Judging by the number of letters we receive from owners of home studio setups located in barns, outhouses and farm buildings, ploughing's been completely overtaken by overdubbing as the rural pastime of the masses.

But there are many advantages to the country life — for one thing (or, in fact, two things) there's very little sound proofing to be done, because there are neither neighbours to complain about excessive volume or nearby noise sources to leak into your unprotected mikes.

And because of the amount of space that you need to store cows, haywains, pitchforks, fleeces, automatic seeding machines, or any of the other artefacts that no serious peasant can live without, most farm buildings are of sufficient size — unlike cramped city flats — to fit in a spacious control room and as many square feet of recording area you need including drum booths, vocal booths, live areas, dead areas, and areas that don't feel very well at all.

One typical example of the farm-reared home taping fanatic is Jim Murphy. Jim (24, brown hair, slightly crossed eyes) lives in the wilds of rural Shropshire where, as he put it, "local bands and recording studios are only slightly rarer than the public transport services."

Jim's studio is on a farm smallholding, where he lives anyway, so premises were no problem. A disused barn was cleared of its contents — including old tools, decaying machinery, a car chassis and lots of straw — and divided into a control room and a recording area. The stone walls and wooden roof of the barn give the sound a good natural 'live' ambience, which is particularly handy for vocals, drums and acoustic instruments. To complement this for those instruments that want a 'deader' sound, another area was separated off, mainly by the expedient of erecting screens and walling them with carpet.

As for gear, well, whereas most people would have gone to the nearest studio equipment suppliers, our hero went to the supermarket. Or at least, the was how he raised the money; by working for a big supermarket chain as a manager.

So after 18 months of supermarket supervising, he scraped together enough money to get a TEAC 80-8 reel-to-reel tape machine, followed a few months later by a Seck 16-8-2 mixer, thereby getting the basis of quite a reasonable studio of either home or pro standard, depending on how it developed.

The possibility of the studio 'going pro' had always been a thought floating around the dim recesses of Jim's mind, and to allow for this he'd gone through the process of getting planning permission from the local council before commencing work.

"The council had never dealt with a similar application before," he remembered, "and I had to convince them I wasn't planning to build a recording studio the size of Wembley Stadium!"

But for the meantime, while he was learning how to use the studio and building up its stock of gear, he was satisfied to keep it as purely a personal hobby. And for a few months he concentrated on acquiring the rest of the things that make a studio complete, such as some AKG mikes, Beyer headphones, a Trio cassette deck, a Great British Spring reverb unit, a Quad 405 amp, Tannoy and Auratone monitors, a TEAC 32-2B mastering machine, an MXR graphic Eq, a Fostex compressor and digital delay line, and to go with Jim's already extensive guitar collection (a Strat, a Rickenbacker guitar and bass, a Gibson acoustic, a Giannini Spanish, a Kimbara twelve-string, etc, etc... ) some more effects pedals.

"Cost was deciding factor in choosing the equipment," said Jim. "Not having access to any studio gurus, I depended heavily on dealers and magazines like IM for information as to what were the 'best buys' available at the time of purchase. I decided to buy new equipment for reliability and so far I've had no significant problem with it at all (unless you call a couple of nonfunctioning VU meter lights a problem). Nevertheless, although I got my equipment at a good price; I feel I could have saved some money if more advice about the second-hand market had been available."

In the Act

But once the gear was bought and installed, what was it used for? I'm sorry, that's a lot to do with The Official Secrets Act. In fact, that's the name of the band that Jim plays guitar for, and the selfsame band are the main users of the studio. Jim writes most of the material and plays most of the instruments, with his brother Mark hitting the skins and a gent by the name of Neville Weaver playing bass and supplying backing vocals.

Because of the fact that the main man has access to the studio all the time, he records the backing tracks without the rest of the band, first putting down a click track on the Roland Drumatix to its full potential," he says, "as Mark always comes up with a better drumbeat which I can equalise; the Drumatix sounds cannot be equalised individually."

