For recording music, there is no place like home W


BY COLE PARKINSON insight magazine


hen thinking of a recording studio,one may not first think of it located in someone’s house.


While the notion of home-recording studios has become more common in the past several years,they may still not be in the forefront of people’s minds.


One of these hidden gems resides in


Lethbridge’s Apply Within Audio. Founded in 2012 by local musician Greg Lait,


Apply Within Audio is located in the basement of his home and much of the construction of the studio was done by Lait. “This studio, I started pretty much when I bought (my house) and I had to gut pretty much the whole basement.I bought the house


in 2014, I think, so I started slowly. I put as much money as I had into it at the time instead of going into debt.So we gut- ted the whole basement, took out the floors, dug the shale that was underneath the concrete floors out and started from the ground up,so we could isolate the floor in the live room,”he said. Lait, a graduate of the Harbourside Institute


of Technology as an audio engineer, says the dream of operating his own music recording company is one he has had most of his life. While his original vision was to attend


Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan University,he was happy with the nine-month course he took in North Vancouver. “I wanted to do it for most of my life. I want-


ed to go to Grant MacEwan (Edmonton) when I was younger, but I didn’t pursue it as much as I should have,”he said.“Once I got my carpen- try ticket, I went off to school and kept pursu- ing it.”


Upon returning home from school,work began pretty quickly on what would be Apply Within Audio’s recording studio. After roughly three years of work, the studio


was brought to its current condition, though Lait points out he still has a few things he wants to do. Consisting of a live room and a control room, plenty of work was needed to get both sides


into useable conditions for a recording studio. “The control room is pretty much acoustically done with the bulkheads and the differ- ent shapes to stop any stand-


ing waves. I also tiled the whole basement floor. I still have a few acoustic treatments to go,but I am waiting for some warm weather to spray paint outside. I wired in all of the patch bays by myself, soldered and built them.Pretty much everything I have built myself with some help from friends drywalling, floors and what not,”Lait explained.“Acoustically, there is most- ly just insulation in the ceiling to stop any transfer. It is not meant to be an isolated room but,more of a controlled room. In between the glass is three panes of double glazed sealed units, so there are 12 pieces of glass to stop any transfer.” Construction in the live room was even


more advanced, as making it as sound proof as possible was a bit more work. “The live room was quite the challenge. I isolat- ed the floor so there is no concrete underneath. There is foam underlayment with a subfloor on top. I insulated and isolated in-between there and I isolated between the walls.On top of that, I have floating walls that are isolated from the ceil- ing joists so there is no solid transfer going through any of that. It is a double wall all around that, and it has a resilient channel and some iso- lation clips. It has a double layer of five-eighths drywall with acoustical glue between those sheets on the ceiling and walls. So the walls are actually a little spongy, they aren’t solid,” said Lait. "Everything is acoustically isolated with double doors to stop any sound going between. It was a lot of painstaking construction, but it gets the job done and I’m happy with the results.” In terms of recording equipment, Apply Within


Audio has collected a tidy sum of gear over the years.


While expanding on said equipment is always happening, right now the recording process at the studio is highly effective.


26 - insight magazine march 2019


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