This is my music studio, built up over the past few years (after two decades of longing :-) as a place to work on my own music at my own pace. I felt I needed to have a room of my own as one never knows when The Muse may appear, so having a studio at home is for me preferable to using a commercial facility. The advances of modern technology allow semi-pro production with computers, albeit without the luxury of racks full of esoteric outboard gear (*drool*) and acoustically tuned rooms of a big studio. One day I'd love to make a proper room in some old medieval church or castle... Meanwhile, I try and seek out sonically interesting places in which to record (to portable DAT), and then bring back the audio to be reassembled with other fragments.
I first began making computer music in the 1980's, using 8-bit machines
such as the
BBC Micro and then
Yamaha CX5M.
Back then, music was programmed by typing in lines of code or entering notes
laboriously by hand. After studying electronic music at college, when
samplers and digital mixers were just becoming mainstream, I drifted out of
the field and got more into playing and
writing for acoustic
instruments, but
my interest in electronics never disappeared. And the prospect of notating
orchestral parts by hand is just too frightening and ludicrous for a modern
day computer geek! So now I'm gradually dipping my toe back in the water
again, slowly obsessively acquiring
equipment (and now trying to stop spending all
of my money on
GAS ;-)
and learning how to use it.
These photos are many years old - new ones coming soon... Since then the studio has moved locations and is being redesigned; you will be impressed by the transformation! One day I plan to build a silent music computer to run Ardour on; I was waiting for quiet and powerful processing to become a technical reality, although now that the industry has eventually got there, my bank balance and focus has moved elsewhere for the time being. I'm using the wonderful 64Studio audio distribution which has excellent professional audio tools. Hopefully I'll get the audio cabling finished soon and start up the production line... I have a long list of CDs promised to the various people I've recorded over the past few years. (If you're still waiting, please hang on in there! :-)
© copyright Malcolm Smith 2002-12-08 - last updated 2009-08-17 - links verified 2006-02-12