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Remix Magazine Article
From: remixmag.com
Article by: Remix mag & Thes One
Date: Jul 1, 2006 12:00 PM
The Boom Boom Room
Between albums, producer/MC Thes One of the L.A. hip-hop duo People Under the Stairs (also including MC/DJ Double K) got married and bought a house. But the house wouldn't be a home without a real studio to record the group's new album, Stepfather (2006, Tres), so Thes and a few inexperienced friends took on the challenge of converting a spare bedroom into a high-level project studio. Here, he relays what he learned.
Preplanning
The first step is to have the proper tools; that was the first mistake we made. We went to Home Depot probably 10 or 15 times the first couple of days. We were like, “Wait, we don't have a crowbar? Oh wait, we need a sledgehammer.”
Next, it's good to draw a diagram of where you want your audio and electrical plugs to pop out. Once you put the walls up, you're stuck with it, so it's really important that you're comfortable with where your plugs are. Visualize how your studio is going to be laid out based on the gear that you have. If you're going to have your computer or console in one corner but your rack or vocal booth in another corner, you have to envision how you want your wires running. For instance, we turned our closet into a vocal booth, so we made sure to put XLR female plugs and TRS stereo plugs in the wall for plugging the microphone and headphones into the wall. That wire should run behind the wall to the other end of the room where it pops out on a faceplate near my microphone preamp.
Then you have to find your electrical breakers for the studio room. Turn on everything in the studio room, including all the lights, and plug things into all the outlets. Then have a friend go to the breaker to figure out which switch turns everything off in that room, and turn it off. If you're not sure about it, you could turn off the whole panel and kill all of the electricity. At some point, you're going to need to turn on something for power tools, a vacuum, etc. We turned off just the room we were working in and ran an extension cord from another room to plug in a radio or whatever we needed, so we could keep the electricity off in the studio room.
Tear Down Those Walls
Basically, you just go at the dry walls, man. You could cut it with a blade and pull it off, but there's no easy way around it. Just get in there and rip those walls out so you only have the studs of the framing. We ripped all the walls out, and there was mold behind it. The opposite wall was all cinder block, which had been letting water seep through and get into the insulation, becoming this festering pile of mold behind the wall. If you're creating a studio in a basement, mold is definitely a reality to deal with when ripping the walls out. It's very likely that if one of the walls is touching cinder block and there's earth behind it, you're going to have moisture and most likely mold, which typically happens in a basement, lower-level room or other humid place.
The quick solution to that problem is to weather-seal that wall with a solvent-based foundation coating (a company called Henry, among others, sells that), so it doesn't continue to let water through. The foundation coating is like a really thick paint. Slather about two coats on, and it basically moisture-proofs the wall.
Wiring
We had to add extra electrical boxes around the studio, and you want to do that when the walls are down. It's very simple to move a plug once the wall is down; it's just a little box screwed to a stud. Unscrew it, move the wire and put the plug somewhere else. I was deathly afraid of electricity from getting shocked by ungrounded DJ mixers and that sort of thing. But it turns out that an electrical plug is the simplest apparatus of all time. You need to connect three wires, and the instructions are on the back. Just go buy one at Home Depot, and it'll tell you what to do.
If you don't feel comfortable with the wiring, once you have the walls down and everything is open, it's very simple for an electrician to come in. If you want the electrician to put in a subpanel of breakers just for your studio, it won't cost more than $100 or $200 dollars because everything is already exposed.
I ended up putting in a subpanel for my studio — extra breakers that are not on the main box. If you have a lot of big gear — tube gear, a console, etc. — that's something to think about. If you're using computers and digital gear, it's probably not necessary. But do not think that putting in a Furman power conditioner is going to solve any problems you have down the line. I've opened one of those up, and it looks like an extension cord inside. There's an RF filter, and that's about it. Those 1U Monster power conditioners have a lot more going on inside of them. That's something someone might want to throw at the top of their rack. But there's a lot of voodoo in electricity and cables. It wasn't until this project that I realized the truth behind power conditioners and audio cables.
