Re:The Lazeria Jam
2011/03/02 14:26:12
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the lazeria studio was a funky place....
around 1982, the band i had at the time, rented it for 2 weeks, as a rehearsal space for whatever the going rate for that was then.
it was fun, because we had carte blanche to the whole studio all day and night for 2 weeks.
the engineer, used us as guinea pigs while we rehearsed, he'd set up all kinds of mic arrangements and screw around with stuff in the control room, which was big enough for about 3 guys to sit/stand in, and that was it.
it really was 'a control room'….. with the requisite Lava Lamp.
LOL
i remember some really big JBL monitors, don't have a clue what they were.
basically, Lazeria was a long rectangular shaped wide open concrete block building, out in the middle of nowhere....
low ceiling, i guess about 10'.....
"shag rug" everywhere....very dead room…..sounded like recording steely dan records in there.
but the cool thing, was it was wired real smart.....with snakes strategically placed, separate headphone mixers, lots of booms and lots of gobos...
all the gobos had a carpet surface on one side, wood paneling on the other..and they were on rollers, they were easy to move and position. they were beefy, probably a foot wide. i'm guessing, 6' wide by over my head, maybe 7-8 feet tall.
you could build any size isolation area you wanted....so it was super flexible. You could make it a very reflective space, by using the wood panel sides.
the board this jam was recorded thru, was a 15 series teac, into a 85-16 16 channel 1" open reel tape deck...i thought it had a marvelous sound, the playback sounded so clean and sweet.
the guys that ran the studio, had built a bunch of unique one-off mics, basically they gutted different mics of their capsules and transformers, built these big plexiglass stretched-out-hexagonal shapes, and floated the mic capsules with wire, just above the surface of the plexi, using the plexi to 'capture' the sound waves.
my guitar, and the drums, were all captured with one of these weirdo homemade microphones.
later, the engineer dubbed us a cassette of the jam. don't know whatever happened with the reel to reel tape, probably got re-used.....