Moving Mid Water
So We’ve moved Mid Water. From the North of Cambridgeshire to the capital of the country, cooking up tunes and serving the wider audience of the creative capital. It’s been a bit of a journey and for those interested in the story - Here it is.
(We haven’t written it yet. But when we have… it will be here)
If you’ve ever moved house you’ll understand that there is a very specific type of stress that comes with both the organisation and execution of your well laid out plan, moving a studio is exactly the same, except you also need some form of qualification in efficient cable management. Something we are yet to develop. We found a home for our studio in the Finsbury Park area of London, a space for creatives in the heart of the Harringay Warehouse Community. The first thing you do when you obtain a space, is get out the tape measure, you find the height of the ceiling, the length and width of the room, the length of one corner to the opposing side, because all of this is taken into account when you set your studio back up! (More on this soon)
After we measured up, we had to fix the room up… It needed some work.
Being colourblind, finding a colour scheme wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, so here is a quick shoutout to my partner and housemates who helped me find one, and then assist me in picking up the paint to make this room look a little prettier. 5 litres of white paint to cover up all of the patchy walls to begin with, followed by three walls of a ‘blue’ and then one wall of a ‘darker blue’ - Which I have been informed, might be ‘teal’…
Fun Fact: We spent more on paint than on hiring a van to move all the equipment down.
Once the paint was completed, we needed some ambient lighting, some LED strip lighting around the bottom of the studio, and the surround of the door frame, because nothing sparks creativity like some jazzy lights that can flash when you ask them to. We added dense foam panels to the corners of the room that would go behind the speakers to act as bass traps behind the speakers using an adhesive spray. We also painted out studio logo onto the back wall, because we had some left over paint, and in today’s world, getting your moneys worth is vital.
You’ll notice that we opted not to keep the desk, broken chair, and semi-painted fan that previously occupied the room. Oh, and we fixed the radiator.
So it was time to move everything down. We traveled back up to the East Midlands and began stripping down the setup, cataloging every cable, labeling it so we knew exactly where it went and what it was for, bubble wrapping and boxing everything up, ready to ‘gently place’ it all into a long wheel based ford transit. The cables weren’t horrendous, taking apart the desk had us questioning why we tightened the screws so tight previously. Slight error.
Regardless, we drove it all down to our new space, loaded it into the room, left it for a night (we were tired) and began work on building it the next morning.
There will be a whole other blog post coming soon on the sizing and the spacing of everything, but as previously stated. It was a bit of a science.
So there you have it. 7 Guitars, 2 keyboards, 1 desk and roughly 130 meters of cabling in total. We put some art on the wall, and we began to sound test and further sound proofing that was required. We needed two baffels on the side walls to catch the inital speaker refelctions. The baffels are filled with rockwool, a perfect sound absorber which deadened the room slightly and removed the echo that we had previously.
Keep joining us as we continue this journey. Next time, we will explain the maths and the science to the room, frequency nulls, sound tests, and all.