“What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.”
Bono
Bono is not wrong, of course, and it is little short of a miracle that what – when I started writing and playing way back in the very early seventies – would once have required a lot of money on studio fees and equipment and such, can now be achieved with a simple electronic device to which a great many people have access.
That having been said, musicians (and other creatives) tend to be restless souls – always stretching themselves and grasping at some notion of perfection that is, by definition, well out of reach.
This is by way of admitting that the splendid new window was not all that was added to my little studio over the summer – and that the round of domestic improvements on which I commented in my last post also included some other tweaks inside the studio itself.
This is what it looked like when I first set it up:
…and this is what it looks like now:
Quite apart from there now being rather more ‘stuff’ in the room than there was before – and not to ignore the splendid new rug – there are now several more layers of acoustic treatment (bass traps and suchlike) in an attempt to contain some of the wilder room nodes and to achieve something like the flat response that makes for a good recording studio.
The main reason for these endeavours, of course, is to enable us to record the Chanteuse’s voice in all its glory in the best possible environment – now that we can finally work together in the same space again. We don’t have a vocal booth, but we do have a vocal ‘corner’:
This is what it looks like from the Chanteuse’s angle:
We don’t normally record her with multiple microphones but we were carrying out some comparative tests in our endless search for the perfect sound.
We look forward to sharing the results!
