Happy new studio

Thanks to very generous donation to Music at Southampton, the new year is starting with a complete renovation and refurbishment of our recording studios. Senior lecturer Richard Polfreman reports on the progress so far of this exciting development:

 

The refurbishment of the recording studios began in December, shortly before the end of the Autumn term. In order to prepare for the works, Dan Halford and I spent many hours disconnecting the existing equipment and removing it from the rooms – storing much of it temporarily in my office prior to relocation elsewhere.

 

 

As well as the equipment there was much furniture and old shelving piled high in Studio A ready for Estates to dispose of. One major difficulty was the piano in the live room, which simply couldn’t be persuaded to round the corner required to exit the room, even with the help of resident piano expert David Owen Norris. How did they get it in there originally?  Eventually, with the help of three strapping lads from Estates, it was successfully up-ended and manhandled end-wise on a trolley down to Teaching Room 3. Let’s hope we can get it back in as cleanly!

Once the site was clear the building contractors and acoustic specialists could get in and begin the serious work – stripping out the old lighting, carpets and ceiling tiles, installing new audio wiring and patching, battening out the walls for acoustic treatment, respraying the steel doors, and more.

A key aspect of the refurbishment is to convert the adjacent office into a new control room, giving us two control rooms and two live rooms, rather than the previously single shared live room. We’re also expanding the number of tie-lines (audio connections) between the live rooms and control rooms so that we can record from many more microphones at once.  These changes give us much greater flexibility in the recording configurations we can set up, but also needed some careful planning of how the default connections should be organised.

 

Returning after the Christmas break, the infrastructure work is nearly complete. The next phase will be the installation and commissioning of the new equipment in time for students to use in semester 2 – updates to follow!