm x 600mm x 200mm Helmholtz resonator panels, & actually looking at them. Several sheets of 12mm ply, about 250 meters of 18mm x 18mm dressed pine, hundreds of screws & panel pins, loads of glue, yards of burlap cloth to cover the panels in & a large amount of staples plus many weeks to do the by now seeming endless task & you’ve got it.

By now the "I’m getting seriously sick of this" frame of mind has begun to set in, it has been nearly two months since the project was started. Good honest graft though, all this lifting, sawing and building has meant a loss of nearly a stone, at last I’ve shifted the most of the effects of 14 or so years of English beer!

At last the Acoustic arrays are complete, the woodwork is sealed, painted & the frames covered with burlap & the lighting is secured to the panels.

For those that are interested, here are my designs for Wideband and Helmholtz absorbers suitable for studio acoustic correction as a PDF document.

Click here to download the 500k taufactor_absorbers.pdf

I have also included the absorption characteristic for the wideband with 100mm thick Owens Corning 703 Duct liner (2 layers of 50mm will be fine) that has a mass of 48kg per square Meter, and 100mm thick Autex Acoustic Blanket that has a mass of 48kg per square Meter. 703 or Autex can be used in the Helmholtz and it's characteristic will be about the same in either case as it's function is to damp resonance's in the box. You can see the Hardboard has lots of 5mm holes spaced at 75mm centres and there is a temptation to simply use pegboard. Don't. Pegboard is 5mm holes spaced at 25mm centres and this alters the resonant frequency of the resonator to a much higher frequency which is no good. Avoid making the Helmholtz resonators any larger than 600mm wide x 1200mm as bigger boxes have modal resonance's that can make the absorbers less effective. The large Helmholtz in the roof is actually an array of 600 x 1200 Helmholtz's not one huge one.

Phase 4

A foot in the door & two feet on the ground.

I decided that the existing door should be retained as a disguise and another additional door added inside to form the soundlock. Super duper soundlock is not really needed as the distance from anyone else is significant & the olde inverse square law applies.

So a Solid door was purchased from a demolition yard. Looks like it was from a science lab in a school or something similar, nice & heavy. Having never "hung" a door from scratch I did a bit of reading & eventually had the courage to give it a go.

Geeze solid doors are heavy. Acoustic arrays were positioned on the internal side.

I constructed the studio furniture. This proved to be not as easy as expected as I had designed these "Pods" that are in each corner at the front of the studio. The left one was to have 24 U of Rack space & the other was to be a soundproof box containing the computer & peripherals. The design kinda made this difficult, as I wanted them "Floating" i.e. secured to the walls but no legs to the ground. If they fell off there would not only be a resounding crash but quite a few tears. They were secured to the blocks with Dynabolts & coach screws. The next headache was the rack strips, they come in 2-meter lengths which when cut in half is 23U. Bummer & the things use caged nuts, which personally I hate. So I decided to fabricate them myself. At Novation no one knew the standard & the dimensions for the racks were derived from other manufacturers units. If everyone did this then there is a danger that errors in measurement would mean potentially somewhere down the line a rack unit may not fit. I searched the net for the standards for Rackmount gear & after much searching eventually was pointed to the Electronic Industries Association, (EIA) who then pointed me to the via ANCI to a standards "Store" where I could buy the reference at a ridiculous cost. At least in the music industry the MIDI standard is free & is therefore a successful standard. I did eventually find it in a rack strip manufacturer’s site. If you wanna know it, it is surprisingly simple. 1U = 1&3/4". The bottom hole is 1/4" from the bottom of the strip. The following holes are 1 & 3/4" then 1/2" centres repeating. If you decide to do it, try to find an Imperial tape measure, doing it in metric is insanity. 96 holes were drilled & tapped in 2 lengths of Aluminium angle extrusion. In the Computer pod there are 2 shelves. There is a floating floors on the shelves for the computers to reduce transmission of vibration from the drives & fan in the Mac & PC. Like a computer gamer, the studio is optimised around the computer. The mixer is now only a fancy analogue preamp, if not a rather big one. The computer monitor takes centre stage and therefore is in between the audio monitors.

Initially he new nearfields were Yamaha MSP5’s.

One of my HRM1’s was nicked in the move along with my spare drivers. The Yamaha’s sound cool and are biamped active monitors. They a efficient & quite accurate, but lack a little in the real bottom dept. Quite cool for mixes but shyte for programming Basses or trying to impress the neighbours. Not even near NS10’s in the bottom dept, but then again they are only about 4.5" cones. So I then went looking at subwoofer designs. www.linkwitzlab.com & www.diysubwoofers.org both have considerable background info & some handy spreadsheets that take a lot of effort out of the maths. I decided to purchase some really massive 12" subwoofers from Jaycar Electronics. (www.jaycar.com.au) The CS2228 12" drivers had large Xmax values, very rigid cone structures, dual magnets & dual impedance 65mm voice coils. Although fairly expensive, I decided that cutting corners on the speakers was folly when so much effort was expended on the acoustic of the room.

