Back in the 16 and 1700s they didn’t really think very hard about sound proofing their barns. They were more interested in keeping hay, grain and perhaps an occasional ox or horse dry, so all that was needed were some hefty beams that wouldn’t blow over and skinny planks nailed to them. Job done.
On our working farm here in Little Maplestead in rural north Essex, we had such a barn and kept some ducks and a couple of horses in it and occasionally gave the sheep their annual shave in there. In the winter the ducks and horses would tell you that the draft was so fierce the Met Office would have given it a name, and the building had become much favoured by a wide variety of spiders and woodworm. It also had 300 years of pigeon, swallow and house martin guano in every conceivable nook, not to mention cranny.
I had started my company, Audio Network, in the neighbouring building with my partner Robert Hurst back in 2001 and I had always thought the barn might one day make a perfect recording studio. In my humble (by which I mean correct) opinion the nature of the random shapes, angles and surfaces in a traditional wooden barn would make for a perfect acoustic with no reflections or ugly nodes and should sound amazing.
As the years went on and Audio Network grew, we built a couple of mix/mastering rooms next to the barn and the problem was always how we could develop the bigger building without disrupting the business.
In 2018 I finally got around to doing something about it and made plans to put the luckless mix and mastering engineers into temporary rooms and ask other Audio Networkers to wear ear plugs for a year, but as it turned out we made the decision to move the whole business to London anyway so I was good to go.
First, we had to persuade the local authority that the building was a good idea and ticked all the necessary planning boxes:
Then we had to convince a man with a troublingly small moustache and a clipboard that there were no rare bats in the barn’s roof and that the Great Crested Newts in the pond wouldn’t mind.
Our genius architect Demetra Lindsay drew beautiful drawings of the barn in bucolic English landscapes. She didn’t actually add Elgar’s Nimrod, skipping lambs, a cheery bobby and a cream tea, but it was a close run thing. All this achieved, we were good to go and the Council gave us the nod.
At this time I was working very regularly at Abbey Road Studios and always asked for my pal Stefano Civetta to be on our sessions. Stef’s an impossibly cheerful character and a bit of an all-round genius as both a musician and engineer, so I always had him as my much needed wing man. After a particularly fun couple of days in the summer of 2019 Stef announced he was going to come and work with me at School Farm. I had absolutely no choice in the matter, so a day before lockdown in 2020 Stef moved to a house in Sudbury, Suffolk and we were a team.
The first challenge was how to soundproof the barn but keep the interior as it was minus the woodworm. Chris Walls of Level Acoustic Design is the only acoustics expert I have ever met who also a human being and speaks English, so we hired him to work it all out. Lasers were brought in to map every random angle and he came up with the solution of building a new barn over the old one with a steel frame so that in places the walls are 900mm thick. This meant the building would stand up, but the crucial wibbly wobbly nature of the original barn was preserved inside and the sound proofing isolation is pretty much total.
He packed the wall space with layer upon layer of rockwool, heavy duty acoustic ply, air gaps and other secret ingrediants know only to the Illuminati.
Working with very old buildings cannot be planned with a nicely straight lined CAD drawing. These things were built to last, unlike the hutches they build now which have the life expectancy of a croissant. Every beam has a name – collar, blade, crucks, spur, ridge, purlin, brace and ridge, sill and wall plates.
Nothing in the 17th Century was straight or at right angles to anything else. Some of the old oak beams in the barn dated back to the 1300s and are as hard as steel. It is near impossible to bang a nail into them and even the most ambitious woodworm gave up with toothache before they made even 1mm progress – but some of the more recent (300 year old) elm was little more than dust in places.
When the 1970s asbestos roof was removed it was amazing to see the corresponding Roman Numerals on the joists and purlins which had been chiselled there and last seen by the original carpenters who assembled the barn from much older timber, around the time JS Bach died in 1750. Incidentally, all barns from Tudor times to late Georgian, were limited in width by a law stating that any oak timber more than 18 ft long had to be used to make naval warships, so the barn width couldn’t be wider than that or the beams wouldn’t get to the walls.
In March 2020 the building was stripped to its bare bones with no roof or cladding. It looked like a very wobbly and vulnerable toast rack, and at this moment COVID struck, the world stopped and everyone went home to watch ‘Cash In The Attic’.
The builders’ merchants were shut and I seriously thought the whole project might’ve been one of my more spectacular blunders. Added to this, the building team took the view that they didn’t like the idea of the barn falling over, so old beams had to be found to reinforce the building, acrows acrowed, braces braced, props propped and the more alarming leans and wobbles were secured. Since I refused to have modern machined timber this presented quite a challenge.
Chris and our brilliant builder Darren and his team were fabulous. They kept calm, only occasionally sucked their teeth and passed me tissues as necessary. We ordered handmade bricks which were made especially for us by Bulmer Bricks to match the original and gradually the phoenix arose.
I had no idea control room floors were such a thing. We had been allowed to knock down a 1950s lean to on the northern side of the barn which had been home to a lawn mower and an elderly horse. We built a new structure to the old dimensions and that area was to be our new kitchen and control room. Chris produced plans for a floating floor and a slab which required a hole the size of the Grand Canyon. Flip-Flop Mark, our excessively enthusiastic digger driver, was thrilled by the idea, got burrowing and in no time we had what looked like an open cast mining operation. The top of his digger was well below the final floor level.
