Nearly done! Okay actually there is still lots of things to do before we can say it's "finished", but it's mostly cosmetic, things that don't affect the running of the studio. So as for finishing touches we really are close to opening! We've had all our equipment in storage since before the start of the build so we're really excited to get it moved in. A date has been set and now the big parts of the build have been complete, we see no reason why we can't start moving everyt

The control room floor is finished, the light boxes are in, and we have hung the ceiling cloud in there too. One of the last things in this room is the centre table. Once we get this in, this room is pretty much ready to go! A simply built centre piece is going to separate the two sections of the room. Big enough to fit a few stools behind, it will offer a functional surface for our guests to work on whilst in the control room and will also house a selection of outboard gear

So the wood floor is in the control room is going down and it's going surprisingly well. Considering there isn't a carpenter in sight, we didn't expect it to go so well without a hitch. It has completely changed the feel of the room. All of a sudden it feels like we're standing in the middle of a studio as opposed to a construction site. The floor we chose is a HDF engineered oak product. Engineered wood, in contrast to solid wood, is a plank made up of multiple layers. In t

The final stages for the studio electrics are underway and our electrician is hard at work installing our sockets, switches, and lights. We were a little too eager last year, and in our naivety we bought all the electrical fittings far too early. Approximately 9 months later (now we are actually ready to install them) we decided that we wanted a different type! Luckily we could haggle Screwfix to swap them out like-for-like. Tacky white plastic sockets and switches are not

It feels like we're in the final stages of this project and we've put our hearts and souls into it, a labour of love, a huge learning curve, a load of fun! So here's an quick update on what we've done in the past couple of weeks... We've installed the first bass traps at the rear of the control room, using up our huge mound of Rockwool off-cuts the traps are essentially triangle extensions to the existing corners. Built just like our stud walls with a timber frame and sheets

The majority of the dusty work is done, so we've been working hard on the window between the control room and live room, or is that windows...? The studio walls and doors are complete and we had to make sure the the specification of the window was going to maintain the integrity of the acoustic system . Firstly the two rooms are almost entirely independent from each other, separated walls built on separated sub-floors; in trying to keep that separation each room has it's ow

Nahh, we don't need to plaster the whole room. It's very costly and time consuming. Instead we're going to tape the joints and cover it with gypsum joint filler. Plastering a whole room requires a lot of skill and we just didn't trust ourselves to get it right without the experience, also it's a costly job to have someone in an do it for us. So instead, after hours of studying YouTube tutorials on taping plasterboard joints we quite quickly mastered the craft. We mixed the

The construction of the live room in the studio involves a more complex soundproofing system than in the control room. As we only have a small space in which to build our studio we needed to find a method of sound reduction with a small footprint. The common technique of having a double wall system wouldn't have really been viable. There are many iterations of this system but generally involve two separate stud walls that are independent of each other - although effective at

Why on earth does a single door warrant taking up a whole blog? Well it doesn't - we've done much more since the last update and we've hit a huge milestone. (We are just more proud about the door). Attaching the acoustic plasterboard to the ceiling was a lot more difficult than we anticipated. If cutting out triangles and curved pieces wasn't hard enough, just holding the sheets above your head all day was exhausting! The aforementioned ceiling curve turned out quite well

So we are at a point with the studio build where multiple jobs are are running concurrently. The Rockwool is still going in, the electrical work has come leaps and bounds, the CCTV system is being installed, and the plasterboard is making its way on to the walls. The plasterboard is so large (1.2 x 2.4 metres) and so heavy (30kg per sheet) it's really easy to snap under its own weight. Panelling any of the ceiling needs at least two people. Chris has made really quick and