Studio Build - Introduction

A Studio Build…

For the last 4 years we’ve been building an 1100 square foot recording studio. This is not my job; I’m the wife, but I was home, while my husband worked. Thus I had to learn and translate all that weird knowledge in his head to those I was working with. This is a record of that journey.

Introduction

My husband is a sound engineer, musician, IT man, and generally a jack of all trades. I don’t have these same qualities, but we do fight over who gets to be in charge of the power tools and I love projects, I love playing foreman. My husband apparently has been dreaming and designing this studio since high school. As a young professional fresh out of college he began to have the means to buy “toys” and convert bedrooms in his rented houses to control rooms for mixing and living rooms into tracking spaces. When we married he brought a significant amount of equipment into the marriage, and a passion that this was an occupation he wanted to continue. In the 1965 home we had just bought, we converted the dining room into a decent control room. Those simple bass traps were my first experience with mineral wool and the electric turkey carver knife that has lasted us for 12 years (slicing mineral wool, duct board, and of course 703 Owens Corning- it just died, I don’t yet have the heart to trash it).

When we got to design our current home, we left unfinished space upstairs with future intentions to build the long awaited studio, in say 10 years. Yea- so that time table got changed. We were presented with the opportunity about 7 months after we moved into our new home to build out the bones of the studio. Wow! So yikes, let’s get started.