Any person doing a project like this or just getting more into studio stuff needs to get comfortable with making cables. Cables are a huge racket. Companies are making enormous amounts of money selling premade cables, but you can buy very high-quality bulk cable for dirt cheap. In L.A., there are three or four places where you can buy bulk cable for 13 or 14 cents a foot. In a project like this, you need spools of bulk cable. It doesn't matter what plug you put on the end, whether it's XLR or TRS. As long as it's balanced, you can run that cable through the studs. We bought two bulk 8-channel cable snakes with color-coded wires that we labeled on both ends. To get through the studs, we drilled through them with a large drill bit and then fed the wire through. String the bulk cable behind the walls where you need it to be, and after the walls are up, pull out the cable and attach whatever kind of plug you want.
Before you put the walls up, you need to buy faceplates for the audio cables coming out of the walls. Certain pro-audio shops sell faceplates with plugs built into them. Those screw into standard electrical boxes, which come in sizes such as 1-gang, 2-gang, 3-gang, etc. (one gang per electric plug). Say, for example, you needed a box with four XLRs on it in the vocal booth — that's a 2-gang faceplate. So in the wall, you have to affix a 2-gang box. It's a little blue box that you nail to the stud. You have to have that so you can screw on the faceplate. Your audio cable comes out of the wall and sits in the box. When everything is said and done, you solder or attach the audio wires to the faceplate and screw it into the box.
Soundproofing
When I say soundproofing, I'm not talking about treating the room acoustically. This is not a matter of putting foam up on the walls. Foam will stop the high frequencies from bouncing around within a room, but it won't soundproof your room. I'm talking about something that won't wake up your baby if you have to work at 4 a.m. The only effective way to soundproof your room is to add more mass to your walls.
With the walls open, you need to put something inside that's going to make it thicker. The best thing to use is mineral fiber. You could put freakin' sandbags back there, but mineral fiber is good because it's thicker and much denser than insulation. It's not expensive — about the same price as buying a batch of insulation. But it's more difficult to find because it's the nastiest substance ever created by mankind. Basically, it's a 2-by-3-foot slab, and you buy a package of five to 10 of those stacked. This stuff feels almost like fiberglass, but it's particles of mineral blown into a patty. If you get it on your skin, it itches like you would not believe, and it turns your skin red. You don't feel it right away. It can even get in your eyes, so you need gloves, goggles and a hat, and be sure to cover your whole body. And — I'm not just being funny — if you're putting in mineral fiber, and you go to the bathroom, be very, very careful when you touch your private regions. It is some nasty stuff, but it's absolutely the best thing to use. You can't get mineral fiber at Home Depot, but you can get it at a more high-end construction-supply place or high-end studio retailer. It shouldn't cost more than $100 a pack. We spent $200 — 300 on it for the whole room.
After all the wiring is set, put the mineral fiber in over or around the wires. It sits in between the studs and is malleable. You can bend it or rip a chunk off and put it in a small area. In the photos, you'll see the framing and the mineral fiber in between the framing. We put it behind the walls and the ceiling. If you were on the second floor, and there were beams going across beneath you, you could put it in the floor as well. It doesn't have to be too tight, it just has to be in there. When you have to rip it up and jam it in, that's when the stuff starts flying and getting all over you, and it becomes miserable. It is not toxic; it's just irritating. And once you get it in place, it's not like asbestos, which releases into the air. Mineral fiber can rub off on you only when it's disturbed.
Now it's time to start on the floating walls, which means that the wall itself is not touching the wooden studs framing the house. The wall is set off so that when it resonates and vibrates with the music, it doesn't transfer the vibration to the framing of the house or to the outside or other rooms. Without floating walls, the soundwaves of the lower frequencies will travel into the wall, into the stud and then throughout the whole house. By pulling the walls forward, you stop the transmission of that energy, and it stays within the room. It also gives you a better listening environment, because the whole house isn't resonating on certain notes. It really sounds different, and it takes a little getting used to because you're accustomed to listening to sound in an untreated environment.
We had no experience with floating walls. I bought all the parts in a kit from a distributor, and the kit is nothing more than some metal rails and rubber, neoprene padding stickers. You have to buy the dry wall separately.
The first thing you do is put up the long metal rails along the vertical studs. They run horizontally across the studs. We had to cut some of them because they come in 3- or 6-foot lengths. At some point, you'll get to the end of the wall, and it won't even out.
