Studio In Progress

One of the hardest things about moving to Houston was giving up Suburban Din, my little home recording studio I had in Austin.  I was blessed to have a really nice space that was not only a place to put my gear, but also just a great atmosphere in which to be creative.  When we moved to Houston, we selected a house that had room for another studio but we knew it would take a lot of work to get it built out.  Fast-forward a year and a half and most of my music gear was still in boxes.

But over the last few weeks, my brother has been in town working on it and it's coming out great!  I'm totally psyched.

This studio will have a couple of advantages over the one in Austin.  First, it will reside within a detached garage, so sound-wise it will be more isolated from the house.  Second, it will have a very large closet that will double as an isolation booth to record guitars and vocals.  Third, being in the garage, it will be much easier to load and unload equipment when I gig versus schlepping gear up and down a staircase like I did in Austin.  Fourth, we're taking extra measures in the construction to improve the sound isolation so as to keep on friendly terms with the neighbors.  Fifth, it's going to double as a small photography studio and I'm using paint and lighting to suit that purpose.  Best of all, should we need to sell the house in the future, I'm pretty confident it will make a great selling feature as a game room/home theater/workshop/home gym/man cave.  It will work for all of those purposes extremely well -- it'll just be better sound-proofed than those types of rooms usually are.

Since it's in the garage, security is absolutely vital so we have it on our monitored alarm system, multiple locks, and solid-core doors throughout (which also help with sound isolation).  Also, this is Houston and air conditioning is an non-negotiable requirement so we're installing that as well.

At current course and speed I think I should be operational in about a month, maybe less.  And I'm counting the days...

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