Guitar heavyweight and all-around nice guy Steve Morse takes us step by step through the construction of Morse Outside Recording.

When most people talk about building a home studio, they generally mean finding an unused room of their house, buying some gear, slapping up some acoustic foam, and maybe, just maybe, learning how lo solder custom cables. But other people, well . . .they just can't be conventional. So when I asked Steve Morse to tell me about the beginnings of his studio, and he started off by talking about clearing land and knocking down trees, I knew I had something different on my hands.

MOR, or Morse Outside Recording, is located in the middle of a patch of woods in rural Georgia. The work really began in late 1983, with him clearing brush and leveling the lot before a concrete slab could be poured. Design ideas were borrowed from friends or based on necessity (read: budget), and most of the labor was done between Morse's gigs over the course of the following year. The process, though, is never-ending - Morse himself calls it an 'ongoing construction project.’ He explains the building methods and layout this way:

“The slab is about 28X40. About one third is storage, and of the two thirds left, the control room takes up about 16x16. The walls, which were done by my engineer, Chuck Allen, are just stacked on top of the slab - we used dry cinderblocks and then put on this coating afterwards called Surewall. It's a masonry mix that has fiberglass bits in it. You don't have to mortar it, you can just stick up the blocks however you want, and then paint this stuff on both sides. We also put rebars in and a solid perimeter of concrete (atop the cinderblock). "Originally. it was going to be two stories, but then Chuck Allen, who had been helping me and was going to be my engineer, had this great job opportunity come up - something he always wanted to do - so he had to move away. The second story was going to be the waiting room and living quarters. There was a beam we were going to put on top, to divide the studio in half and make it easier to put the floor system in, so instead of trying to build the second story all by myself, I dropped the beam down to where it was flush with the top of the block wall, and started to stick build a roof. That is, I didn't use trusses. The advantage of stick building a roof is you can do it yourself, save a lot of money, and you have open attic space. Truss construction uses triangulation to get strength. With stick building you use heavier wood and just make straight spans, connecting them to the sides of the house. "For a lot of the paneling and the roofing I tortured a local kid into putting up the shingles, and got a good friend of mine to do the trim work in cedar. (He was the only professional carpenter involved. And the money came out of my pocket - there was no construction loan. It was, ‘Go out and work, bring home some money, buy some blocks; go out and work, bring home some money, buy some cement mix; go out and work, bring home some money, buy some 2X6s.' "

MOR Isolation

Morse found that when it came to the matter of isolation (and its cost), practicality was the route to follow. He continues, "The control room is doublewalled. The ceiling of the whole building was first sheet rocked, and then the control room outside walls were built, 2x4s backed by black board, black building sheeting, and sheet rock. On the side facing the studio we overstuffed them with insulation and burlap with cedar trim. The outside walls meet the (ceiling) sheet rock with some foam in between. Then, the inner room has free-standing walls that support its own ceiling. The (innermost) wall is of a light-colored roughcut pine board paneling at a 45° angle, except for the ceiling, which is lapped siding. The original ceiling had six inches of insulation in it, up in the attic, and then this inner ceiling has six inches of insulation above it. Both sets of walls are sitting on foam insulating board from a construction supply house, about 3/4’ thick."

Briefly considering a floating floor, he decided against it. As he explains, "All that stuff went out the window, the same way as double walling the whole outside part. I said to myself, 'What's reality here? How much is this going to matter? Am I really going to hear a vocalist through the floor? No way.’ Of course, using an electric guitar with the speaker volume set on 11, there's a little bit of bass transmission still, but I hear that in every studio I've ever been. I'm really happy with the separation between the studio and the control room. Now, the studio to the outside world is pretty loose. My reasoning was, 'There's not traffic going by, there are no jets taking off overhead, I don't think I have a problem.' " It was for this reason that he decided to forego pouring Vermiculite down into the cinderblock.

Walls in the storage and bathroom areas were intentionally left hard and reflective, for their possible use as reverb chambers. And one unusual thing - the lack of a door leading directly from the waiting room to the control room, is explained this way: "I felt bad even cutting holes in the double wall for wires. I wanted as little of that as possible. And you lose a lot of wall space - I was down to the absolute minimum."

None of the studio or control room walls are parallel; they're splayed at a rate of about one foot of angle for 12 feet of length, and the studio ceiling comes down in a V shape. Even with these precautions, he encountered some problems. "The sheet rock of the studio ceiling is parallel to the floor, and two walls face one another, so I built four movable frames 8' tall and 4'. They're made out of a 2x4 frame-work with insulation and plywood and blackboard on the back. I moved them around until I found a spot where I didn't get any ringing.”

