The Mighty Kasbah - Instalment 2 of the Mighty Studio Build
23 December 2000

The Mighty Studio build at our new premises has been continuing at a pace over the Christmas period. We are now very nearly there. Both the control room and the studio have now finished their construction phases. This has amounted to some 40 days of effort from Tyson Industries in putting the build together. We now have a floating control room, live room and drum booth. The walls have some 6 layers of ½" plasterboard packed with rockwool. All this in an attempt to prevent all sound reaching the BBC studios located below.

Following construction and plastering, Roger, our top interior designer was sent out to choose our new studio colour scheme. He selected a rather nice deep blue for the walls matched with a dark blue gloss for the wood. He topped this oof with a bright orange for the ceiling - and the Kasbah was born. After a few suntans and much laughter Roger was out again, and this time he returned with a lovely jade colour for the ceiling.

The floor in the control room was finished with laminate flooring which allows us to roll equipment racks and executive chairs around with great ease. The floor in the live room has been fitted with high spec, health and safety approved BBC carpet. Finally the drum room was finished with laminate flooring. All the equipment was then moved into the control room and we are now in the midst of studio wiring. Top wire man Paul Matthews has been hard at work all over Christmas to get the studio up and running for the new year. We now have a good proportion of the mic lines in and the spanking new Soundscape Red is wired in and operational.

We were able to carry out a good test of the new facilities with Powder coming in just before Christmas to lay down some drums for their next release on Mighty Atom. It ended up being a very successful test and we'll probably keep those first takes for four of the songs. The acoustics in the control room and live room have had little treatment so far, and that's the final step that is required. Serious Audio will be popping down in the new year to analyse the room acoustics so that we can tune the rooms to perfection.

One top result we can report are our new ATC active monitors (courtesy of Black Mountain). These things just totally kick ass. So the question is - has all this floating room stuff got us the acoustic isolation we require. Well, short answer - not yet. In the control room all things are fine. Crank up the ATCs and absolutely no problem. But, in the live room, set up a drum kit, and we've still got a few problems. It's certainly way quieter than before, but its not all ideal yet. We suspect we need to do some more work on the air con system.

We'll keep you posted in the next installment of the studio build.