Although these speakers are intended for use in a car where there is considerable bass lift in the cabin, by using large 45 litre sealed enclosures & suitable crossover electronics, these subs should be more than adequate for studio application. A suitable crossover was designed with the correct phase relationship between the highpass & lowpass outputs. Additionally I decided that as I would use two subwoofers as this would reduce the need to drive one hard to achieve the desired SPL & result in non-linear distortion when the Xmax was exceeded. As well as this when experimenting with Sub’s I had the MSP5’s in a normal nearfield positions, and an experimental 8" subwoofer in the centre underneath. The result was quite satisfactory, but it was strange that in this position, panning a Kick Drum around (when the Sub & Crossover was engaged), produced panning of the higher freq. spectra of the Kick Drum in the MSP5’s as you would expect, but the main throbbing low freq. content was coming from between your legs regardless. The "Normal" setting (Sub off & Crossover bypassed) the throbbing low freq. content panned considerably with the high freq. content. So much for not being able to tell the direction of low freq. sound. I suspect that in this nearfield position the amplitude difference is so great that direction can be perceived by the human ear at lower frequencies (Certainly 3 meters back from the nearfeilds the low frequency direction was not anywhere as apparent). So unlike most subs where both left & right channels are summed and then a fed to a LPF & then via an amp to a single Subwoofer, I opted for a true stereo low freq. crossover & stereo subs.

The cabinets were constructed of 18mm MDF glued & screwed, stuffed with a low weight Autex Polyester wool & wired with Monster cable. The 45 litre cabinets were also designed so that the 19" Poweramp would sit exactly on top of it. Both subwoofers would then fit easily under each of the pods at the front of the Studio.

Later I replaced the Yamaha MSP5's as they still didn't quite do it for me, plus they have this really annoying habit of "puffing" at you through the ports on the front. After a while it really gets on your nerves being puffed in the face on every kick drum! Maybe it's so apparent because the ports are so small in increases the velocity of the air passing through them, I don't know but it's really really annoying. So I did some research again. In the UK I had my favorite Audix HRM1 monitors and Mackie HR824's. I really liked the sound of both of these units. Turns out they both used the same brand of drivers, Vifa 6.5" in the Audix HRM1 and Vifa 8" in the HR824's & both with Vifa Tweeters. See www.tymphany.com. I pulled apart the sole remaining HRM1 and examined the crossover and hey presto, the crossover frequencies were virtually Identical.

So designs were made and Vifa drivers acquired and I created custom cabinets to suit the design of the studio. Below is a picture of them in development and crossover testing.

These not only sound better but gone at last is the puffing in the face!

Another concept for the studio is that there is no vocal booth, I hate em anyway…the artist feels entombed & you have to communicate through a telephone, the com’s mike. I don’t really like the total dead sound of a treated telephone booth anyway, I like a bit of liveness. I have merged the two…The control room is the vocal booth & the control room. As I have made a soundproof pod for the computer & HD’s. The control room is silent. Sealed can’s are used & with one can off you can talk to each other without the glass & buttons.

The next step was the floor. After a bit of advice from a friend we affectionaley call Shabby, I decided on the clip together laminate stuff. This went in really without a hitch, although the skirting boards were a bit tricky as they had to be clamped & glued into position one by one.

Phase 5

Commissioning…

God I hate wires…Over the last 10 years or so I have developed a hatred for the terrors of wiring. Not only is it expensive but also necessary. I thought I had it licked by using the multicores I had in the UK, unfortunately I made a fatal mistake…well all the best plans go wrong…my multicores won’t reach…in fact I need about 2.5 times the length. Woops…

I noticed this mistake quite early, luckily before any studio furniture was constructed for the desk or keys. I then had an idea, move the desk. I created yet another "floating" bit of furniture for the desk. Because the desk was wider than the Rack pod I decided to put this on an angle, this would make it the same width and actually help in visualising the desk itself. This was done and all the existing wiring now fitted. Whew!

This meant that the plan of having 2 keys on each side of the studio was not possible so a large keyboard array was created on the other side capable of accommodating 7 or so keyboards.

Luckily the olde loom I had in England for the keys actually fitted and was wired in. All the shelving holding the keys was mounted on a sheet of MDF which itself was mounted 200mm off the wall allowing all the mains, midi & signal wiring to be concealed.

Phase 6.

Why a ditch is the most expensive part of any studio.

