Galloway Street Studio
A quieter weekend has allowed R to kindly take some photos of my studio space at Galloway Street. These photos are not an extensive catalogue of ‘every single bit of gear I have’, but more or less show the space I work in. You can see more older shots deeper back into the blog.
So let’s start with a wide shot of the whole setup seen from the back sunroom, which the ‘big room’ opens onto via sliding doors. In these shots you’ll see that I’ve hung material on all the walls to dampen off high frequencies, and a big old couch lies diagonally across the middle of the room to act as a light bass trap. Being a bigger room, it allows for an open sound and is not bad at all for recording vocals in:
Here you can see the three guitar pedal boards all hooked up, my electric guitar, the microphone setup, a midi controller keyboard, the bulk of the other bits that make all the sound work:
The Rode K2 microphone, pop guard (necessary for stopping ugly ‘pop sounds’ when recording the voice), and the sE Reflexion Filter (acoustic housing for the mic):
As above. You can see the high ceiling and the beautiful plaster façade on the room:
You can see the Reflexion Filter acts as ’sound shell’ to filter out the echoes of the room. This makes the vocal takes sound dry, which is desirable for vocal placement in my songs:
Many bits:
My speaker setup is a 2.1 system. The two nearfield monitors are custom designed and have a bright true reproduction. I’m using the two quad-cabs (one is bottom left here) as my sub-woofer. The cross-over for the two ranges is controlled within my soundcard (M-Audio Delta 1010, just right of the screen). Left is our new Denon record player, and a cassette mastering deck (for lo-fi tape experiments). The keyboard is an old DX9 which is mostly used as a basic midi-controller:
The light coming in from the West:
Head of my classical guitar, with the uber-special singing bowl on the music library:
Music collection, and above my live banner that Mum made:
Iain’s drum set as well as his PA speakers, which he uses with his electronic drums when he comes over to jam:
Iain’s drums, with 12 string Kortt acoustic guitar in foreground:
Sometimes in music, pigs do fly:
Loopzilla:
The old FT2 computer, with yours truly strumming away:
Boss GT-8 which has a send-loop connected to my old Zoom 4040 pedal. The GT-8 is connected to Loopzilla, and then from there to my computer:
Loopzilla and the old electric:
AKG D330 microphone, being my preferred live mic, in foreground. FT2 in background:
My main studio computer, proudly displaying Renoise:
If you look closely you can see work being done on “The Objector”:
A small mixer and my trusty old headphones. I use this setup to ‘real time monitor’ my vocals with zero latency while recording. The mixer is fed by sub-outputs from my soundcard and my microphone preamp (SPL Goldmike 9844). The mixer comes in handy for odd routing jobs:
There’s geeky comfort in being surrounded by knobs!
At the top you can see my mic preamp, which is a wonderful combo of tube and solid state technology, and allows for pretty smooth microphone performance. At the bottom of the stack is my old 350W Mosfet amp powering the two quad-cabs for sub-woofer playback:
OK! Now onto my Galloway Street Studio Team! First up we have Rusty. Rusty is a beautiful and mysterious girl of wise experience. She is my creative consultant whenever my songs are needing a touch of elegance or mature subtly:
Meet Gus: he is my roadie! You can see from his large frame he is used to the roadie lifestyle of lugging around large bits of equipment and eating copious amounts of junk food. Whenever Gus isn’t moving my gear for me, he can be found sleeping in some corner, busy not exercising:
This is Harriet – my guitar technician. She can be a little aloof sometimes, but sure knows how to keep perfect intonation on my range of axes. Being young and beautiful, she hope to one day start her own band called ‘A Puurfect Circle’:
Next we have young Nero, the studio engineer. Nero’s excellent sense of smell helps him find all manner of amazing technical solutions for sounds I’ve needed. He has some wild ideas though sometimes: I have to draw the line when he starts digging a hole in order to ‘get better acoustics out of the room’:
And finally we have my Manager, Maxwell. Max and I are close, and have a great working relationship. But with business it’s another matter – just look at this face and ask yourself ‘would you trust Max with all your money?’:
Lastly, just down the hall from the ‘big room’ we have setup a whiteboard. The whiteboard gets used for brainstorming and organisation of ideas and projects. It’s become a very useful tool in keeping on task on the many projects I’m involved with. Thoroughly recommended:
