Recording Rooms

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The Rooms

The entire house is given over to recording spaces: (I'm obviously not married! ;-)

The Control Room (=living room) - with lotsa synths and rear record wall as a diffusor
The Piano Room (=dining room) - with piano, harmonium, drumkit and African drums
The Bowl Room (=bedroom) - with singing bowls, gongs and bed for sound massage
The Computer Room (=office) - also has congas and more African drums
The Kitchen - larger reverberant space (door can be opened to add reverb to Piano Room)
The Bathroom - small reverberant space for vocal practice while showering
The Gardens - large space with birdsong ambience and plenty of natural light

We are now all set up for multi-room recording and overdubbing, with mic cables strewn all over the place. So players can be recorded simultaneously (or separately) in different rooms for sonic isolation and experimental distant mic-techniques. Mics in different rooms are permanently wired to preamps in the Control Room, and can be moved between rooms.

Acoustic treatment is still suboptimal, but until proper bass traps can be constructed we use ghetto techniques like having a bookcase in The Piano Room to act as a diffusor, and lots of duvets hung over things to reduce flutter echo. It ain't pretty but there are limits to what can be achieved in a rented residential property. But having no neighbours within earshot is a blessing and a half, allowing dead-of-night recording with no external noise.

One day we hope to have a fully configurable headphone monitoring system routing any choice of channels to different rooms. For the time being, we recently got a simple headphone splitter box to share the headphone feed. So now we can enter The Zone in groups rather than previously just one person wearing the headphones and trying to conduct the others (not easy!). Singing and playing together in huge caverns is essential for higher-life sciences to evolve! I look forward to taking Away Teams on missions to distant planets this summer. Tunnels, stairwells and churches are also highly likely destinations.