After getting a fair number of emails about some of the mixes and remixes both on the site and things i've done in the past, its tmie to put up a page or two about the work space I use for practicing, tinkering with ideas and sometimes just relaxing listening to music - some would call it a mess, some would call it a spare bedroom. I call it the studio.

Many years ago on a very wet Saturday night in May, I was playing to a medium turn-out in a dimly lit club. The crowd were fairly up for it given that we'd only just had a bank holiday weekend and so, much to the owners disgust, dancing rather than drinking was the order of the day. It was a fairly banging set as I recall and as often is the case, I was completely lost in the music and the mix. I was flipping through my boxes looking for something a little different and came across a track i'd loved for ages. I dropped the slice of distinct vinyl to the platter and crowbarred the tone arm out of its holder and onto the groove. To my horror, i'd misread the label and put the wrong side on, however, to my surprise, i'd landed on an acapella version of the track that I didn't even realise I had and what's even better, without even a nudge of the pitch control, it was perfectly in time and on bar as well so I flung up the fader and cut in this vocal and let it run. The crowd got a trip down memory lane and went wild at the vocal with people whistling and many hands in the air.

Now, it's important to remember that mash-ups weren't that common back then and although they're commonplace these days with record sites having sections dedicated to the genre, if done well, they're still excellent and a great way to revive a classic or to just play around with something brand new.

Anyway, not having a third deck to hand that night meant I was going to have to either get out of the vocal early to use a mix-out point and keep the flow or fade out the backing track and mix underneath the acapella (a technique i've mastered since then). I chose the end the vocal route at the time and when I got back home the next mornnig started playing with the mix and refining the vocal alignment and kept cutting bits of the chorus in and out until the thing was so tight that I wasn't DJ'ing anymore, I was remixing live.

Sadly this didn't leave much time at the beginning or end of the track so I started thinking about doing a proper single-track remix of the two items and make it into a complete new work that I could use which would run perfectly every time.

We're talking about 1994 here when studio technology was in the mega-bucks price range, eBay didn't exist, Atari ST's running Cuebase were the order of the day and samplers were limited to about 4 seconds on high-end disco mixers or go buy an Akai! Studio time was so expensive you just couldn't do it and not many small studios existed - certainly not outside of Manchester, Birmingham or London.

At the time, I lived, as we all do in our early years, with my parents. Space was extremely limited in a three bedroomed space above and behind my parents shop with a brother who is eleven years younger than me and so racks of outboard units and 64 channel mixers were both out of the question financially and physically.

I took the approach that the then humble PC with it's open architecture for interface cards, growing amounts of hard disk space and stabilising operating systems might be able to be twisted around to the function of maybe mixing a few samples together.

Again, i'll remind everyone reading in 2006 that 12 years ago, PC's were flaky at best, the internet practically didn't exist, games required a university professor to configure as they didn't run under windows, Microsoft wasn't even at 95 by this point and Creative Labs' SoundBlaster 16 was the dogs balerics but who cares - i'll give it a go anyway.

And so, the idea struck me that a studio didn't have to be the stereotype that it still is in most cases; a production booth, practice room, accoustic chamber, vocal recording booth, equipment racks abundant, patch cables all over the floor, John Williams furrowing his brow and a guy that needed to sit across two stools and should really have had a haircut back in 1972 to operate the twelve foot long mixing desk.

You could barely call it one but i'd managed to chuck together enough cash for a SoundBlaster AWE32 card with 8mb soundfont memory, a spare stereo mixer, a bigger monitor and a copy of Sample Audio Workshop (SAWPlus). Since the idea didn't need keyboard, everything could be simply sampled and then sequenced. The PC was an Intel Pentium 166MMX with 64mb ram, about 40gb hard disk and a refurbished 17in monitor and an HP 2x CD-Writer

MP3 format didn't exist then so samples were in WAV format and were huge to deal with so you needed fast disks, I couldn't afford A/V rated SCSI drives back then so I preyed it didn't glitch. The good thing about software of that time was the rendering mode in that it didn't do it in real-time playback and so it could wait for data to arrive in its buffers to be manipulated and written to the destination file. A technique even the mighty Ableton software still uses to this day.

I won't go into the details of how the track was produced - that's a tutorial many a more qualified person has written thousands of times over on the internet, suffice to say that it took me about 3 days in total to get the thing sounding right, it worked, the track was mixed down, written to CD and then played many times.

I don't have any copies of the original any more for reasons that involve a very ex girlfriend, however, I was playing a club in 1998 and did the same vocal over a different track which sounded even better and copies still live on to this day in the mix you can find on this site called "I'll Be There" which is a mash-up of Sub-Merge ft Jan Johnston's "Take Me By The Hand" and Mars Plastic's "Find The Way" with a few vocal stabs taken from Reel 2 Reel.


Studio 1 saw other tracks being working with local DJ's and producers including Dave Boyle and Steve Jackson as well as doing a very jumpy techno/hardcore track called "Take it to the limit" put together with DJ Aidy "Scratchmaster" J.

The final production for Studio 1 was at Christmas 2002, a full-length mix-cd done entirely in ACID Pro 3 called "16 songs that all sound the same". Demonstrating that a computer can mix a full-length set as well as any DJ - something with James Zabiela then went onto release in the form of 2005's "Utilities" album.
Due to other commitments at the time, studio 1 was dismantled in late 2003/early 2004, it's parts to be re-used in a live environment including my beloved SL1200's which i'd had for nearly 10 years at the time.

Finally, after nearly 2 years away from the production scene, the new studio is back online.

The equipment list comprises:

For DJ's: 3xTechnics SL1210 turntables, 1xNumark DXM909 Mixer slaved to 1xPioneer DJM-600 mixer, 2xStanton 304 CD-Turntables

For Production: Bheringer Eurodesk SL3224FX-PRO mixer, PC - AMD Athlon 3200XP+ / 2gb RAM / 2x500gb Hard Disk / Ableton Live 5.2 and many sample CD's and resources, 2xDenon Single Deck Tape Decks, 1xSanyo Projector onto 8x4 screen, Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse.

For Making Noise: A total of 9,300W of power output across 6 amplifiers (3xC-Mark 2400w, 1xDare 1100, 2xDare 500), Alesis MEQ-230, Bheringer Composer Pro Compressor/Gate/Limiter, Bheringer Crossover, 2 x 450W Sub/bass and 4 x 200W Mid-Tops

Also on stock, an additional 2xSL1200 and 1xSL1210 turntable, various mixers, battle and club series.

Naturally, as there's a projector, we like to relax a bit so there's a DVD player, X-Box and PlayStation 2 hooked up as well as a feed with remote repeat from the Sky+ box in the lounge.

I'm planning on adding 2xPioneer CDJ-1000 MK3's and a DJM-1000 later this year as well as a MIDI keyboard and a fully-balanced sound card I/O interface but this will be after i've moved again (the lease is up on my flat and the landlord wants the building back).