Our studio in Jura has been getting its audio cables these last few weeks, threaded inside the walls like a network of nerves beneath the skin.
On the outside, the studio is an agricultural shed. It’s a steel, portal frame kit building like many others around the crofting township where we’re based. On the inside, the different heights and dimensions of the rooms are acousticly optimised for the full spectrum of sound waves, the construction and surface materials carefully chosen to avoid reflections hitting the microphones. Although, since we first designed the space, Maker has diversified into other creative fields like photography and digital content, it’s gratifying to see it fulfil its potential as an amazing place to record music.
For Hugh, it’s full circle. A recording artist (as I’Anson) and multi instrumentalist, he’s also handy with a soldering iron from an electrical engineering apprenticeship when he left school. Later, he worked for a year at high end mixing desk manufacturer Solid State Logic in Oxfordshire, helping to build mega desks as destined for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, amongst others.
He’s been painstakingly stripping wires and soldering them into 25 pin D-Sub connectors. These are where more than 60m of Mogami (Japanese) multicore cables terminate, carrying signals from around the building straight into the Control Room. We now have 16 audio channels for microphones in the live room, plus some direct digital input channels to cover things like synths, plus audio flowing the other way out of the desk for artist monitoring. The different signals can be manually patched into different pre-amps in the Control Room using a short connecting ‘bantam cable’ with a jack on each end, like in a telephone exchange, or an enigma machine. That’s the patchbay you can see in the photo above, on the left of the image.
The wiring, the whole building really, sums up the Maker way; if you want the best thing you can dream of, you just think it all through, then make it happen.
This particular dream has been in Hugh’s mind since he was about fourteen. “I’ve always wanted to have a recording studio in Jura,” he says, having known the island all his life. “Jura is the perfect place to think and reflect and write music, but also helps you be in the right frame of mind to play and record it.” Now the Maker Studio is fully wired up, we’re able to capture inspiration and record music, voiceovers, or sessions here at maximum quality and convenience. Music has such an important place in our life and work, these are exciting times.
Read more about our Studio on Jura >