GuitarMasterClass Blog

This post is a little digression, but important

One day, maybe 12 years ago, my co-conspirator Ant was out and about in the Birmingham Area. He happened upon a junk shop, and there he saw a sculpture or statue that reminded him of nothing other than an honest to goodness Sungod … fixated with this idea he rushed home and immediately composed an ethnic sounding song in honor of the strange being and called it “Sungod” of course. Although I remember it clearly, we never recorded it, it was just a tune made up of midi played through the synth we had at the time, with a lot of African drums and other esoteric instruments. We liked it so much that we decided to name our joint studio of that Era “Sungod Studios” - and it has been called that ever since through several incarnations. The grand task I am embarking upon in this blog is in fact the realization of Sungod Connecticut - the Connecticut branch of the Sungod Studios business empire!

Time moved on, we ditched the sequencer software we used to produce it, and although Ant still has the synth we couldn’t play the song anymore and memory dimmed it …

I recently came across the midi file for “Sungod” and decided to resurrect it … I was faced with a number of Midi tracks that were obviously percussion, and were complete nonsense unless you happen to know the exact patches used on the old Synth and the key mappings. I could figure out which were the melody and piano parts, but the percussion was impenetrable …

I decided to keep the melody parts and build a completely new backing for it. I added percussion, bass and drums and ended up taking what was an ethnic sounding masterpiece to a more upbeat and modern sounding piece - and it occurred to me that this was very much in keeping with the modern upgraded status of the new studio over the equipment we had when the original “Sungod” was written - so now my studio has a theme tune, and I offer it to you below

Now the studio is coming alive, I am starting to feel the soul I am talking about in the title … a studio is a place of creativity in recording and mixing, and the feel of the place is supremely important. Little touches like this, although they may sound a little frivolous, all help with that. When Ant comes over I fully intend to take him shopping - we will do our best to find something like the Sungod that inspired the name in the first place, and we’ll bring it back to the studio and give it pride of place - and of course I’ll share a picture with you all!

Now, back to practicalities! As planned, Ant will be arriving tomorrow and construction will commence - things will move rapidly from here and I’ll try to keep you all up to date on a daily basis.

All the gear is here:

• Bass Traps
• Auralex Tiles
• Wire Tidies
• Rack Rails & Blanking Plates
• Adam A7s
• New Cables (with the exception of the monitor cable which is expected tomorrow)

In particular, the Adam A7’s sound miraculous even in the untreated studio. Like all good monitors they let you surgically pick apart any track. The result is that well put together tracks sound amazing, less well put together tracks sound bad - these speakers do not flatter, and if a track sounds good on them, then it likely is good - this is the real function of monitor speakers, to let you hear the individual parts of the music so you can construct a unified whole, and the A7s achieve this with flair!

In addition to the A7s, I bought a couple of additional items for the rack - I decided to get an 8 channel headphone amp to replace the non-rack headphone amp I currently have.

I also picked up a couple of patch bays to help with the wiring.

Both Behringer, and both good value for money.

Over the next few days, our list of tasks includes:

• Existing studio dismantling
• Throwing out the old desk
• Building a new desk
• Cabling the PC into the machine room
• Building the mobile 19″ rack
• Retesting acoustics for the new location and speakers
• Constructing and erecting the Bass Traps
• Applying the Acoustic Tiles
• Re-test the room acoustics and adjust if necessary

And perhaps just as important, there is a secondary list of things to achieve:

• Jam together for hours
• Write some new songs
• Record some new songs
• Drink Martinis
• Eat great food
• Relive past glories
• Work on our acoustic set

That last one we do every time we get together - we never get it finished but it is a lot of fun!

Point is, we plan to have a lot of fun as well as get some serious work done - I am seriously looking forward to this coming week!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am and is filed under A Studio is Born. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.