Welcome to my studio

This is what you see when you first arrive at my studio. It's the deck I built just outside my studio door, and the door itself. They are examples of my amateur woodworking. Projects like these permeate the studio and help give the space a warm personal character that is aesthetically pleasing. Simultaneously relaxing and stimulating.

Here's a view of the exterior door from the inside. None of those little pieces of curved wood are stained in any way. I just selected woods of various colors to create what you see.

This shot was taken from inside my control room, looking into the West foyer. I use foyers on both sides of the control room as part of my "sound lock" system of double walls and floating floors, which help to dramatically reduce the amount of sound that is able to penetrate into the control room.

The control room is a completely floated room within a room, using a Kinetics RIM floatation system. The room is not absolutely soundproof, but it is very, very quiet. No mechanical systems in the building can be heard in the control room. All of the windows use special low sound transmission glass. It even has a complex low sound transmission air handling system that completely prevents any sounds from the furnace from getting into the room. I sometimes feel like I'm almost wearing this room when I'm working at the mixing desk. The room is so quiet and it's interior surfaces have such an effective balance of sound absorption and diffusion, that I am unaware of the room imparting any coloration to the sound coming off the studio monitors.

The room is two stories high, with an isolation booth on the second floor overlooking the control room below. (Kind of like a choir loft.) The sight lines between the booth and control room aren't great, but having the large window makes the booth feel bigger when you're in it, and the angled glass provides another diffusion surface.

One advantage of having the 20 foot ceiling, is that it reduces low frequency distortions by allowing the longer wave lengths to physically exist in the room in a purer way than would be possible in a room with a smaller cubic volume. At the same time, the bass is controlled through the use of bass traps for absorption, and it is diffused by large solid geometric forms that are part of the complex multi-facetted tetrahedron that defines the interior space the room itself.

My Workspace

I strove to retain as many hard surfaces as possible in the room, which meant I had to pay particularly careful attention to diffusion. I did this because high frequencies are easily absorbed and lower frequencies are not. So, if I had treated the interior of the room with nothing but soft, sound absorbing surfaces, it would sound very bass-heavy. Seeing as low frequencies are difficult to absorb, and therefore will be present in the room, the goal was to strive for a balance of all audible frequencies to be present in the room, but broken up through the use of diffusion to avoid unwanted sonic coloration. In a word, the room sounds good - or perhaps more accurately - the room is sonically invisible.

The other part of the equation when it comes to having a good sounding control room is the audio equipment used. I am using Tannoy System 15 main monitors, driven by Bryston 7BST monoblocks, (amplifiers). Very clean. Very accurate. For secondary near field monitors, I'm using self-powered Genelecs on the meter bridge. I also have a powered "junk" speaker hooked up, just so I know what my work will sound like on people's crappy speakers.

The control room is so quiet, we had to create a little machine room for anything that makes unwanted noise. We converted this closet to serve this function. It is physically outside of the floating control room structure and it has it's own air circulation system, which is completely separate from that of the control room. As you can see, it contains the CPU, along with hard drives, a printer and some other peripherals. It also houses the Brystons and power conditioning for the control room.

My vintage Polyfusion 2000 modular synthesizer - the second floor isolation booth, with it's beautiful carpet - and the cool Etruscan planter.

This is the outer door to the East foyer, (below). I like this door pull. I was visiting the shop of a woodworker I knew, when I noticed an oak log he had leaning up in the corner. It was hollow and had a hole in it where a limb had detached from the tree at some point. The tree had continued to grow for quite a while after the limb had detached and the wood had kind of flowed around the lip of the hole as it grew. I asked if he could saw the hole off of the log so that I could use it as a door pull. He did, and it made a great pull. The way the wood flows over the edge around the lip of the hole looks very fluid and it's a completely natural form. I love it. He also provided me with the section of burl that I used for the push plate on the opposite side of the door.

The door(s) to the isolation booth. This room also uses a Kinetics RIM floating floor system and is even more heavily isolated than the control room. The room-within-a-room construction method was strictly adhered to, including the ceiling, and it uses a low sound transmission air handling system and glass, just like the control room. This room, though not an anechoic chamber, is exceptionally quiet. It looks nice too, (if somewhat difficult to photograph). In the background of the image at the right, you can see the angled sound deflecting wood panels, which are suspended from the ceiling of the control room beyond the window.

My World of Analogue Modular Synthesis

Historical Perspective:

I had my first exposure to analogue modular synthesis at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s. They had a couple of Moog 55s that were kind of just barely working and an ARP 2500 that was completely non-functional. They were marvelous, fantastical machines, but by that time had been largely supplanted by cheaper simpler instruments. They were very expensive and hard to maintain, and they were basically just not available.

