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The Technical Stuff

One for the tech heads. Below are the details of how the studio works.

Signals are taken via 14 balanced jack wall inputs to the rear of the 48 patch panel. At the moment, the first 8 of these go to inputs 1 through 8 on the Soundcraft mixer. These inputs are then taken via the direct out links to the 8 inputs of the Yamaha AW16 G, allowing duplicate recording. The main 8 outputs are then routed to the first of 12 inputs on the Hercules Firewire rack mounted sound card. An additional 2 inputs are available directly into the sound card and a further 2 are routed directly from the Proteus 2000 midi expander.The signals then appear on the computer via the card and are fed into Cubase SX 3.1.9 where each channel can be selected for any number of audio recording tracks. In addition to this, the card provides 2 MIDI in and MIDI out ports which are connected to several Yamaha keyboards, the drum kit and harmoniser and the midi sound modules. This allows us to record MIDI and audio data together in one song - ideal for such processes as vocoders, harmonies (via the Digitec Harmoniser) and the like. These actions can be done either whilst recording or in post production. Once the tracks have been recorded, they can have up to 8 post production effects inserts per track added and mixed as required. Once you are happy with the mix, we "train" the on screen sliders and mix down the song. This is monitored via the Behringer Truth Monitors or the main 2500 watt PA stack (or both). If we want to record vocals, we have a vocal booth separate from the main studio with 2 channels of headphones available (out of the 4 available). We can add "more of me" into the headphone mix via the mixer aux send functions. Once the track is complete, we can load it into Soundforge to analyse what we have done and, if required, add compression or other effects to make sure the levels are suitable for normal CD playback. Once we have done that, we can duplicate the CDs on a standalone CD duplicator.

There you go - piece of cake.
Just for the record, the studio contains just under half a mile of screened cable - all of it fitted before the inner walls went up.

If your still reading - then you must be as sad as me (Paul). You might be interested in how we did the soundproofing. The studio is located in a former huge garage which has breeze block walls and a massive "up and over door". For various reasons, we wanted to keep the door in place (otherwise the planners would have got involved). Firstly, we placed a layer of heavy carpet around the walls to dampen them down a little. We then placed 5 " of sound absorbing insulation around all the walls and the ceiling. To this was added 1/2 plasterboard with this attached to the wall using a flexible adhesive (to avoid mechanical contact). Once this was dry, we then glued (to give another different sound absorbing layer) another 1/2 of plasterboard. Once this was all dry and set, we glued professional sound deadening foam to all the walls to eliminate any reflected sound. It seems to work.