Topher home recording studio, Part 1: Listen to the Midnight News.

A series of feature stories retraces the long evolution of my home studio from ’80s to today

I’ve been writing and recording my own music since I was in high school, which means I’ve had some form of home studio — torn down, rebuilt, moved, upgraded, torn down again, and again— for the better part of 25 years. By this point, I feel like I’ve been setting up home studios all my life, and in a way I guess that’s because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

In many ways, this can get tiresome. Any home studio owner who has packed and unpacked a studio several times will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a slow, manual, methodical, physical process. And yet as an artist, I also have no choice — this is part of my calling, my creative process and I am compelled to do this! And again, any home studio owner will know exactly what I’m talking about.

On and on it goes, and when I set up the latest incarnation of my studio — King Edward Park — in the basement of my Edmonton home a year ago, it was only the latest in a long line of a continually evolving setup.

Of Home Music Studios

I’m an independent, DIY musician from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and this series of articles traces the history and evolution of my studio — the major breakthroughs and lessons learned over the course of 20 moves (and counting), and encapsulates my advice and tips I’ve learned along the way and want to share with anyone else looking at setting up a studio of her or his own. Over those years I’ve been involved in writing and recording hip hop, new wave, synth pop, electronic, rock and acoustic genres. (My current solo work is an alloy of elements that create smart, heartfelt pop singer-songwriter material).

For the uninitiated, let me start off by saying for anyone who has songwriting, home recording, producing, or other such related passions, setting up your own home studio is serious business. Like a fanatical vintage car mechanic getting his or her garage built and arranged and equipped just so, a home studio (or “project studio”) is a reflection and extension of a musical brain, as well as ground zero for turning your creative ideas into shippable, sharable art.

Serious business.

I don’t know if talking about this can be of help to anyone just starting out, or to seasoned pros who are still curious about tinkering and improving their own set-ups, but in case it is, I thought I’d walk you through my own set-up process as I go through it myself for the umpteenth time. If nothing else, maybe seeing someone else who’s had to tear down, lug around, rebuild and adapt his own studio so many times can spark an idea, large or tiny, in your own musical launchpad.

But before I get into how I started my own studio, I need to rewind further into the past… into the prequel: My uncle’s home studio, on a potato farm near Rainier, Alberta, in the early 1980s.

‘I Live on a Potato Farm’ — the studio before my own

Ohama’s Midnite News home studio
1980–86
Rainier, Alberta

Before the beginning of my own journey, there was my Uncle Walt, aka Tona W Ohama, aka Ohama, the early ’80s new wave pioneer who made his own carefully constructed and emotionally haunting music in the basement of a rambling farmhouse on the bald southern Alberta prairie near Rainier, Alberta.

I spent a lot of my early life on the potato farm, and having Ohama for an uncle was like having Brian Eno for an older brother. While I was 9 or 10 years old, living as far away from bustling, hip urban metros as it seemed possible, I was getting a one-on-one personal education on then-cutting edge studio technology.

When I think about it, the sheer luck of it all is mind blowing.

While today you can have a home studio on your iPad for $5, in 1982 they just didn’t exist, not at any price. Recording studios were these big, impressive, ridiculously expensive rooms in New York City where famous acts with major label backing would hole up in secret for months only to magically emerge with songs on an album. They were not things you put in your basement to use yourself.

Unless you were an Ohama.

By the time his landmark I Fear What I Might Hear album was recorded, Walt had built up his own impressive facility where he wrote, performed, recorded and mixed everything (before he sent masters off to be turned into records, all on his own and with no label, and distributed the records to stores across Canada, again by himself with no label) by the simple combination of wanting to make music, and not having anyone tell him this wasn’t the way you do it.

He had his own 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder and 2-track mastering deck, a big mixing board (that when I was young, looked huuuuge), towering 19" racks full of patch bays, echo units, graphic EQs and compressors, and a vocoder that as a kid I would love to play with by using it to narrate my own robot stories, a white upright piano that was unofficially declared the most out of tune piano in the Canadian West, lots of hardware synths (by this time there was an Oberheim OB-Xa system, Korg Poly Six, Yamaha CS-40m, Yamaha DX-7, and maybe some others) and drum machines, all feeding into some seriously loud studio monitors that made the walls and ceiling shake with bass well into the early morning on most nights.

All of this was gear stretched out across a dark, dusty farmhouse basement with a red-and-white checkered vinyl floor, wood panelled walls, and a steep staircase lined with cobwebs.

It was my favourite place in the world.

My uncle was very cool about it, and never treated me like I was a “just a kid.” He not only tolerated me hanging around, he took time to explain how everything worked, and encouraged me to play around with whatever equipment he wasn’t using at a particular moment.

And I spent every second I could in it.

Sometimes I also got to be a bit of an assistant engineer on nights where he was recording with friends over (which seemed to happen frequently) from Calgary or Vancouver.

“OK, I want her to go and scream, but scream at the back of the room, away from the microphone, and Chris, when I give you the cue, you press stop on this tape deck.”

It was awesome.

He also had an entire Sound Ideas sound effects library on reel-to-reel tape. This was the same library that TV production studios would use: A fat binder listed any sound you could think of, and which of the 100-odd reels it would be on, and what track # it was. If I wanted to hear car crashes, I could look up the reel, thread that reel of tape onto the 2-track machine, scan forward while listening and counting the beeps until I had counted the right number (22 beeps meant track 22), then turn up the headphones and enjoy the smashing stereo goodness. “CRAAASSSSHHH!!!!”

It’s easy to look back now and see just how formative these years were on my own creative process, musical passion, and at a practical level, my taste in home studios. Walt’s studio was essential to what and who I am. All along, having my own studio felt like a natural part of me without me consciously thinking about it until years later, but in retrospect, having a wonderful studio full of cutting edge sounds as my hangout before we had such things as the web, cellphones, email or even cable TV, had a gigantic influence in forming who I have become.

But perhaps the most telling influence that studio had on my life can be seen in the music studio of my own, which I set up everywhere I’ve lived since.

Next up in this series: Part 2 — High school days: 4-track cassettes from the bedrooms of smalltown Alberta.