I recently made quite a big move - leaving behind Phoenix, Arizona (and my little bedroom studio) for the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia - moving to a cabin in Floyd County, Virginia - just a mile off the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Not only is the closest full grocery store more than 30 minutes away - the cabin is half the size of our house in Phoenix!  That means there is no extra bedroom to be converted into a little studio.  But, be assured true believers, this was not a haphazard move.  

The music and the music heritage in this part of the country is inspiring and I cannot wait to start playing in the local music scene.  Sitting on the porch surrounded by nature has already changed the way I play and the serenity of a campsite is now my daily existence.  However, I've got no way to capture the new material.  Luckily, I have an amazingly supportive wife who agreed to use some of the bit of profit from the sale of our house in Arizona to fund a small studio on our small 5 acre spot of hilly land.  

I've dug into a swath of YouTube videos and read two books about making a studio from the ground up:   “How to Build a Small Budget Recording Studio from Scratch” by Mike Shea and F. Alton Everest and Home Recording Studio: Build It Like the Pros by Rod Gervais.  I found a local builder - Blue Ridge Mini Barns in Floyd, VA - to build the structure and after some cost considerations and back-and-forth, I've determined that I can have a 20' by 12' studio with 12' wall on one side down to a 10' wall on the other.  My wife insisted (despite sound quality issues) that I had to have a small window to prevent me from becoming a cave dweller.  With that agreement in place - construction starts in November!  They will be using 2x6s and skipping connecting every other stud to the outer wall.  With the extreme angles on our property, rather than full concrete on the bottom, I've had to concede to use eight concrete pillars and just pack the bottom of the studio with stone mineral insulation.  The budget does, indeed, impact the execution.

I've broken the build into five phases and really hope we are done with everything by May 2022.

thanks for reading,

ian