Work is progressing nicely now with the new control room.  We are about 85% of the way there having fitted the custom built work surface along with most of the new gear.  I originally intended for a Focusrite to go in there however I managed to grab something far superior off ebay for next to half it’s retail value.  Go me!  We will now be using an RME Fireface 800 at the heart of the studio which just sounds fantastic.  I plan to buy an Audient ASP008 8 channel preamp to for tracking drums but money is quickly running out after my mega spend spree!  There are just a few more items I need to complete this upgrade and unfortunately they are not cheap:

•  Audient ASP008
• Mackie Control Universal Pro

Still, whilst I wait for money/gear I have been writing a tribute song to my recently deceased friend James Hill.  Although I tried to be optimistic, I think most who listen to this track will find it quite haunting - this was not necessarily my intention but I cannot kid myself into thinking losing a close friend is anything but distressing.  However, I tend to show my emotions in my songs than I do in day to day life so it is a good outlet for me and, more importantly, “Your Song” is a rememberance of him and an expression of how much he will be missed.

One of my closest friends from my childhood/teenage years, James Hill sadly passed away in the line of duty last week.  Words cannot begin describe the man that he was, is and always will be - a true, honest and kind close friend of mine.  Lad - you will be greatly missed.  To remember him and his life I am currently writing a song which I aim to record in the coming weeks.  It deeply saddens me to hear of this tragedy and my thoughts are with his family and his soon to be wife, Anastasia Newman.

Things have been relatively quiet here whilst I get ready to have a major overhaul on my recording studio.  My drummer friend Pete has kindly agreed to build a custom work station for my control room (thus maximising the space in there) so that we can start tracking again.  I am also going to enlist the help of Steven Price over @ Grub (which, by the way, is a fantastic little venue in East Grinstead which I highly recommend checking out some time!) to sort out the marketing for our studio.

No studio overhaul would be complete without the addition of some nice new gear.  Gone is the analogue mixer <sniff> but expect to see the following here very soon:

• Focusrite Octopre w/Digital option
• Mackie Control Universal Pro w/Extenders & C4
• Stand mounting for Genelec monitoring
• Custom built work surface courtesy of Pete

I have been wanting to do this for a while now but money was always going to be an issue!  The big idea was to minimise the amount of A/D & D/A conversion in the studio to keep the integrity of the audio signal/path intact.  To do this, we had to cut out the middle man, and in this case, it was the Soundcraft mixer.  Despite my love for the sonic qualities of this mixer (the punch, depth and wide stereo field) I just couldn’t justify keeping it in the age of digital recording.  My system will be moving entirely into the digital realm now and to accomodate this, some serious control surfaces will be needed, hence the Mackies.  Likewise, there will only be one stage of conversion for recorded audio once this upgrade is complete and that task falls in the lap of the Focusrite Octopre.  I have it on very good authority that the converters sound fantastic on these units so it will feed my 2xMOTU 828MKIIs digitally (via lightpipe) to hopefully take recording here that little bit closer to the professional realm…thats the goal at least!  Let’s hope that our aim is true!