There was a homemade bass trap about 2-1/2’ deep in the control room, which consisted of burlap covered pressboard panels with insulation on them, hanging suspended just above the ground at the rear wall of the control room. He recently removed it because people kept leaning against the burlap and tearing it, and it was taking up space. He also believes that at the low monitoring volumes he uses, the difference can't be heard.

MOR Gear

The equipment roster is pretty straightforward: "I have a Soundtracs CM4400 console, with the automation on order, and a Studer A80 MkIV. The speakers are JBL 4411s and 4401s, little speakers called NHTs, NS10Ms from Yamaha, and then the Auratones. Instead of having five power amps, I bought a heavy duty double wafer switch, and just put a bunch of outputs on the amp. So I've got this JBL amp that’s the power amp."

Other problems called for equally practical solutions. For example, Morse didn't want the expense of separate air conditioning systems for control room and studio, but "I wanted to avoid the problem of haying the guys in the control room comfortable while the guys in the studio are freezing. Instead of having two AC systems, I have one with a movable baffle in the duct work that will divert the flow between the control room and the studio and waiting room area. So I have as many vents in the control room as I do in the entire rest of the building. It seems to work fine, although there are times when we have a lot of people in the control room and the machines are working hard and there's a noticeable temperature difference.

"I specified fiberglass duct work that supposedly is low noise and soundproofed, and a low fan speed, although I have done acoustic guitar where I had to turn off the AC for the take.

"Also, I have footswitches soldered into the remote controller with record, play and autolocate buttons, so that I can do guitar in the studio or the control room.

Studer said it would void the warranty, but to me it's utility vs. security, and utility always wins out."

MOR Applications

The connection between studio and console inputs is made not with a snake, but by ordinary 20' microphone cables bunched together. He removed the connectors from one end to run them through the walls, sealed the hole with rubber sealant, put the ends back on and ran them into the board. At the studio end the mic cables are numbered and sit coiled on the floor. The reason for the odd number of cables (14) seems typical of Morse: "That's all the brand new cords I had. I figured I could mic a drum set with that." Even the outboard racks had to he carefully configured, because some of the gear has to do double duty with Morse on the road. Two big racks in the back of the control room hold the items that live in the studio, connected to the patches via a 32-pair snake. The mobile stuff sits in its own rack to the right of the console where "billions" of little 6' custom cables, XLR or 1/4” on one side and TT on the other, go straight from the devices into the patchbay. The connectors and power cords can easily be pulled when the gear goes on the road. Among his outboard gear are some favorites: "I think the Lexicon 224 is really flexible, I make really mutated sounds with it. I get a short sound that's not like reverb at all, delay it, and then regenerate it crossing the left side into the right side and the right side into the left side, to get a real swooshy kind of slapback.

"Another weird effect I use, the Dynamite, I was told about by Trevor Rabin. I asked him how he'd gotten this obvious compression sound from 'Owner of a Lonely Heart.' It's kind of a strange irony, walking past these other great compressors to use one that sounds cheaper just because it's neat, but (that's the case)."

He also has a favorite dynamic microphone - the Model 63 from Audio Technica, which he describes as being like a Shure SM57 with more high end.

MOR Studio has already seen a lot of action; Morse's Stand Up album was done there, which he started with another engineer, before realizing "It's usually easier to patch something in than explain it to another person. It's also easier for me to have my own sounds always set up and returned to out-of-the-way faders so when I want them they're there." His latest solo, album set for release in September (preliminarily titled High Tension Wires), was also done there as were the guitar solos that appeared on the last Kansas album, and the recent Ensoniq-sponsored Dixie Dregs reunion performance.

In the future MOR may see a totally different kind of project: soundtrack work. Morse has already received a couple of offers, and in anticipation of a suitable one he recently purchased a Fostex E-22 half-inch mastering machine with center track timecode. Another recent acquisition, a Sony DTC-1000 R-DAT machine, was used as the mastering deck for High Tension Wires, after a good experience with the Sony PCM-2500 on the Dixie Dregs project.

The effort that went into building MOR apparently was well worth it to Morse. In fact, the studio has obviously become central to his musical career. As he says "technology is rewriting the rules for what studios need to be. You can sit in a closet with MIDI stuff so there's no reason why anybody who earns a living in the music business can't have some kind of studio. I strongly believe that limitations in equipment can be overcome to a certain degree, and that people should not steer away from having their own studio because of what everyone in the studio business will tell them. If you're in the studio business you have to have a front, an image, the latest this that and everything. You have to compete. But if you just want to have something to make music in, I think you can do it."

Transcribed by John D. Smith