Moving on

Me in my “old” Dearworld Studio control room

About a year ago, I moved out of my beloved recording studio. During a period of nine years, I had recorded and mixed numerous records there. With the help of my dear father, I rebuilt the entire interior and did the acoustics. I personally planned every signal path and cable connection to fit my needs. With all my beautiful instruments gathered there and most of them ready for use in a wink, everything in that space was tailored by me to be the perfect atelier for my work, and to make an atmosphere that was professional but not intimidating to artists. All things were in place to make the studio a part of the creative process that is record making.

What ended up happening though, was that the work I was doing there, was less and less interesting to me. To put it bluntly, I was getting bored doing what I did. Recordings weren’t challenging or exciting anymore, which made me feel guilty towards artists sometimes. I felt like only “facilitating” other peoples creativity, whilst trying to squeeze in some of my own whenever I could.

Lovely artists came to record with me, but with my rent going up, and the artists money earnt with records going down, the time I could spend with them got shorter. The pressure on the studio process was high, consequently there was little room for experimentation or creativity. Everything had to go smoothly, and fast, and without surprises.

From the outside my “business” looked quite successful. My creative soul however, was slowly starving… Various events in my life lead me to question myself. Yes I had a beautiful space, a comfortable life, I was good at my job and had more than enough work. But was this how I wanted to spend the rest of my time? A day can only be spent once. No matter how much money someone pays you, you’ll never get that day back.

So what did I dream of? Where did I want to go next? That I wanted to walk a new path was pretty clear, but with my head between the speakers almost all the time, I had no idea what that could look like. The only logical step was to leave the studio behind - no matter how utterly frightening that idea was to me.

Almost 1,5 years have passed since then… so in upcoming posts, I will tell you what happened next.