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Waterway Wonder The Limehouse A good live room suited to drum recording was an important part of the design process
Jake Young takes a look at Rupert Pfaff’s recently upgraded studio, part of an east London creative community. Through careful planning and space
STARTING ITS life as a dog biscuit factory, the Spratt’s Complex on London’s Limehouse Cut canal has been transformed in the past few years into a live-work development for artists. It now houses singer-songwriter Newton Faulkner as well as Rupert Pfaff who manages The Limehouse recording studio. The Limehouse offers tracking,
production, mixing, and mastering services as well as online mixing, which has enabled it to work with a number of international clients. The studio has two senior engineers, Neil Williams and James Aparicio, along with a house engineer, Joel Davies. Pfaff has filled out an eclectic
musical CV so far. He ran London’s Turnkey music store before it was taken over by Sound Control and now heads up the UK branch of German online musical equipment retailer Thomann. Having occupied small studios on and off for years, Pfaff bought the Spratt’s Complex space in 2006 after spending a year looking for a suitable building to house a studio. “I knew from previous experience
that if I didn’t live very close to it I’d never go in it,” laughs Pfaff, referring to his three-bedroom apartment one floor up from the studio. The space had live- work planning permission so that problem was straight out of the way,
28 February 2014
and while the idea of living above a fully functioning commercial studio may seem slightly less than desirable, Pfaff notes that the space was built with 2ft-thick brick walls and a 40cm- thick concrete ceiling between the two floors – a good starting point for soundproofing. For the final touches, studio designers Recording Architecture were brought in to design the control room and live room. “Recording Architecture was great
with very detailed instructions of how everything should fit together and what happens at the junctions, and came down to have a look a few times just to make sure we were doing it all right,” says Pfaff. “If we’ve got a really loud band in the live room you can just hear it upstairs.” It took a year to do the building
work and get everything wired, working, and tested to the point where Pfaff thought The Limehouse was ready to open commercially. “It’s a relatively small space but we wanted something that was very high quality acoustically from the start. I felt that whatever’s happening with people doing stuff at home there’s always going to be some requirement for a decent acoustic space, which is very expensive to achieve and that’s the one thing that people really don’t have at home.”
management a booth and amp chamber were squeezed into the 300sqft live room. “It’s not huge but at the same time it’s comfortable to record a five-piece band in,” says Pfaff. Being a classically trained
Small but perfectly formed
percussionist Pfaff always wanted his studio to be a good place to record drums. “I find with recording drums either you’ve got to have a big great- sounding room and you record the sound of the room or you need something that’s much more compact
“I felt that whatever’s happening with people doing stuff at home there’s always going to be
some requirement for a decent acoustic space.” Rupert Pfaff
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