In the photo below, you can see the mineral fiber in the wall. There's a blue 3-gang box with an 8-channel snake of bulk cable coming out. And up on the ceiling, we put up some floating wall rails. So first you put the rails down spaced apart along all the walls and the ceiling. Then you put the black neoprene strips from the kit across the railings. Now there's a rubber cushion on top of that rail. Then you take green board, which is like 5-inch dry wall, and lay that against those rails. Screw the green board into only the rails and not the wood so that it's literally hanging off of the ceiling. That's the essence of the floating-walls system. If you put your hand against the wall in this room, it won't move, but it's not touching the frame of the house; it's kind of floating off of those rails that are isolated with neoprene.
The black squares are the neoprene rubber — just stickers, basically. You put those stickers all over the first layer of wall. Then you put another layer of wall — the final outer layer — up against those stickers on the green wall. So there are actually two walls: The wall you see in the room is sitting on top of rubber cushions, which are on top of the green wall, which is on top of the rails, which are on top of the studs. In creating floating walls, you lose about six or seven inches off the width and length of your original room's size.
Every time we put up a new layer of wall, we had to cut out the hole for the faceplates where the electrical and the audio were going to reside. The console was going to be placed right where that ladder is, so we wanted all the audio from the room — the vocal booth mics and the stuff from the rack on the other side of the room — to pop out right there as a faceplate of plugs.
Windows
No matter how well you make the wall, the windows are always the Achilles' heel of studios. I didn't want to build this beautiful studio and then have complaints from the neighbors late at night. After consulting a lot of people, the best solution was to take a hammer to the original window, and then put up two layers of glass block, which is like a wall. We did one layer from the outside and one from the inside. Glass block has very similar acoustic properties to a wall, and it's excellent for letting in natural light and stopping sound from traveling out of the studio. Glass block was also cheaper than building a solid wall because it would have cost too much money to finish the wall on the outside of the house. There are two layers of glass block because by soundproofing the room, we created a thicker wall.
In the photo below, you can see half of the first layer of glass block sitting in a plastic track. Wherever you buy glass block, you can get the track and the spacers as well. All you have to do is screw in the track around your window opening, and the glass block sits in the track. Make sure the blocks fit evenly — your measurements have to be precise. You can't cut a glass block when you get to the end and there's room for only half a block. Put the plastic spacer down, then pour the cement mix in and put the blocks on top — that helps you keep things evenly spaced. I thought that process was going to be difficult, but it's not. It's definitely something that a home-improvement person could do. You just have to use a little foresight.
Acoustic Treatment
The room is now soundproofed, but that doesn't mean the inside will sound good. Acoustic treatment is a whole separate issue, and the last thing I wanted to do was buy a big purple foam kit to put up on the wall. That's not going to look so hot. Instead, I bought 18-by-18-inch squares of superthin, light wood at Home Depot, and I cut foam to the size of the wood. I sprayed the back of the foam with spray adhesive and stuck the foam to the pieces of wood. Then I went to a fabric store and got a light green burlap fabric that I thought would look nice in the studio. I wrapped the fabric over the foam and stapled it to the back of the wood with a staple gun. Then I bought industrial Velcro at Home Depot and affixed these nice, 2-inch-thick burlap squares to the wall.
That's my poor man's acoustic treatment. It's enough to stop the high frequencies from bouncing all over the place in the room, and it still looks okay. It works well for the high frequencies, but it doesn't do jack for the low frequencies — they are a bigger problem. There are products available to fix that, but this is still a small bedroom studio, and I don't have space to put in a big carpet tube or something like that. But the great thing is I can overcome any acoustic problems with volume. I can just crank it crazy loud and not bother anyone.
People In The Studio
I'm definitely happy with the studio, although we got way behind schedule on the album because of it. But there was a point when I was mixing, and I had been up for literally 30 hours. I was sitting there, and Double K was next to me dozing off. I had the air conditioner pumping, it was 5 a.m., the sun was coming up through the glass blocks, I had the music loud and my wife was asleep. I thought, “You know what? This was all worth it, just to be here at this moment in time.” For someone who tried to put a little bit of every piece of money I got into gear so I never had to depend on a record label, it meant a lot for me to be sitting there like that, enjoying my own studio.