The floor was then built with layer upon layer of dense acoustic plywood on the reinforced concrete slab, then a layer of rubber springs (or Studflex anti-vibration mounts if you prefer), followed by more dense concrete slabs, more plywood layers screwed down tightly and finally the floor. Nothing is allowed to touch the walls and this, Chris earnestly informed me, is all part of building the perfect control room to mix the Atmos 7.1.4 room Stef told me I had my heart set on.
It was around about this time we realised the control room roof was too low to contain the massive air conditioning pipes we were going to need to install. Air going through small tubes goes ‘whoosh’ so you have to have tubes like the channel tunnel which gently waft cool air and don’t create any noise which might be audible on recordings. Large sound attenuating boxes also need to be hand built and nothing even remotely fitted into the roof cavity. Not only would the pipes not fit, but we also didn’t have anywhere to put the huge compressors needed to make the thing work (around about now you might be spotting that I am no air con expert).
Getting the air flow right is critical in a studio. Because of the tightly sealed doors really good ventilation is vital not only for musicians’ comfort, but also controlling humidity. With a Steinway concert grand with a 6 figure price tag and regular musicians with similarly costly instruments in the room, they are not going to be pleased if they come back after lunch to find their Stradivarius has curled up like a British Rail sandwich.
I dug my toes in when I was told all the machinery would have to go into the roof of the old barn and made it clear that the experts simply had to find an alternative. I know it is never a good idea to stand between a dog and a lamp post, so I got out of the way and let Demetra, Darren and Chris figure it all out while I went off for a little cry. About a fortnight later they worked out how to get the machine into the valley roof (with some extra bracing so it didn’t land on Stef’s head) and the pipes were coiled around joists and each other like some blue whale’s colon. It worked.
The rule for the builders in the old barn was to keep everything random and wobbly, but the control room was the reverse. Chris’s drawings were planned to the millimetre (no exaggeration) – everything had to be done to Dolby’s exacting standards and the speakers positioned with incredibly precise ratios. I have never understood quite why they all have to be SO precise given that one tiny nose pick moves your head significantly in relation to the speaker position, and all human beings pick their noses when listening back.
As the basic construction phase neared the end it was time to think about the technical installation. Stefano had written up his wish list of equipment, microphones and systems (please see other blogs for details). HHB was called in to help design the systems and Bill Ward and his nephew Jack Saunders, the cabling ninjas I knew through Abbey Road, came to in lay some 30 miles of cable. I have been to studios before that had crackly signal paths and knew that cabling isn’t an area for economising. Only the very best will do, so Bill and Jack spent months fishing vast looms of cables into tight spaces with far less swearing than I had budgeted for. For a month all I saw were their bottoms. They then terminated all the ends with solid gold solder. We had our own patch bays designed and made and put tie lines into the main room, 2 booths and 2 outside buildings so we have 5 entirely separate recording areas which can all work together with video links.
I think we only really made one major mistake and that was on our acoustic doors. I used a company who had no interest at all in being helpful – or it seems doors. They sent a succession of ‘fitters’ who clearly had no idea what they were doing. One of their door operatives actually went to sleep in his car and left it to our ever willing team to do his work for them while the others in his crew had forgotten their tools so went to the pub. On the next occasion they sent a replacement bunch who drove all the way from the west country, were surprised by how heavy the doors were, stated they couldn’t possibly lift them and drove home again. They admitted they’d never ‘done doors’ before.
Amazingly, the company was charging me £40,000 for 7 doors (£5,700 + VAT each) and to this day the outer control room door can only be opened and closed by a team of shire horses. The company still shows no interest in trying to fix it and I wish we had just used big thick fire doors as I have done in other studios I have built – but we all live and learn and in the scheme of things the door issue is pretty minor.
Whilst we were doing all of this, we also rebuilt the old Audio Network offices and transformed them into a very comfy place for musicians to stay, dug out the old pond and relandscaped the whole area. I didn’t want any building work to be happening when we had our beautiful new studio operational, so we had to do everything in one go.
The experience of taking an old farm barn and turning it into one of the best audio facilities in the land was undoubtedly ‘a journey’ and not for the faint hearted. It was huge fun because we had amazing people – Architect Demetra Lindsay, Audio Elf Chris Walls, Building Goblin Darren Howard, Stefano (of course) and many others all came together in the difficult year of lockdown and made the whole process as enjoyable as it was challenging. I have also made some amazing new friends in the process and Mike Banks from SSL and Recordproduction.com has been a particularly supportive and helpful advisor and believer. Without people with his infectious enthusiasm and generosity, we would never have made the progress we have and I couldn’t be more grateful.
Every time we are recording the talented players I am fortunate enough to work with, I like to imagine how surprised the old timbers must be to find themselves converted from chilly chicken perches and duck digs to warmly climate controlled beams prized for their random and warty appearance.
What would the old carpenter from 300 hundred years ago have said if he knew that one day his handywork would be part of a building that recorded music so it could be heard all over the world for years after it has been played? I suspect he’d have brushed the shavings off his smock, patted his wooden trosers and said it doesn’t make any sense – and I think he might be right.