Topher home recording studio, Part 3: ’90s college days. Totally awesome.
Learning the craft with a pile of cheap, used gear. (Vintage audio examples included!)
University-era home studio
1991–96
Various locations in Lethbridge, Irma and Rainier, Alberta
By the time I was a music major at the University of Lethbridge — young, poor and hopeful — I had a series of bedrooms I called home, and where I would (barely) fit my old twin-size bed, CD ghetto blaster, Depeche Mode posters, a few clothes, hundreds of CDs, AND a pile of used keyboards and their associated cables, stands and gig bags.
I would set up shop in each apartment and basement suite I called home during my four years in Lethbridge, ripping the studio apart for each and every live show and then laboriously hooking it all back together again, and doing the same for every summer job move, and move back.
Same core setup as when I left high school: the Ensoniq synth I used as my central MIDI sequencer, the Fostex four-track cassette as my central mixing board and recorder, and various other keyboards and drum machines as players in the Christopher Nash Mikesh-Rigged MIDI Christmas Tree of Retro Antiquities Bedroom Studio Hip Hop and Synthpop Orchestra.
At this point I had also acquired my uncle’s old and on-paper-obsolete Emulator II sampler, which was one of the most exciting keyboards I have ever owned and the third key piece of the studio. Now I could SAMPLE.
Not to sound like Old Man McMusic, but sampling is so simple today it’s not even something people think about.
<oldmanmcmusic>It’s like phones. Today, you don’t even question whether or not your phone should work on a wireless network. They’re ALL cellphones. Of course they work on wireless networks. But in the 1980s there were no cellphones. Land lines only. People actually used pay phones and calling cards and calling collect. Fancy pants people had cordless phones, but those still had a receiver that plugged into a — you guessed it — the same land line connection that rotary phones would use. So when the day came where you could use a cellphone to cut the cord and talk from anywhere, it blew you away.</oldmanmcmusic>
That’s what it was like before/after sampling. Old/new. Now at the time samplers were around but very expensive, and the Emulator II was already old and obsolete in terms of its 8-bit sound quality and 17 seconds of sampling memory and “This may take a while…” load times and its freaking 60-lb weight, but I didn’t care. I could sample! I was part of the new and I could add any sound to my compositions.
(Trivia reference, the Emulator II is the keyboard Ferris Beuller uses to call in sick to his high school:)
I basically used it as a sampling drum machine and drum loop player. I sampled my own drums off of records and CDs I loved, and grabbed classic drum loops off of remixes I owned, and the sonic capabilities of my studio really expanded greatly.
Recording with Beyond Belief
With this setup, I began writing and recording more serious tracks with my Wainwright rap group, which was now morphing into an electronic pop dance band renamed Beyond Belief. In the early 1990s, Ryan, Glen and I recorded and released a full-length cassette, an EP, and a CD. I also did side projects and some compositions for university using this same set-up, and was even an on-stage music director for musical theatre in Lethbridge for a couple of very fun summers.
All the music would be sequenced using the Ensoniq. I would load samples in the E-II (from 5 ¼" floppy discs — woah!!) that were triggered and played along in sync (hopefully) with the MIDI sequence.
I would record all the keyboard audio together (now also including a used Korg DW-8000, my first synth with any kind of built-in effects unit, and a Casio CZ-101, which I would sometimes use as a keytar) by playing the entire song MIDI sequence from start to finish as a mixed stereo track on the Fostex tape deck. That left me two tape tracks for vocals and overdubs. If the mix wasn’t right or something was EQed wrong with the stereo submix of the keyboards, I’d have to re-record the whole thing in another pass. And once I had overdubbed vocals to that mix, I was committed to the music mix — there would be no way of rerecording that stereo music pair of tracks in a way that would sync up with the vocals. Super time consuming, considering I didn’t have studio monitors, and therefore relied on the AUX inputs of my little CD ghetto blaster, and my Discman headphones, and my crappy truck stereo, and an old Yamaha bass amp lent to me by a fellow Rush fan, to listen to the mixes and try and get them right.
