With the exception of Mind Reader, which was recorded at Acrobat Studio in Pickering, Ontario, all of Alan Darragh's other albums are DIY projects, recorded out of Despot Studio, his home studio in Toronto.
Initially Alan used the home studio principally to record his improvisational work so that he could later transcribe and develop it into compositions. The space (right) was relatively small but he had ample room for his Kawai RX-2 grand piano, a Kawai MP9500 weighted action digital piano, a computer, a small mixer and a couple of microphones. After he got his pup, Teddy, there was enough room left to squeeze in a training crate. A small sofa was crammed into one corner. At this stage, acoustic accuracy, although far from ideal, was not an issue, except that every so often the training cage would set off a rattling buzzing noise.
By early 2007, he had produced his first book of over 50 compositions, seven of which were later recorded on Mind Reader. Alan was keen to do some multi-instrument arrangements for some of them. It was at this point that the deficiencies of the studio became apparent. It was close to impossible to squeeze in another musician to try out ideas. The situation came to a head after he started to work with percussionist Adam David. For a while Adam used a small practice kit, which he left in a hallway at the studio. But when Alan went out one day and picked up a second hand five piece Premier XKP Drum Kit, a Ludwig Black Beauty snare and, in a moment of madness, five cymbals plus hi-hat for the studio, the crunch finally came.
A larger space was found (left). It solved one difficulty. But the acoustic problems generated when a grand piano shares a room with a full drum kit and a spectrum of cymbals were a nightmare.
That was one factor. The other was that as Alan moved more and more into full and free improvisation, he wanted pro quality recording to capture the freshness of the original. He still continued to transcribe for compositions, but he also wanted the improvisations to stand up as finished products. He said, "Now that we were going to actually put this stuff onto CDs, I needed to more than just record it, I needed to make the quality good enough for anyone to listen to." The acoustics and the recording gear in the studio were not up to it.
The musician faces a real dilemma when confronted with the technical and mechanical side of music. True, the mechanical/technical and the creative go hand in hand. Any musician will tell you that it’s not a case of one or the other. They are both necessary to the final product. Unfortunately, both need time and application – lots of it – to produce results. The technical problems have to be fixed, but the process can become so engrossing that the music more often than not gets left behind. Alan was determined to avoid that. He decided to concentrate on the music side of things and leave the rest to someone else.
The solution, of course, was to hire a construction crew, an acoustic team and a recording engineer. They had the know-how. With no rich uncles or aunties coming out of the outbacks of Australia or the fleshpots of Brazil, that plan had to be scrapped. The studio had to be a DIY project. He press-ganged family and friends into service. While his slave wage team wrestled with the practical, he continued his own battle on the piano.
It was difficult to know what to do to control and improve the sound of the room. There was a lot going on in a relatively small space. There were so many different variables. Naturally the first thing the earnest but bewildered conscripts did was to consult the Internet. It didn't take long for them to discover that studio acoustics is a HUGE and complex topic!
Thrown into the deep end, the neophytes floundered for shore as best they could. After much head banging, they decided what knowledge couldn't fix, common sense might. Frequencies had to be absorbed or diffused – that much they understood. Wool felt, pegboard and lumber were bought by the truckload. Panels, which purported to approximate the instructions of the virtual experts, were hung on a hope and a fancy – with a bit of science thrown in. Floors were carpeted with Craigslist finds (right). It helped somewhat. But the drum spill into the piano mics was an issue. Also Alan couldn't hear the piano above the drums and the drummer said that he couldn't hear the piano.
The challenge was to design an acoustic environment where piano and drums could play along side each other, yet each musician could hear what each was doing without resorting to isolation booths or sacrificing dynamics. This was clearly the only way to capture the feel of a live performance, but it did pose obvious problems when it came to recording the piano in sufficient isolation to permit it to be treated independently of the drums.
It called for more trolling on the Internet. One idea, which stood out, appeared in SOS magazine July 2001. The article described how Gus Dudgeon, "one of the most successful British record producers ever," devised an ingenious method for isolating the piano from the drums. Dudgeon said,
The problem is that you lose separation in a studio situation, because it's very unlikely you're going to be able to get the piano somewhere isolated . . . So I started off the traditional way, and then when it started getting a bit more complicated, and I really wanted to get the mics up higher and higher to get the most natural sound, I found the thing to do was take the lid off, and then get a carpenter to build the shell of another piano, upside-down. So, in other words, on top of the original frame of the piano we built another one about three times as deep, so physically the piano was now about 10 feet tall, and it was padded inside. We had two holes at the side, and we just poked the mics in there, and then you could get the mics high above the strings. You could put the piano right in the middle of the rhythm section, and you might just hear a little bit of low rumble from the bass or the bass drum or something, but you could usually filter that out without spoiling the piano sound in any way. I think we had about three built altogether. There are upside-down piano frames dotted all over America!
Terry Medwedyk, president of Group One Acoustics Inc., who provided invaluable encouragement and advice, said he had come across one of Dudgeon's piano boxes, and was able to describe it:
When Elton was in town at Eastern Sound recording his 'Blue moves' album [he had one built]. I saw this piano cave that was built for him in storage years later. It was shaped more in plan as a harpsichord, about a foot taller or just under eye height to see over the top. It was basically drywall framing and insulation with thick acoustic panels on the inside. Most recordings of the day were quite dry so that they had a choice to wet it up with reverb/ delays and room effects in the mix if need be.
The concept appealed to the intrepid crew of friends and family, but how to execute it generated much discussion. Couldn't the same effect be achieved by surrounding the piano with mattresses as Alanis Morissette had done? The sticking point was that the studio had to provide an acoustic and recording environment that would require the least amount of postproduction fixing. Mattresses, blankets or thick acoustic panels would produce a dry sound. As green as Alan's team was, they had taken to heart the number one rule of acoustics – "Only one thing makes a room sound good. REVERB." The piano box couldn't be "dry." It had to resonate. With this axiom in mind, the self-confessed acoustic ignoramuses decided to design the box as one big soundboard.
The recording results for the completed and newly christened box - PianoPort – fully vindicated the experiment. The sound of the live piano was indistinguishable from the recording. The PianoPort allowed the microphones to capture the full spectrum of resonance of the live piano.
The philosophy behind Despot Studio is one of unadulterated sound. The mandate is to produce music with the minimal amount of postproduction effects. It is a vision in keeping with Alan's move towards original free improvisation. It reflects a purist attitude. He says of his recent work, "Because we continued to record throughout the construction process, there are noticeable variations in sound quality in some of the CD tracks. Rather than attempt to redo the tracks from the written material, I decided to include them because I wanted only the original recordings."
He has a few complaints, which he sums up, "Construction of the studio = a lot of brouhaha! Fine-tuning of the studio is going to be a constant, which is why I call it the despot. More brouhaha! Before we built the 'piano port', Teddy would lie under the piano. He started lying under the piano the moment we moved it into the room. He would lie under there in his basket while I played the piano. Now he lies in his basket between the drum wall and the piano port where it's hard for me to see him. I liked him under the piano. Also I have to remember to turn off the cuckoo clock, the furnace, and the other dogs when I record."