RECORDING Field Notes – My First Personal Home Studio

IT was 40 Years Ago Today...

Technically, my first personal studio was predated by a shared, cobbled-together four-track reel-to-reel system in the dirt basement of my first Nashville house in 1980. A few years later, my day job as an assistant engineer at a “real” studio showed me what professional audio was supposed to sound like. I realized those old consumer four-track systems just weren’t up to the task. I was officially spoiled.

In 1986, my first true home/personal studio was designed specifically to replace the studio I had conceived and built at my first—and last—full-time studio job: Castle Recording Studio in Franklin, TN. What had started in 1984 as a copy machine/storage room at the opposite end of the building from the main studio soon became a synth-based production room and, later, a full-fledged Studio B.

My motive for building it was simple: There were some amazingly cool electronic instruments sitting unused in the main control room, since most of our clients were country artists. I wanted to get my hands on them full-time. These included a Roland Jupiter-8, Oberheim Pro-One and DMX drum machine, among others. I needed a space where I could set them up away from the main studio, and I found it in a spare room filled with boxes and the office copy machine. All I had to do was figure out how to make the “pitch” to the owners.

I assumed I’d get a “no” when I asked if I could move all the synths and one of the analog 2" 24-track machines into the copy room. Somehow, I found the courage to ask, and they said yes. It fit with their plans to expand into music publishing. I got lucky!

The eventual lineup included some of my favorites: the Roland Jupiter-8 and Oberheim Pro-One, along with the newly arrived Yamaha DX7 and fabulous DX1. Add an Oberheim DMX drum machine and Simmons SDS7 with the ultra-rare drum sequencer, and, of course, the Fairlight CMI at the center of it all.

There was nothing else like it in Nashville, carrying on the tradition of the A room, which in early 1984 boasted only the second SSL console and 3M 32-track digital machines in Nashville.