THANK YOU to all my customers for your support! I didn't have a 'holiday' as such but simply had to make time to finish off my new premises. Now I feel like a holiday!!! 😀 This week though, I'll be jumping repairs and order-builds that have come in recently so rest assured that things are back to normal.
As many will know, I hate DIY mainly because I don't think I'm very good at it. Having said that, this final phase of the project has taught me a lot of patience. Being fussy, I've learnt when to draw the line. The property is a self-build house from the seventies and no adjacent walls are quite perpendicular and no opposing walls are exactly parallel. Kind of good for a recording studio but a pain to paint, decorate and build stuff in. Of course I also learnt a lot about paint, LOL.
as you can see in the picture above, I still have a couple of things to finish off like the recoat of the other side of the door that's behind me and most obviously, I need to mount a TV screen.
I'm delighted that my sub-bass enclosure is almost finished. A couple more coats of paint and I can think about putting in the hi-fi. I'll be doing a feature on the build of this soon. Of course it's the front that most people will be interested in.
Furniture has been ordered and while the seating will be here in a few days, I'm not expecting the bespoke coffee table before the end of the year! 🙁
UPDATE - 23rd October 2023
Last week I received an e-mail informing me that my teak root coffee table was ready to be delivered. WOW!!! That's like several weeks before I expected. On the day of delivery, I received another message saying that the delivery van had broken down. 🙁 Oh boy... Anyway, to cut a long story short, it got delivered today and I'm delighted to announce that my lounge is now F I N I S H E D which means that the whole place is now presentable and just the best place for me to work.
Apart from being a place to receive guests, I'm look to resume my video exploits very soon. Of course the area just isn't big enough to host bands, not even solo artists, really. I am however, looking to do kinda podcast things, chat shows and stuff like that. Let's see how it goes...
JUST A QUICK REMINDER...
So back in 2021, I had just moved in and the task of getting this space together seemed really quite daunting. Anyone who loathes DIY as much as I do, will understand. It wasn't just a case of a few licks of paint. There was repair work to do, I had to fix things to keep out the rain, doors needed to be recut, repaired and in one case, a new door had to be fitted. I built a shelf unit in the lab. That was after I installed an 800mm worktop. There were rack enclosures that I had to build for the studio. Oh boy. And of course I was rebuilding my business and was determined not to let down my customers.
I had a lot of EMS rack cases but they were meant for the road. In the studio, I wanted something a bit classier and decided to build my own 19-inch rack enclosures. 'Glutton for punishment' comes to mind.
I was so busy with repairs and designing stuff so getting the lab up 'n' running was an obvious priority. Working in the lab was such a relief and fixing gear and designing peripherals for vintage synthesisers in my kitchen at home, soon seemed like a distant memory. The only problem was that I still had all of my IT at home so I was dashing between the new place and my home, fixing stuff and then doing admin. A no-brainer, the office was the next area to be completed after the lab.
One thing visitors don't see are cables. I H A T E C A B L E S and planning just how everything was going to talk to everything else without cables hanging all over the place, was a challenge I took on while I was, well... waiting for paint to dry, LOL.
Planning and then implementing all the cabling in such a way as to keep it discrete, was a big deal but my work wasn't over by a long shot. I was well aware of the 'sound' of the studio. Hard, plastered walls gave all the important rooms a lot of reverb and that had to be addressed.
The walls of my previous studio were covered with foam acoustic tiles. While perfectly adequate, I wanted something a little more cosmetically pleasing and embarked on making my own acoustic panels. Like I said; glutton for punishment!
I started off this post by thanking my customers for their patience and understanding but I must also acknowledge friends and family, for their unwavering support. The new place is just an awesome work environment and my daughters both commented that the studio actually sounds better than what I had at Area 51, my previous studio on the local industrial estate. 🙂