OK so if you were a burglar & actually knew that behind the barn door was a studio you might want to break in. Once you got past the padlock & barn door you would be faced with another 50mm solid door with a euro style deadlock. You could attack it with a chainsaw, it would probably bust the blade well before you got in, however…

Still it makes me nervous. So security happened to become an issue. Ever tried digging a ditch? Especially one 50 meters long and several feet deep? Well that’s what had to happen. Digging the ditch was not so much of a hassle, although there were several mains conduits, telephone conduits, pool lighting conduits, 3 pool plumbing pipes, bore water pipes & fresh water pipes to negotiate, not including several trees, a large wood pile, a large compost heap, many bulbs & plants in a garden, underneath a sealed terrace & in 300mm headroom footings of the house. Don’t become a Drainlayer or Cable jockey, the shit ain’t worth it…well maybe the money is really good if you like that sort of thing!

So you say, "why is the ditch the most expensive thing in a studio?" It’s simply not the ditch, but also what you put in it…Conduit, several security cables & a Cat 5E networking cable. Then there’s the monitored alarm system this lot is connected to. A very expensive ditch indeed.

Phase7

The Concept…

Over Christmas they inevitably roll out the olde classics on telly, you know the ones Ben Hur, Sparticus, Jason & the Argonauts etc etc. Well this Christmas was no different, I turned on telly one Saturday afternoon and bingo…I had an inkling that I’d found the inspiration for my studio design.

Rummaging through some old stuff I had at my parents suggested they could be put to use in the design and my plans deepened. By the time the sequel came out the next Saturday I was hooked. Explaining it to some people could be potentially embarrassing, Anyway I’d always wanted a black room so what the hell…the scheming when on in my head, all I had to do was find the right size mould…browsing through a department store I saw a sandpit collection of toys & there it was…a sandpit spade…I had the mould, I had the concept, I even had some of the bits, all I had to do was make it look convincing, it had to be if it was gonna work. That was going to be difficult.

If you cannot have a bit of a laugh now and then life isn’t worth living is it? When I told the other half she definitely laughed. Maybe I am still a child at heart? But then again, if the wife can pick the colour of the carpet in the house then I shore as hell could do whatever I like in the studio!

The pad came out and plans were drawn up. I just couldn’t resist it, I was going to base the design of the studio in part on the USS Discovery from the movies 2001 & 2010, and the centrepiece was going to be my very own HAL 9000. Cool or what!

The first thing that would have to be custom made is the worlds biggest LED. I when down to the local boat supply shop and started looking at Fiberglas resins. I needed encapsulating resin to make the LED. They didn’t do it but did do standard resins. These go off tin a different way to encapsulation resins and are prone to bubbles which wouldn’t do. I found a manufacturer of the resins and they could supply me so I purchased a litre of resin & some hardener. Next I found the biggest brightest LED I could from electronics suppliers & set up a rig to cast the LED in resin in the mould. The result is below, a very large 110mm diameter LED.

A bit of web surfing produced images from the movies and with these I could duplicate some of the design of furniture etc. & of course HAL himself.

To scale Illustrator drawings were made of the HAL interface & passed to a friend who owns a screen printing company. I fashioned some aluminium plate to the correct size & had it brushed & anodised black. Then my friend screened it with the artwork supplied. The Eye LED was attached and bingo, one HAL9000. I had a flat screen monitor already & inspection proved that the stand could be removed and so the screen could be mounted on the wall directly below the HAL. A bracket was made for this purpose & a good several hours were spent messing around with geometry’s of where the optimum viewing & listening positions where. I found a reject black laminate benchtop at a kitchen furniture factory that was perfect & could be modified to fit between the 2 pods at the front of the studio. A suitable black MDF panel was also mounted on the wall between the pods to mount HAL, the MSP5 speakers & the Flat screen. The panel also hid all the signal, mains, USB & VGA extension wiring as well as the wires supplying power to HAL & the optical memory.

About 20 years or so ago I was commissioned to install the audio system in a place called Kelly Tarltons Undersea World. These are basically huge aquariums that have tunnels made of very thick transparent acrylic. I had scored some blocks of this and kept them for a rainy day. 20 years later, I had a use for them. Mock up HAL’s optical memory, all I had to do is light them up red…100 x 5mm Red LED’s later lots of drilling & lots of polishing & bingo.

I’m quite pleased with the overall look. It does look quite convincing…

Phase 8

What went wrong, hold-ups, ankles, New Zealand weather & the resurrection of Pharaoh Rattie.

I strongly advise not to put the rubbish out after you have become the worse for wear late on a Saturday night. Especially down a long unlit driveway in the country where there is no street lighting.

