Dave and I met in February 1997, and began working on music together around
November of that year. The first few sessions we did were in various radio
station production studios around Sydney, where I was, at the time, freelancing
as an audio engineer. A lot of the tracks from those sessions ended up on
Acoustic Demos Volumes 1 & 2.
Before long, I started to feel like I was abusing the friendships with the
radio stations I was working with, so we started looking at ways that we could
record at home and still get results that were comparable to what we were
used to achieving in $100,000 studios.
At the time, I had a townhouse with a large living area that was my 'home
office/studio'. Acoustically, it was a nightmare, Wes Craven-style. A bloody
great rectanglular box, four concrete walls (2 parallel pairs...yuk), and
one wall was 75% glass. Knowing the intimate nature of Dave's work, and being
a pedantic audiophile engineer, I wanted to be able to capture nice clean
signals.
I wanted good signal to noise ratios.
I wanted an absolute minimum of reflections.
I wanted full frequency detail.
I wanted everything this room wasn't going to give me... at least, not without
a fight.
You know what they say about neccessity. I figured I needed acoustic baffling
of some description, but being in a rented property, I couldn't attach anything
to the walls. This led to the concept in my mind of free-standing baffles.
A trip to the hardware store later, and I was home with enough 42mm x19mm
marante (that's a kind of wood, in case you weren't sure!) to make 2 rectangular
frames, each 1200mm wide and 1800mm high. The corners were braced with triangular
offcuts.
I also ventured into that most un-male of domains... a fabric store. I escaped
with some rubber-backed curtain fabric, 8 pillows and thankfully, my life.
The curtain fabric was cut into 1200mm x 1800mm sheets. One sheet was then
stapled to one side of one of the frames. I then turned the frame over, so
that the fabric was on the floor with the frame on top. I spread glue over
the 'inside' of the curtain fabric, gutted four pillows, spread the filling
throughout the frame, then stapled another sheet of curtain fabric to the
other side of the frame.
I then made a couple of crude stands for the frames, in the form of some 42mm
x 42mm marante with a square channel cut into them, that the frames could
stand up in.
Click on the thumbnails for close-ups of the finished masterpiece.
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