Lighting & Air Conditioning
I put in those lights that you see. That was the beginning of the shit hitting the fan period. There's not a whole lot that can go wrong with the wall construction. There is some, but it's not rocket science. Putting walls up and using a drill to put in screws is not the most difficult thing in the world. But the electrical side is where things got complicated.
The lights were a problem. This was a do-it-yourself thing, and I didn't know what was going to happen. I thought it would be really nice to put in some hanging track lights, and I put a dimmer on them. Those little halogen track lights you would get at Home Depot, and the dimmer is controls all of the track lighting; this is all simple stuff anyone could do.
So here's the problem. Some track lighting has transformers in it. In other words, some track lighting is low-voltage lighting, so the voltage comes in normally at 110V, and then the transformer steps it down. The fact that these things have transformers, and they're hanging down like that basically makes them big radio antennas. So that's like three giant car radio antennas above my console—not good. In addition to that, when a commercial or cheap dimmer from Home Depot dims the lights down, the extra electricity that is not going to the lights is sent down the wires of the house. It's not just disappearing; it's getting kicked down the line. So everything in your studio is going gets all this extra electricity sent to it, and everything that has a chassis ground—your turntable, DJ mixer, etc.—basically becomes a giant antenna. The first time I plugged everything in, it was picking up radio so fricking loud. That was discouraging, and I didn't know why it was happening. I had to get rid of those lights and get regular voltage lights. Low-voltage lighting is a definite no-no—not good for the studio!
Somehow I figured out that if the lights are off, there's no radio. But there was still a buzz, and it turned out it to be the dimmer on the lights. But I still wanted a dimmer in my studio, so I had to get this crazy, giant transformer that you put in your wall to absorb the extra current. It's definitely not recommended. It's like this giant knob, just so I can dim my lights. I would say stay away from dimmers, or holler at me, and I'll tell you what to get, because that is a very difficult thing to do in the studio.
Also, we put the air conditioner in that's above the speaker there. That was another problem to solve: how to get an air conditioning system for the room. That's a Japanese-style air conditioner. They're really cool because they sit on the wall, but they don't make a big whole in the wall. The hole is only an inch and a half on the other side of that, and it's just a metal tube that goes to the outside where you have your fan. It doesn't make any noise in the room at all. It just blows cool air into the studio and it sits up on the wall. I had that professionally installed. Those things can run anywhere between $1,500 and $3,000.
I wanted AC because of my console, which kicks out tons of heat. It gets hot to the touch, where you can't even touch it. That's my console sitting there in a million pieces getting ready for me to start putting that back together. It's a Neve 5116. If you have someone just using Pro Tools and there's no console involved, you studio's not going to get as hot, so air conditioning may not be necessary. Depending on where you're located, it may not even be necessary at all. But my theory was if I'm going to spend this much money, time and effort on building a studio, and it's in my home that I own, an extra $2,000 for an air conditioner that I can control just for the studio has definitely come in handy during the summer. When it's 4:00am and you're still mixing, it's not comfortable and it's getting balmy and humid in there. It's nice to turn the air conditioner on; it keeps you awake. It's just a little bit of a luxury.
Gear
I finally got the console up and running, which was a whole story in itself. Some of the console problems were too obscure to go into, but one problem was that the console was too big to fit through doorways. Any way you try it, it's an inch too thick. At my old house when I moved it in, I was renting and I didn't give a damn. We just took a hammer to the doorframe and went right through that bitch. But now at my new house, my friends were like, "Should we just go through the door frame?" And I'm like "Hell no! Not in my house!" So we had to disassemble it down to a level where it probably had never been disassembled before. Putting it back together was a mess. I was having a lot of electrical issues here because in my neighborhood, there are big power transformers, so I was getting a lot of buzz and noise on my electrical lines. And no frickin' Furman power conditioner could do jack about it. So I talked to some old-school studio heads, and they were saying the same thing. They were like, "Yo, throw your power conditioner in the trash can. You need to go to this place called C&H electrical surplus out in Pasadena, where they have all of this surplus stuff left over from the aerospace industry. You need to buy a giant power transformer." It's this big ol' transformer that you would put in a closet somewhere. Basically you plug in the electricity from the wall on one side, and it goes out the other side to you studio. This giant transformer just absorbs all the bullshit and kicks out a very steady, superclean voltage. It's only around 8-by-12 inches, but probably weighs 70 pounds; it'll break your back lifting it. I had to get one of those for the console.
