Chamber tile!!!

Got some of the random, super cheap , industrial glazed tile laid down in the chamber today. 

  The sound changed, for the better, but not as much as I thought it would. The high gloss paint actually made more of a positive difference to the sound of the space. I guess it was more square footage, but the tile is... um.... tile, so I thought it would sound brighter and slappier right away. It DOES, however, even out the verb tail quite a bit. The overall RT-60 in there is probably about 1.25 useable because of the ambient noise floor of being in NYC at all. The overall RT-60 of the room is probably about 1.5 seconds, which is what I was going for in the first place. If I can, I am going to shoot for closer to 2 seconds, with 1.5 useable. I also put a giant piece of bank security glass that some one gave me to hopefully knock down a little flutter echo in the corner. You can see it leaning in the corner. It weighs a lot, as it is about 5 feet but 1 foot by 3/4" glass. crazy heavy. Anyway, that helped a little, but then the tile really got things to move right. The tile is going to stay as randomized as you see in the picture, but with more tile laid in on top of this layer. So we wind up with a shiny, diffuse, crazy bunch of variation in the floor. The super glazed subway tile will lay on top of this shiny, but textured tile. It should be really surreal in there soon. even more than now. The 15" Mackie speaker is up on its stand firing into one of the walls that is super shiny, and all wired up. Tomorrow morning we will get some sounds happening down there. All the wire is done on the chamber end, just have to crimp a bunch of DL pins onto the other end of the snake and get it on the patch bay... then I can REALLY start to hear what needs to be done in the way of tuning and further construction/painting/tile/stuff....

DT3 IV, completely.

Finished up with Dub Trio for our 4th record together. There are some sounds on this new one that people will simply not know how the hell we made them. Some really fun ones. Modular trickery, multi buss pedal level freak out glitch trickery....
 Tricking the robots.

Dub Trio

Almost done with the newest Dub Trio record.
   We finish up over the next couple of days.
Then its back to finishing the now-famous-and-just-about-to-be-a-reality studio G chamber...

Matt and myles sealing up any gaps in the high gloss paint. 

The chamber really started to sound like a chamber around this time. 

There are a bunch of mechanical "helpers" that will be installed next week.... Sheet metal and springs. 

Possible clear coating of certain surfaces, and some crazy plexiglass chunks....

The next step after getting the walls painted with high gloss outdoor paint, is to get the floors, which seem to be in a permanent state of wetness these days (global warming?) covered in some sealed flagstone and some awesome surplus industrial shiny tiles. I am buying the odds and ends at a couple of tile places, like the stuff they dont have enough to do a whole bathroom, you know? The super shiny subway tile type stuff, but in sick colors like industrial green and brown. I am really excited for that step because I wont have to stand in disgusting slime the whole time I am working down there. 

    PHASE 946: after the foor, we will add the super thin, plate-verb steel sheeting that will be suspended by springs and turnbuckles between the 2x4 uprights (you can see one of them in this picture) to extend the verb time by hopefully a bunch. Clearly the metal will be a bunch of Db down from the room decay, but I am hoping it will add a nice tail on percussive sounds like snare. Already, the clap sound down there is starting to inspire.... Special thanks to Francisco Botero, Miles Turney and Matt Labozza for helping out down in that smelly hole today. Its going to be legendary. :)

Also, I ordered the Speakers for down there today, and the SDC microphones. They will be here next week. I am using some crazy inexpensive stuff: the mackie "THUMP" speaker, and some samson small diaphragm condensers. It is so nasty down there, that I dont want to send anything to snazzy to the dungeon just yet. If the SDC's suck, I will re-evaluate later.

Walls are starting to get glossy and extend the verb tails...

After this pic, I started sealing cracks with some crazy masonry sealer stuff that is like 

plaster/mortar that is used to fix things like chimneys. I cant remember what it was called. I think the fumes down there are making me slightly slow (er).

Around this time, I started to feel like we were getting somewhere. Even when we would just talk, we could hear that sealing up all these porous surfaces was starting to liven up the space. The space already sounded really cool, which was why we got rolling on this in the first place, but to seal up the crusty old brick was crucial if we are going to hit my goal of a 1.5-2 second decay time in here. 

I thought I was totally NOT going to hit that goal until around the time this picture was taken. We just kind of clapped around the room a little after getting more of the walls fully coated and there was a nice .85 decay.... super encouraging.

You can see two crucial details here over Francisco's shoulder:

The wall is insanely porous in places, and there is a bunch of standing water in the hallway leading to this creepy chamber off of the main building under the sidewalks of williamsburg, Brooklyn, next to the subway stairs...

We really had to use a TON of this really expensive paint to get the walls to be glossy....

Chamber project painting

So we got to painting the totally SICK walls down under studio G. We rolled the totally way too expensive high gloss outdoor latex onto the crusty old walls and watched it flake off of the old brick and mortar, so we swept the walls off and scraped and then went back with rollers and then went back with brushes to really get the walls sealed up. 

Gone Chambering

Francisco and I as we got started to make this crazy basement/vault room into a chamber underneath the live room at Studio G Brooklyn. You can see some sick metal stuff that was put up a million years ago that we are getting ready to rip down. It was NASTY stuff. like rusty razorblades hanging from the walls.