Article Preview - Studio SOS: James Burnham

James Burnham is a talented musician who lives in a small rented cottage close to the Herefordshire and Worcestershire border. He plays mainly acoustic guitar and violin, although he has been known to play the odd bit of electric guitar too, and he records under two names, Judo Being and James Isaac, producing both minimal experimental techno and lounge-y jazz.

Before our Studio SOS visit, James had a basic studio set up in a tiny (six by eight feet) bedroom, with a ceiling height sloping from about six feet on one side of the room to nine feet on the other. The recording system, based on Cubase running on a PC, could hardly have been simpler: an M-Audio Delta 4x4 interface, fed directly into his recently acquired Mackie HRM824 studio monitors, and a Joemeek MQ3 recording channel (a preamp, compressor and EQ) provided his only mic input. For recording he used mainly an MCA SP2 side-address condenser mic or an AKG C1000S back-electret model.

Despite having no other equipment and no real acoustic treatment (other than the odd sheet draped about the place), James had managed to make some rather good recordings of himself and other musician friends. However, he realised that the less than ideal acoustics of his studio were limiting the quality of his recordings, and he was also curious to find the best way to expand his system to allow the recording of multiple musicians. To date he'd recorded singing acoustic-guitar players using a single mic, adjusting the placement to get the best balance between guitar and voice, and he had no means of providing a headphone feed to musicians playing in the next bedroom or on the landing.

When we arrived, Hugh and I checked some commercial material played back over James' speakers and, sure enough, the reflective surfaces in the room were diluting the stereo image. The bass end, though a little pronounced, wasn't as bad as expected — which was partly due to some plasterboard partitions acting as impromptu bass...