Recording progress

Don’t let anyone tell you different: with care, you can record your music without paying money to a studio. This isn’t to say that you should, only that you can, though that line of thinking is a post all by itself.

For my part, I’m recording the cd in my basement. I have good quality mics (as detailed in an earlier post); a reasonably powerful computer; good software; a comfortable space in which to work; and friends with experience willing to help me create the best product possible.

I like my house. It is the only house I can remember living in. It’s about ninety years old, subject to all the aches and pains that such a house is heir to, though for the purposes of this post the one I’m most concerned with is squeaky floors.

The house was never well built to begin with. The original builder worked with what he could get his hands on: this was just after WW1 when there were shortages of…well, almost nothing, but apparently measuring tapes and decent wood were very hard to come by. In the same way as the accuracy of satellite imagery is measured in meters, so also the accuracy of the measurements in this house: anything less than the builder’s outstretched arms is probably measurably inaccurate.

Case in point: from where I’m sitting at this moment, in my basement office, I can see 2″x6″ floor joists1 on 18″, 6″, 20″, and 24″ centers; single, double with a gap, single, doubled with no gap, and so on. The variety of spacing is remarkable, and I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t stuck with boring ol’ 16″ centers2.

The short of it is that it makes recording very hard: every footstep is heard, every squeak transmitted like a telegraph, and every dropped crayon or lego sounds like a bowling ball. I can only work when the family is gone (which is almost never) or in bed, which during the summer time doesn’t happen until after 9:00 in the evening, and when the furnace/ac isn’t running. In late July into August, that is likewise, almost never. I can turn off the unit from my office, but that leaves the upper floor of the house sweltering until I’m done. Such action makes me unpopular, and so is to be avoided.

Progress is slow.

1 For the record, floor joists should be at least 2″x8″.

2 Yeah, that was sarcasm.

This entry was posted in Recording. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *