The Results!

Well here it is - the (almost) finished product - a recording studio in a shed!

Control room

Here is the control room, from the outside doorway looking in. Nice curtain huh? That’s to absorb any front-to-back reflections at mid / high frequency. Bass dispersal is achieved by putting shelves on the back wall and filling them with junk and spare polystyrene blocks from the floor :)

The ventilation grille serves two purposes - ventilation (obviously), and it’s our wiring conduit between the control room and the booth, which minimises the number of holes through the partition wall.

The control room window is a double glazed conservatory roof vent, mounted sideways. It was left over from building the conservatory. Sometimes I’m glad I horde old stuff.

Yes the speakers really are hung up on bits of string…

Sound booth

Here is the sound booth from the back corner looking towards the control room window. I ought to be honest and point out the not-quite-finished ceiling, which should also be sound insulated but isn’t (editors note: it is now, Jan 2008). As you can see, the main insulation material at the moment is carpet underlay, hung on the interior wooden frame that forms the booth.

The interior control room window was saved from the old shed. Just underneath it is a small shelf holding a cheap MP3-capable mini system for our headphone monitoring amp, and below that is where the wiring comes into the room.

The mixer on the chair and one of a pair of powered PA speakers provide local foldback for rehearsals. The mixer also supplies two line level signals from the microphones / guitars into the control room.

The studio in use

It’s time to rock this joint! Here Martin is demonstrating there is indeed room to swing some sticks in the sound booth. You can now see the other interior window (also reused from the old shed) on the North facing side of the building and letting in a reasonable amount of natural light, but no direct sunlight.

The floor (just visible here) consists of a set of plywood boards, taped together with the indispensable carpet tape (aka Gaffa tape).

Yup it’s Martin again, this time looking cool in front of the partition wall door which leads into the control room.

Of course Bob is super cool when playing guitar too… :)

As indeed are many of their friends, who seem to turn up quite often for organised and random musical events. As long as the food holds out we’ll be fine…

The interior door is just a cheapo from B&Q, with more glass to let in the light from the control room, via the control room partition door, which is double glazed (yet another bit of the old shed recycled).

Here you can see the edge of the 100mm Jabloc underfloor insulation for the sound booth.

Oh, just incase you were wondering, the door is upside down!

Welcome to Shed#1, step this way please…