Do you think I meant country matters?
Or, How the Hell Do You Get a Studio Built Around Here?
Hello all!
I hope you’re all keeping well and being noisy.
I’m trying out a bit of a change in tone and format this week, after a conversation with Documentally. I’m also borrowing a couple of his ideas about formatting to see if they work for us. Let me know what you think!
So, get comfy and heed my tales of builders, roofers, diddly bows, recording studios, Green Day and Megadeth.
Here goes…
The Story
In the last newsletter, I promised I’d fill you in on why I’ve been quiet for so long. Well, here goes.
As a bit of background for new subscribers, I moved to Central Brittany in France in November 2020, getting my feet under the table just before the end of the Brexit transition period. From then until April 2021, my wife and I were in the process of buying a beautiful stone cottage that we had found while appearing on the TV show A Place in the Sun. Besides it being a beautiful cottage, it also had a huge, stone coach house - The Devil’s Coach House this newsletter is named after - that we planned to turn into a recording studio.
As John Lennon (allegedly) said, “Life is what happens while you’re planning something else”. Well, our plan of moving to France, quickly completing our property purchase and having a fully functional recording studio by May 2021 did not quite turn out how we expected.
First of all, the purchase of our new house took ages. We had been warned that this is always the case in France, but we didn’t expect it to take until 31 March to finally get the keys!
Once in the house, we discovered it wasn’t quite as easy as you might expect to get tradesmen to come and renovate the coach house. For one thing, there are a lot of old stone houses to renovate in Brittany and not that many stonemasons and roofers. Artisans like this can afford to be extremely picky, and you pretty much have to befriend them before they’ll even consider working on your property. Add to this the pandemic: the cost of building materials in France more than trebled, if you could get them at all, which meant that, once we had found the right people to do the work, we had to wait for them to source the wood, slate, etc.
We did eventually replace the nasty, old, asbestos coach house roof with a beautiful, blue, slate one in January last year.
The mason did essential structural work on the exterior walls in May. I managed to install the studio control room in July (more on this below), and the interior stone work for the huge live room is being done as I write this newsletter, due to be finished mid-February. (Can’t wait to show you pictures of that!) After that, we will replace the electrics, install a new floor, insulate the roof, construct a new arched front for the building, and we’re away. The plan is to be open for full band recording sessions from May 2023.
So, what were we doing all that time with no studio?
Well, I took over the master bedroom of the cottage and built a temporary studio, which actually sounded really good. I did all my mixing and mastering work from there; we even recorded the backing vocals for Keening by Cairns in that room. It sucked being relegated to the spare room to sleep, and the place felt very crowded, but we somehow managed to make it work.
Then, we threw ourselves a curveball and went back to school…
More on that next week!
The Work
In the summer, after several coats of paint on every surface, moving boxes out, moving gear in, connecting all the cables, we finally got our control room fully operational.
Having the control room has made such a difference to our lives here. Not only do we have the master bedroom back, so we can spread out a bit and welcome guests and clients, but also I get to hide away there doing two of the jobs I love the most: mixing and mastering.
Some folks have asked since I left academia, “Do you miss teaching at the university?” and I have honestly been able to say, “No, no, I don’t miss it at all.”
However…
This week, I have been helping my neighbours’ (when I say neighbours, they live three fields away) daughter work on her school project, which is to build a musical instrument. We’ve been making something very like a diddly bow out of junk lying around in my outbuildings, and it seems to work just fine. I’ve not only been enjoying teaching her about how musical instruments work, but I’ve also been able to show her some woodworking skills. Next week, we’re going to have a lesson on how to solder together a contact microphone out of an old guitar lead and a piezo element, so we can amplify the instrument and get really noisy.
My take-away from this is that I actually still really love teaching. I had just become disillusioned with the education industry that I had found myself in. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s no way I’m going back to that life, but I am looking forward to running some composition and production courses in The Devil’s Coach House this year. I’ve also decided that I will take on a very limited number of 1:1 online students in the areas of music composition and record production. I’ve even set up pages on my website to accommodate this.
The Sounds
It might not be a “cool” thing to say, but Megadeth are an awesome band. I saw them for the first time when I was 15 at the Manchester Apollo; it was the first major gig I had ever been to. I was blown away. Before this point, I’d only been to Punk and Grindcore gigs at a small local club called The Den. Some of the bands I saw there in later years, such as Carcass and Green Day, did go on to bigger and better things, but at that point it was all strictly underground.
Someone actually videoed Green Day’s 1991 gig at The Den, and it’s up on YouTube. Keep an eye out for a ‘stage’ diver in a Mudhoney “Trinkets and Baubles are Yours t-shirt”. That’s yours truly.
I knew Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying from The Friday Rock Show with Tommy Vance, that I taped religiously. I didn’t manage to catch the band that year for their disastrous single UK show in London, but I did see them in Manchester on the So Far, So Good… So What tour. From that point on, I bought everything they had released, until Rust in Piece. Although Rust in Peace is now considered a classic, at that time, I had moved on a bit from Thrash Metal and, like many people at the time, had discovered Grunge, as well as Prog Rock and Jazz Fusion. You might say I’d traded in the biker jacket for a German combat overcoat from Army and Navy.
At Hellfest 2022, I managed to see Megadeth from the perfect vantage point of the sound desk. I wasn’t really familiar with their output after Rust in Peace, except for Tout Le Monde, so it was great to see that it’s still a band of absolutely kick arse musicians. Their new album isn’t half bad either.
So, back to my original point; Megadeth are an awesome band. It never made sense to me that Metallica became the megastars, when at every turn Megadeth have produced infinitely superior music. No wonder Mustaine was so bitter when he put out Killing is My Business against Kill ‘Em All and Peace Sells against Master of Puppets and the general public said, “Nah, mate, Metallica are well better”. Insanity.
I often wonder how differently Metal might have developed if Killing is my Business had had the impact on the scene that it deserved. Perhaps it didn’t take off as well as it should have, due to the quality of sound on the record. I have certainly heard Megadeth fans say they don’t like that album because of the production.
Well, it had passed me by that this album had an amazing remix a few years ago. To be honest, even if I’d known about it, I would probably have ignored it, as I generally don’t like albums being revisited. I still feel nauseated thinking of ZZ Top going back and putting huge, ‘80s gated snares all over their early records.
Anyway, after reading this interview with mixer Mark Lewis, I thought I’d give the remix a go, and it’s fantastic. In fact, with this new mix, I rate the album even more highly, now that I can hear so much technicality that had got lost in the original production. The only quibble I have is that they had to rerecord the vocals for These Boots, and they’re just not as good as in the original mix. Ho hum.
Thanks for making it to the end of this week’s letter! I hope you found it interesting.
Tune in next week to find out how going back to school worked out.
Stay noisy!
Steve
Love this. :-) Place looks great. Although you have reminded me of my failure never to have got to see Megadeth. Maybe there is still time.