Building The Studio: Part Two

Thankfully writing about building our recording studio takes a lot less time and effort than building the actual studio, so here’s the second installment of how we built our own sound studio in our back garden with limited funds, limited knowledge, and just enough stupidity not to quit! If you haven’t read Part One, you can read it here.

So, on with the story…

After many months of arm-aching toil, things slowly started to progress, even though the garden looked like a very cramped building site! Hundred of bricks and blocks had to be ferried by wheelbarrow down a narrow back alley and over an assault course of construction before being stacked neatly ready to be used. Likewise bags and bags of sand and cement were carried into the building site. Now it was time to call in the professionals:

Oh, but hang on… Now we have to halt on building the walls before they get too high, as we need to pour the floor first!!! The concrete pumping truck was unavailable that weekend, so guess what…? That’s right, we had to ferry all the concrete in by wheelbarrow!

Who knew Tone Def Tony was a dab-hand at donning his wellies and leveling concrete floors! Quite amazingly too no four-legged fucks walked across it as it cured, so there were no footprints for eternity left behind. We would also like to state for the record (although it was tempting at times) there are absolutely no dead bodies buried beneath this slab!

By this time we were many, many, many months into the project, and it still felt like we were miles away from ever completing Finch’s Folly (as it was now being called!) But wait! What’s this…? Actual WALLS going up…

Many more beers later and months more hard work, things actually started to look like a building, and oh, what’s that…? A roof and a door…!!!

Just in time for the colder (and wetter) months, the build was FINALLY in the dry! But we were far from finished. Although it was grounds for celebration, we did contemplate just turning it into a pool hall instead, as money was getting tight, but Finch’s Folly wasn’t looking like such a folly after all. It was now time to fit out the interior:

No-one had told us that sound-deadening plaster board is a lot heavier than regular stuff… About three times as heavy in fact! Oh, and I wonder if you can guess how we had to maneuver fifty sheets of the stuff from the curb to the studio…? That’s right, all by hand! But once the door was closed, it was as silent as a grave in there! Now we could build the partition wall between what would be the actual studio space and the engineering room:

This is where I actually thought about extending the readers’ agony by stopping and creating Part Three, but felt if you have read this far, you need to be put out of your misery! It just so happened that the BBC were renovating one of their London studios, so we somehow managed to acquire some amazing sound-proof studio doors (magnetically sealing doors no less!) and that gave the studio a feel of elegance! But the outside walls still needed rendering. The cheapest quote was almost a thousand quid…!!! Enter Tone Def Tony once more… not just a dab-hand at leveling concrete floors, but we discovered he had a knack for rendering too…

Not one to show off at all, but here he is feeling rather chuffed at his achievement:

And this is how the studio finally looks inside:

Having taken a little over two years to complete, we sat back for some more, well-earned beers! But our journey wasn’t over just yet… even though we now had a sound studio at our disposal 24/7… NOW we had to learn how to operate the sound equipment and software, well, Finch did, but that’s topic of another post…

As always, thanks for reading, thanks for all your support. The first song, I GOT PISSED WITH SANTA CLAUS will be released very soon…!