The results? Here are some examples of what was recorded with this (literally) bedroom setup. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Beyond Belief:
Audio Examples!
This was amazing to me at the time. We were writing and recording our own music, selling it on cassette to our friends, got it played on college radio, and in the only Wainwright club we’d hang out in back in the day, the legendary Kelly’s.
Even though my studio was a hodgepodge of used gear, cheap cables and chromium dioxide tape, I was using it to ship our art. It was a super productive time in my life, with hundreds and hundreds of hours spent wringing the most music out of those primitive tools as I could.
Early Lessons Learned: Studio Setup Takeaway Tips
Learn from your best setup.
One of my favourite studio setups ever was the one we did to record Beyond Belief’s first full-length album (self titled and sold on cassette). It was the summer after my first year away at university. We all came back home to work the summer, and record an album. I brought all my gear and set it up at Ryan’s parents’ basement. I could (and would) drop by every lunch hour and most evenings and weekends to work on songs. There was more space here than in just a bedroom — room enough to set up all the gear and have it all connected together, and Ryan’s family was OK with us plugging away at our tunes all summer long.
It was in a basement, so we could be relatively loud. Ryan was there for constant feedback and ideas, and Glen and other friends were also in and out of the studio space frequently, so it was also a social space, which made recording fun. It had everything we needed technically and it was a good hangout spot. Best of all worlds. So when you have a setup that works, think back to what made it work. Import your ideas into your next iteration of your studio. In this case, it had a lot to do with environment, comfort, access, fun, socializing, dedicated space, and otherwise things that had until that point had nothing to do with what I thought was essential to a great studio. Dedicated space and ergonomics matter as much as acoustics. Speaking of which…
Ignoring science costs you.
I wasn’t thinking of acoustics at all. I was in rented places, in squarish box-shaped bedrooms, so there probably wasn’t much I could do for proper acoustics even if I cared, but I was pretty oblivious to how important acoustics are to accurately monitor your mixes. Now, you can go crazy trying to get them perfect, and I still don’t go too nuts on sound treatments — life’s too short, seriously — but ignoring them completely makes mixing songs really, really difficult. So it does pay to pay as much attention to it as you need. Learn the basics, and you’ll save time down the road, to a point.
Buy some new cables for God’s sake.
I didn’t have money to spend on good cables, let alone stands, furniture, or even real speakers. I didn’t let that stop us from creating. On the other hand, it probably would have been wise to skip just a couple nights out drinking per month in order to afford a mic stand that wasn’t a hockey stick with a mic taped to it (true story) or for cables that wouldn’t ruin takes because they would randomly ZZZZZTTTTZTT!!! because they were so cheap. That stuff isn’t super sexy to spend money on. But in retrospect, just a tiny bit of money would have made life in the studio much, much easier.
Small rooms and short strings.
While on the topic of cables, in terms of equipment placement, I was going with as consolidated a setup as I could make it (keyboards take up a lot of room and usually my space was very limited). I was also limited by the length of cords I happened to have to hook everything up. But instead of setting up the room so it’s best for creativity and ergonomics, the ergonomics were dictated by how long the power, patch and MIDI cables happened to be. Today that’s known by the technical term of “duh that’s backwards”.
I like to move it move it.
Another thing that factored into my studio at this time in my life was mobility. During my undergrad degree I had to pick up and move eight times, not counting times I had to pack up all the gear for live shows. So I was never in a place where I could make permanent or long-term installations or changes. This meant I never had an ideal or optimal recording setup, but it recognized my true needs at the time. Sometimes those trump textbook how-to guides.
Next up in this series: Part 4 — Caffeine Sunday. Enter the synthpop. Enter the age of the computer.
(Previous article in this Medium series: Part 2 — High school days — 4-track cassettes from the bedrooms of smalltown Alberta)