The other gear problem was that I have an Akai MPC3000 with eight unbalanced outputs on the back, and I had to interface that with the console. The solution we came up with was a custom-made, 8-channel direct box, where you plug in all eight MPC outputs into it, and it kicks out eight balanced outputs. Now that I have this network of wires, I can patch those outputs around and send that signal anywhere in the studio right through the walls. So that's definitely a plus.
I could make any cable in the world, and I could interface anything between anything, but for the life of me, I couldn't get the MPC to interface correctly with the Neve console. It was as if the studio had become so rigged up and professional, that a little unbalanced drum machine that was made for consumers was not fitting into the equation. So we had to make that piece of gear. I'm surprised no company has marketed a product like that yet.
Vocal Booth
Where the window is in the photo, that was just a solid wall for the bedroom closet. First, you want to make sure that whatever you cut out is not load-bearing. Those little tiny pieces of wood that are going out aren't load-bearing, those are just little 2x4s that are there so you can put a wall up. So we took an electrical saw and cut into the wall and cut that middle stud. Then we laid that piece of wood across between the other two to make that square frame right there. That was fairly simple. Then you go to a glass place and we had them make a window, which cost about $110. So after we put the wall up and everything and framed it all out, you just basically slide in the window and you're good to go. It was actually fairly simple. In this picture you can also see all the boxes for the electrical and the audio. You're looking at the back of the vocal booth, so you can see the XLR cable going up to the back of the blue box for the vocal booth. To the right, you can see how the cable comes down and comes to a hole in the wall. And then you can see the two big 3-gang boxes where those faceplates with the TRS plugs ended up. The yellow wires are electrical wires that you see going through the studs, and then there's two slabs of mineral fiber stuck in between the studs right there.
Remix: What was the timeline like from building the studio to producing the Stepfather album?
Thes One: We moved into the house in the spring of 2004. The actual studio construction of putting up the floating walls and everything happened in just two weeks. We could have done it quicker, but it was two weeks to get everything up and another two weeks to put the glass in and get the window in the vocal booth. There was a lot of time spent wiring. I had to get those faceplates and the soldering iron and I had to match up the colored wires with the right plugs. That was like another month and setting up equipment took another month. It wasn't until mid-fall of 2004 that I turned everything on and was like, "Uh-oh, we got problems." All winter I was troubleshooting, and then I mixed the Giant Panda record Fly School Reunion (2006, Tres) at like the end of February 2005. That was a practical application where I put the studio through its paces and fixed problems that I could never have foreseen.
I had been stockpiling records, and I hadn't really been making beats, so I started right after that. We worked really hard on it. We recorded all of spring and summer of 2005 and into the fall. I mixed it at the beginning of this year.
It was pretty much just short of a year working on the studio. What's interesting is that in the meantime, I did a lot of listening. For the first time as a professional musician, I went a whole year without making anything, but I was listening and forming all these thoughts about what I don't like and do like about what I'm listening to. So by the time I got around to actually sit at my sampler and make something, I had all of those thoughts, ideas and information in my head, and I just started banging out all this weird shit that ended up on the record. It was cool, because I think later on in life when I look back at my music career, that's going to be a new start for me. Starting with this record and going onto whatever else comes out after this.
The record in general seems a lot more ambitious and labor-intensive than before.
All the things I learned while setting up the studio and all the things that happened changed the way I looked at studios and the way I looked at making music. On all the other People Under the Stairs records, my focus was the beats. I wanted the drums to be loud. After doing all stuff, I just wanted you to be able to hear everything. The vocal I wanted to be really clear. I felt like why do all of this if I was just trying to do the same thing I had done before. So I was trying to do something I never could before, and I never felt comfortable putting my vocals up in front of a mix at a pop level. I always hid them behind a beat or I tried to turn them down to this underground hip-hop level.