Why, you ask? Cos it’s a sure-fire way to attempt breaking your ankle. That’s what happened to me! Just about ready to lay in the conduit with all the wiring and this happens. Luckily no bones were broken but Geeze I don’t think I’ve experienced pain like that before. So everything ground to a halt, just as the wires were to go in, I had to stop & hobble aimlessly around the joint. I even had to miss a contract to do the NZ music show.

Two weeks after this, a winter storm came in, a real bastard. Rained, or should I say pelted down for several days. On a routine check one afternoon I discovered a 20cm of water about 1cm from reaching the level of the studio floor backed up by the door of the studio and steadily rising. Total freak as just before I had done in the ankle I laid the new laminate floor. This would not like a quick dip. After madly digging around in the dirt to find the blocked drain, we finally managed to divert the flow back to where is should go…very close to buggering that new floor! Country drains are not quite like urban systems as I discovered. Both the driveway & the paved area in front of the studio drained via silt traps into a large loop of novaflow that was buried in the ground in a shallow scoria soak away. The sheer volume of water from the storm overloaded the soak away as far as I can see at this stage. I’ll have to improve this as a safeguard for the future.

All this weather and the clearing of the drains meant that all my nice ditches were very full of water and I would have to wait for a dry spell. They will then drain & my ankle may get a chance to heal, so that crawling under the house to lay in the cables could resume.

Hell the power did a bunk as well…anyone would think I was in a third world country!

The same storm that nearly flooded the studio also blew a large pine tree down about a mile away. This in turn caught the high voltage power pole & took out the power, which in turn caused a major power cut. It was blowing a real gale & we kinda had anticipated it & already had the candles out. Suddenly all the power went out. Waste not want not, as you can see a bit of Sub Design web surfing went on during the outage.

But when it came on again the extent of damage became apparent, The surge had taken out the water pump for the house (It has an electronic control system), Vaporised the MOV & several other components in the Video Power supply, Blew the Switchmode power supply for my ibook, Blew the power supply in my subwoofer Poweramp, but most annoyingly also took out the power supply in a prototype Synthesiser was working on. Talk about everything happening at once!

The other little gem about this situation was that I was programming some sounds for a Synth Manufacturer & they wanted the data I was making in 3 days and I had not made a backup of the data and had no idea if the data was still there until I fixed the keyboard. Moral of any computer story is the time honoured, "Always make a backup".

The next surprise was Taz (our new 1 year old male dog) only recently learned to cock his leg when going for a wee outside. He’s still learning & sometimes he is distracted or thinking about something else & will raise his front leg rather than his back one, but he’s getting the gist of it. Although this is amusing, it was not so funny when I discovered that he had got into the spare bedroom where I keep all my gear and cocked his leg and peed into a box of leads. I am surprised every time I do the lawns how much excrement can come out of two dogs, & I can vouch that the volume of liquid Taz had neatly dispatched into the plastic storage box of leads was impressive.

Water, Water, Water…It rained for 40 days in Noah’s time right? Well to date it’s rained for 53 days in a row (admittedly not continuously) here so far this winter. This is unusual weather even for here. This has been washing debris down from the field & into the drain in front of the Studio. This overload caused it to block again & I had to rod it to clear the water. This is an issue I will have to address once & for all soon. No sooner had I fixed this then I discovered the resurrection of Pharaoh Rattie. Mr Rattie, or to be honest his descendants, suddenly reappeared. Despite all the rain the little blighter must have been thirsty because he decided that after having a serious munch on a variety of Horse feed, in the feed room next to the studio, he felt like a drink. To this end he proceeded to turn the plastic water pipe into a sprinkler system. This very effectively flooded the feed room & adjoining stable, but luckily not the Studio. Several Rat traps were pressed into action but Rattie was to clever for them so after several days trying to get him with the traps, poison bait was also used. This did not however discourage Rattie from chewing the new Telephone wiring I installed in the studio. This caused an intermittent short, which made the phone unusable intermittently. Finally, Rattie met his demise. This will have to be an on going exercise, as food will always attract them. Maybe there is a down side to building a studio in a stable after all!

A few other hiccups occurred at this time as well. All the rain has meant that our Dam burst & where we had a nice pond, is now a muddy slick, & Coco, one of our Horses died & in doing so broke the fence. We were fixing the fence that the Horse had broken & suddenly noticed Taz was missing. Taz followed another dog walker for miles and we spent hours looking for him. The cold snap also made our telephone reception unreliable. Crawling up in the roof revealed that it was a cabling problem.

Life is not boring in the countryside!

At last…

In goes the gear.

As expected there were the usual wiring nightmares, why the hell doesn’t it work? I expected it to take a week to wire & debug it. Of course, it took longer, everything else has so why choose to change the habbits of a lifetime?

So here is a picture of the finished Studio at last....