Hi 5 Studio Blog

Praline Country. A Split 7″ with Oh! Pears to be released by BITBY.

We’ve been helping the Howard Glasser Archive, (a folk music archive housed at UMass) digitally preserve their many tapes of folk music concerts put on by Howard dating back to the 1960′s.  There’s all kinds of great stuff in there. Scottish, Irish, Appalachian, New England, etc.  Some highlights include Shamus Walker, Pete Seeger, and Barbara Carns.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a Barbara Carns tape in the stack they sent me. That’s my friend Tom’s mother! I worked with Tom Carns back in California. He’s a great guy, a great singer and guitar player in his own right and I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear this tape. Get in touch, dude!  (pictured above, fyi is our newest tape machine – an Otari MTR-12 that Ben drove to Cleveland to pick up)

Josh Olmstead’s band. Arches were super tight and played most of their tracks live all on 8 tracks of tape and they rocked it.  Mixing in April. All analog put the computer away.

Been making some music in the studio as it is these days. Need to take a break from construction and building things to, well… rock out. We are also out of money and so I think we’ll pause before round 2…

With all our money spent on the space, the infrastructure, the insulation, sheetrock, etc. beggars can’t be choosers, so… we’re going to go with the free console option.  Someone had unloaded this old Soundcraft 320B 32-channel mixing board on us. It didn’t do much besides make an awful buzz when you powered it up. I gave James Ryskalchik a call and he was down for the job.

James singlehandedly recapped the entire thing, strip by strip and got all channels working.  Lo and behold it sounds pretty good!  There was only one problem. Outputs.  The Soundcraft 320B was never really meant to be a recording console, so it had all these weird summing and bus outputs, but no direct outs. Literally drilling new holes into the back panel, we added 16 direct outputs for tracks 1-16 (eventually perhaps all 32)  But 16 is fine for now.  Headphone outs were a slight problem too, so we literally took apart a little headphone amp and stuck it inside the board, appropriating a few of the boards many strange outputs.  Headphone sends to each room. Done.  We repurposed the live mixing output features including some really stylish red faders for a few very useful balanced main mix outputs.  Now we can send different mixes simultaneously to the Otari MTR-12 tape machine and ProTools.  Bitchin.

Getting there… 2 layers of sheetrock everywhere. That’s a lot of sheetrock.

And Green Glue in between. This stuff is weird. It’s like slime. It never dries.

When a little short for cash, what do you do to pack a bass trap?  Throw your trash into it, right?  Catherine (who works as a nurse) had a whole lot of depends and other medical supplies lying around that she was going to throw away after moving to another job.  So what do we have here?  A bass trap full of depends.  And a mouldy Ugg for good measure.  Ugg=Australian for ugly.

What the hell is a “Lemon Glycerine Swabstick” used for?  I don’t even want to know.  All I know is that if I am ever in severe need of one, I will know which wall to take apart and find it.

We’ve saved a bunch of scraps from the rehab/construction going on in the Maas Building for the past 2 years.  It comes in handy now as we are in a low cash-flow period and need to put up the first of two layers of sheetrock in here.  So, to continue with no cash: nail up whatever you have lying around.

I think this is the extent of my notes on how the hell to run the wiring of this studio… Hey, what’s that weird-looking dirty blue cable?  That’s one of many cables that I got out of my uncle’s studio when it closed a couple years ago.  More on that in a later post, but basically – back a couple of years ago when this place was still a dump, I drove a big truck up to New York and got a whole bunch of stuff from the Looking Glass Studio as it was being demolished.  Wiring, a couple of audio racks, some rolling gobos covered in pink fabric straight out of 1985, two 7′ sliding glass doors, and all the pieces for an entire 12′ double-paned bay window.  All for the price of the UHaul and a few bucks to the demo guys for helping me move the glass into my truck.

In this picture, that’s actually not the Looking Glass glass* that you see there behind the cables – that’s some bullet-proof bank-glass that I took out of a little bank being demo’ed in Germantown a while back.  Craigslist has always been a great source for finding stuff like that.  I am not quite sure what the hell I was thinking I would build (an entire glass room?) but I’m probably not going to use all this glass and I’ve been moving it around for like 2 years now.  I guess there’s a name for people who do stuff like that.  Hoarders.  In my defense, it was all free!  Who needs a bullet-proof takeout Chinese food window?  I got it.

* By the way, the “glass” jokes could be endless – the studio where my uncle worked was actually owned by Philip Glass – so technically we’re using “Philip Glass’s glass from the Looking Glass”

Ah – here are the real notes!

Gotto plan ahead for a double thickness of sheetrock.

Might as well finish that bass trap while we can still access this corner.