My Studio


Home / Music / Studio

"But - the Music Room is... everywhere!"

This is my music studio, built up over many 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. What began as having "a studio at home" soon grew into every room of my house being filled with different musical instruments. This organic approach 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.

You can chart my progress in photos over the years. Since its humble beginnings the studio has moved locations and is being (constantly!) redesigned; you will be impressed by the transformation! I recently built a silent music computer to run Ardour on, which absolutely rocks, and I now have all the professional audio tools I could want. There is still more cabling to be finished, but we have started 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! :-) And new music is coming very soon...

[ Wide angle panorama with phat-fingered Jupiter ]


© copyright Malcolm Smith 2002-12-08 - last updated 2011-07-03 - links verified 2010-11-01