From a production standpoint, as soon as Double K came to the new studio and was a lot more comfortable here, it definitely enabled us to experiment more on the new record, solely because we had a far more comfortable recording environment than before. This was one that was thought out, and all the gear was in the right place. When he had to do scratches, it wasn't an awkward situation for him where we had a foldout table with turntables. Everything was laid out correctly. That in turn enabled us to take the record to places we had never gone before because we were so relaxed doing it. That was really fresh, and the proof is in a lot of the songs.
Stepfather comes with a free DVD, and in it there are two studio sections. One of the sections is the making of the record, and all of the stuff we've been talking about you can see in the DVD. There's footage of Double K scratching in the studio. You can see the acoustic treatment on the walls, and there's a good pan shot of the studio. There's a great shot of us in the vocal booth recording the verses on the record. It will make a lot more sense for the people reading.
So the studio actually helped you musically?
It's dope because how all of this affected us as a group musically is kind of big, and we couldn't have foreseen when we were building it how your recording space and your environment—like the ergonomics of the recording space—affects what you actually create.
The song "Pumpin'" is a prime example of the evolution.
One part to it is having the studio that technically enables me to try to do that thing that's festering in my brain and try to get something popping out. But also, fundamentally, Double K and I have reached a point where we're so bored, and I mean I don't want this to sound bad. There's definitely people out there doing their thing, but for the most part, the home studio revolution has created an influx of really mediocre music in the world. There's a lot of people with talent doing a good job, but for every one person with talent, there's a lot of stuff I get on CD when I'm touring, and I want to call the dude and say, "Why did you give this to me? what did you think I was going to say about this?" It's one of those things where I admire anyone who's putting their heart into it, but you've got to at least try. And I felt like as a producer, people were always throwing around the same terms when describing us: funky, old school, golden era, throwback and whatever. It really made me question if I was starting to play into that because that's what I'm classified as? So my thinking was that as soon as Double K gave me the green light to say, "Let's stretch out, we don't have to be the People Under the Stairs that people think we are," we just went for it.
With "Pumpin'," I didn't even know what Double K was going to think when I played it for him, because it was so atypical for us. But he was right. He was like, "We're just two dudes who make music, and we'll make what we want. If you like it and I like it, than it is People Under the Stairs."
We definitely tried and made some shit that we feel good about. There was theory at play here from a drum programming perspective. I didn't want much of the typical hip-hop drum programming on this record. The drum programming on "Pumpin'" is almost like a disco thing beneath all of the jazz brushes. There's a lot of four on the floor, and it's very much a departure from a lot of the underground hip hop I hear. There's a lot of classic albums with those beats, but here we were definitely trying to do something different.
'Tuxedo Rap' is another dope track.
Yeah, I had this Mexican record that I found down in Mexico City. I won't say what it is; I think it's pretty obvious what it was emulating. I was just trying to have a good time with it but try to do a drum break that people haven't heard before. It came out well, but again, I owe a lot to Mike [Double K] and the environment and all that stuff that enabled us to just stretch out and say, "Fuck it, we don't care anymore and we'll just have fun with this and experiment a little bit."All the samples from the movie Hollywood Shuffle were really funny.
Word. There's a lot of movie stuff thrown in there. It's definitely not a concept record, but we were trying to tell a narrative through the whole thing, the way it was put together. The working title we had for Stepfather was I'm Trying, but the Kids Don't Listen. We had that before Stepfather, but that's kind of how we feel at this point. We feel like stepfathers, where we're gonna come in, and the kids aren't going to listen to us regardless, because we're not hot or whatever. But we're wholesome dudes, and we're just trying to do the right thing.What else are you going to be working on in this studio?
I have an instrumental record coming out towards the end of the year called Lifestyle Marketing. It's kind of like a theme project where I'm remixing all these old commercials from the '70s. It should be interesting. I've had a lot of those beats done here and there. After that, there's a few MCs I'd like to work with that I'm going to get out to, and we'll just be making music for sure. We'll also be on the road touring, but I definitely look forward to being in my studio this summer with that air conditioner on.