A few years later I was given a large Polyfusion modular (right) to use for three years, but was never able to acquire it. The instrument had originally belonged to Herb Pilhofer, a prominent commercial music composer/ producer in Minneapolis. He donated it to Intermedia Arts as a tax write-off in the '80s when people were abandoning the old modulars in favor of the new digital synthesizers. It eventually fell into disuse there at Intermedia, and a friend of mine who worked there asked if I would like to have it. (YES) It was mine for a while, but unfortunately, they would never quite sell it to me, and eventually someone wanted it back as a teaching tool. I periodically made inquiries to see if they might be willing to sell it, but they never did, and then one day I heard that they had sold it to someone else. (sound of heart shattering) I later learned that this person flipped it. He sold it to Hans Zimmer, who later told me that he traded it for something else. A move he says he has always regretted.

A Second Chance:

Over the years, vintage modulars became more and more difficult to find and quite expensive. I'd given up on ever being able to own one, until one day when I received a phone call from my local bicycle mechanic asking if I had any interested in an old Moog synthesizer. It belonged to a friend of his. It had been given to him by his father, who used to use it in a Rock band decades earlier. It had been in a storage locker and was a total wreck. It looked like it had been through hell and it didn't work at all. He wanted some fairly serious money for it, and it was a gamble for me to buy it not knowing if it was fixable or how much the restoration would cost. I rolled the dice and wrote the check. It was a Moog Model 12 modular synthesizer. I packed it up and shipped it off to Kevin Lightner in California, who took about eight months to complete the restoration work. It was worth it. The instrument has been restored beautifully and sounds absolutely fantastic.

Before and after Kevin's restoration job on the Moog Model 12.

The "before" picture.

The "after" picture.

Hardware Revolution:

In 2013 I became aware of the revolution in contemporary analogue modular manufacturing that had been developing for a few years. I was literally shocked to find that there were around 100 small companies building modules, mostly in the eurorack format, which I was completely unfamiliar with at that time. I became familiar with it in a hurry and found myself plunging in with both feet. I discovered that I could directly inter-patch the new eurorack modules with my vintage Moog modular - expanding and enhancing the capabilities of both. I've also now added some 5U format modules from the artisan module builder, Bruce Duncan of Modcan, and I have a bit of a laundry list of additional modules I'm looking forward to adding to my ever-growing modular monster.

Return of the Polyfusion:

It is my understanding that there were only two Polyfusions sold in Minnesota. The one sold to Herb, mentioned above, and another one which was sold to Steve Solum. I've known Steve for decades and I knew he had the Polyfusion in storage and was hanging onto it. I made various inquiries over the years to see if he'd be willing to sell it. Eventually, this became an annual ritual. I'd send him an email asking if he had given any more thought to selling the instrument and he'd say he still wanted to keep it. In 2017 I made my usual inquiry with Steve, and this time he finally relented. We agreed on a price, I picked it up and brought it directly over to Logan Erickson to have him start in on a restoration, which it needed seeing as it hadn't been powered-up for many years. I can't believe my good fortune to have this opportunity once again to own such a rare and interesting instrument.

Picking up the Polyfusion from Steve.

Logan inspecting one of modules.

Modules on the shelf during restoration.

Modules in the case.

The keyboard controls.

Installed in my studio.

Here's a list of all the modules in my current analogue modular synthesis rig, for those of you out there who like to really geek-out on this stuff, (like me).

Module List

5U Format

Moog Model 12
902 voltage controlled amplifier
903-A random signal generator
904-A voltage controlled low pass filter
907 fixed filter bank
911 envelope generator [2]
921 voltage controlled oscillator
921A oscillator driver
921B oscillator [2]
multiples module
reversible attenuator
mixer
952 duophonic keyboard

Modcan
     01B VCO
     39B frequency shifter
     44B 904A VC low pass
     47B VC dual ADSR
     61B quad LFO

Synthesizers.com
Q960 sequencer

4U Format

Polyfusion 2000
   2002 random signal generator
   2004 voltage controlled oscillator [3]
   2006 quadrature oscillator
2010 dual voltage controlled amplifier [2]
   2020 voltage controlled low pass filter
   2022 voltage controlled high pass filter
2046 dual envelope generator
2047 dual voltage controlled envelope generator
   2048 dual sample and hold
   2060 power supply
2080A four input mixer
   2054 keyboard

Eurorack Format

4MS
Dual Looping Delay
Rotating Clock Divider
Shuffling Clock Multiplier

ADDAC Systems
200B Buffered Multiples
207 Intuitive Quantizer

Analogue Systems
     RS-35 external processor
     RS-60 envelope generator
     RS-95E oscillator
     RS-100S low pass filter
   RS-240 frequency shifter

Blue Lantern Modules
Asteroid Operator VCF

Cwejman
ATT-4 quad attenuator

Division 6
Mult 6

Doepfer
     A-132-3 DVCA
   A-143-2 Quad ADSR
     A-154 sequencer controller
     A-155 sequencer
     A-160 clock divider
     A-161 clock sequencer
     A-180-2 mult [2]

Intllijel
     Azimuth II
     uScale
     uStep

Livewire
Dalek Modulator ring modulator

Make Noise
Erbverb
     Maths
     Renè
     Wiard Wogglebug

STG/Soundlabs
STG.DIV clock divider

CV/Gate Keyboard

Futureretro
512 Touch Keyboard