The next step is the rhythm guitar, because as the song is usually written on the guitar it can form the backbone of the arrangement. This is put through a Marshall 'Rock and Roll Baby' combo, or miked direct if it's an acoustic guitar. Next, the bass goes down, DI'd to provide good separation from the other instruments. To get a punchy bass sound, Jim equalises it quite heavily, cutting the extreme lows and boosting the mid-lows.

With the rhythm tracks recorded he puts down lead guitar and/or synth via a Roland SH101, double tracked to thicken it up a bit. Penultimately — oddly enough — the drums go down. This is almost backwards compared to the usual method of working, but it's necessary because Mark is only available occasionally.

The drum sound is gained by the use and positioning of different types of microphone; AKG D80s are a favourite because they are cheap and reliable. These are positioned close to the drums and facing away from one another. An AKG D12E is put on a blanket inside the bass drum, making sure the mike's at an angle to pick up the drum's overtones, and the snare is double-miked, with one mike above and one (usually an AKG D222) pointing at the snares to pick up the 'snap'. A Calrec condenser mike is used as an overhead to pick up the cymbals.

Then all the channels are equalised to emphasise the separation — boosting the high for the cymbals, the low for the toms, and so on. And when all that's done, the whole kit is mixed down to just two tracks — one for the top kit in mono, and one for the bass drum so its level can be adjusted in the final mix.

"I could bounce the tracks down," said Jim, "but because of a lack of spare tracks by the time I commit the drums to tape, I find it better to work this way. The drums are usually centred anyway, so stereo's not that important and with the stereo reverb and the occasional pan of a roll across the stereo picture I can get a stereo effect."

Richer Sounds

"Obviously this isn't the best way to record the drums — a track for each drum, better microphones, noise gates and a different recording schedule would all help. But until I become a lot richer I am forced to be content with my present system."

Then finally (usually) the vocals go down. If Jim has a definite arrangement worked out he'll do the vocals last, but sometimes they'll be put on tape after the rhythm guitar so the fills can be worked around them. The voice is generally double-tracked to fill it out — and then it's time for the mixdown, when everything gets a bit of the fairy dust treatment, otherwise known as effects.

"No recording would be complete without using effects," affirms Jim confidently. "I used to compress every instrument before committing it to tape, but these days I just try and get as natural a sound as possible and compress it, if necessary, on mixdown. However, I still use the digital delay a lot — I think it's absolutely brilliant; it can flange, chorus, phase, double and echo, but unfortunately only one at a time. However, I have quite a few Boss guitar effects pedals which I can use to supplement the DDL. For instance, digital delay plus the Boss chorus can mimic as Andy Summers guitar sound.

"My other effect of much note is the Great British Spring reverb, which gives a good stereo reverb, particularly on the drums, and comes in handy to add a bit of life to instruments DI'd or recorded in the studio's 'dead area'. Conventionally, I don't use it on the bass drum or on bass instruments as this makes them sound woolly. The use of equalisation on the desk can be quite effective, too, for example by using the desk's sweep equaliser to suggest a megaphone effect when used on the vocals..."

After all that, what does the final effect sound like? Well, our own Adrian Deevoy, the scourge of the unsigned, the Rasputin of recording, likened it to "OMD with a strange Pop bent" or "a peculiar cross breed of Abba and The Cure" in his demo review a few months back. Praised by faint damnation? Whatever, in recent months Jim's own efforts have been joined by a few other bands, some of whom have gone on to be signed to independent record labels and a few of which look set for majorlabel exploits. His ambitions to eventually go totally pro in the world of multitrack may be on its way to becoming reality as the word spreads from the bands that have visited occasionally to put down their masterpieces. And with his plans for the future ("as always, money permitting") including an extension to the barn that will include recreation and residential areas to enable the studio to become a mini-Manor, it may not be too long before Jim Murphy's farm produce will be a fine crop of multitrack masters. As for the straw-powered Fairlight, though, we'll have to wait a little longer.