GARAGE REMIX

Joe Morena (left) and Leeroy Thornhill in the control room at Mill House studio.

How do you follow 10 years in The Prodigy, one of the most successful bands of the last decade? By recording a solo album in an outhouse adjoining a disused windmill, naturally. Matt Bell meets former Firestarter Leeroy Thornhill and his studio designer Joe Morena to discuss the making of a recording facility in a former double garage.

In almost any other band, Leeroy Thornhill would have stood out by virtue of his two‑metre frame alone, but as the dancer in The Prodigy, he had some pretty stiff competition for the limelight. Hell, even fellow band member Maxim Reality, with his outlandish clothing, psychotic coloured contact lenses and wild rapping style, never stood a chance of winning media‑attention contests with Liam Howlett, whose public persona, a mixture of hard‑as‑nails Essex bovva boy and eerily obsessive studio boffin, proved surprisingly beguiling to the press. And nobody, but nobody, could outgun Keith Flint, who — perhaps not wholly unsurprisingly — was never denied tabloid headline coverage with his penchant for eccentric body piercing, rolling into concerts in vast translucent inflatable balls and styling his hair to look as if it had been ripped, still growing, from the heads of 17 different people and stitched into place by Keith himself.

With such bandmates, it was never going to be easy for Leeroy Thornhill to shine. And so, a few months into the 21st century, he did the sensible thing and left the band.

The Tall Guy

A year later, Leeroy is positively beaming at me from across the farmhouse table in his sizeable kitchen. And well he might — not only has he just completed his first solo album (Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, released under the name Flightcrank), but he produced, recorded, mixed, and sang on most of it himself, in a former garage adjoining the converted windmill where he lives. It's an admirable result by anyone's standards, but for the man who self‑effacingly refers to himself as "that tall geezer out of The Prodigy," it's absolutely stellar.

"Cameron McVey [producer of All Saints, Neneh Cherry, and Massive Attack] produced 'Amazing', the single, and Luke Gifford of The Strongroom engineered one track and helped me produce the vocals on another," explains Leeroy. "But the rest was all done here by myself. I'm quite pleased, because two tracks were done on Neve desks at Mayfair Studios, but they don't really sound that much better, if you see what I mean.

"I love the fact that the album's DIY. This was my first album, and I wanted to do as much as I could — I wanted it to be honest. I produced 11 of the 14 tracks, mixed them and mastered a lot of them myself, with my TC Finalizer."

Surprising as these latest developments may be to casual followers of The Prodigy's success, Leeroy's seemingly new‑found career in songwriting and production goes back a long way — back, in fact, to the dawn of The Prodigy itself. Mere weeks after the band's formation in 1990, their founder, Liam Howlett, was forced to buy a second Roland W30 sampling workstation to play at live gigs with. Almost immediately, Leeroy began taking the spare home, got Liam to show him a few basics, and, as he inimitably puts it, "started to write some well dodgy music with it!"

Over the following years, Leeroy nurtured his bedroom studio, adding the first of what would eventually become three linked Mackie 1604 mixers, several affordable but highly capable effects units such as the Boss SE70 (a favourite of Liam Howlett), and a few synth modules. "Eventually, me and Liam switched over from the W30 to Macs and Cubase VST after Music For The Jilted Generation, [The Prodigy's second album, from 1994] and Liam did The Fat Of The Land [1997] on Cubase on his Mac. That was wicked, 'cause we all got computers at the same time, and were helping each other out. But sometimes, Liam would get a bit of new equipment, like an MC303 or something, and say 'This thing's wicked,' so I'd get one. Then I'd come to him hoping he'd know how to work it, and try to prompt him, saying something like 'That MC303's great — I can't wait to get my head round it.' But more often than not, he'd just say 'Well, once you know how to use it, let me know!'

"I always wanted to do my own stuff, but it was hard — the dance scenes were always changing. Also, I was doing stuff bas ed around samples, and they were always out of date so quickly. It wasn't until '96 or '97 that I started to work out what I was really into. I started doing some remix work in the studio in my last house, but it wasn't until the band stopped touring and I moved here a couple of years ago that I really got it together musically.

"I really wanted to put a proper studio together when I moved. It always sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider what you can pay out for a studio or rehearsal rooms, as well as the time driving there and setting up — you save on all that. And you can rent it out if you build it properly. So when I started talking to Joe, I made it clear that I wanted a studio here that I could hire out and produce for other people in, as well as me."

Do The Hustle

The control room at Mill House is built in a horseshoe shape around the chair in front of the the Mackie D8b, and at the optimum position for the Yamaha NS10 and Genelec monitors. To the left is the digital patchbay, to the right the monitor for the Mackie D8b and the Mac G4 monitor and keyboard. In the centre under the D8b, on slide‑out trays, are the master keyboards. Pride of place is occupied by the Roland W30 (top tray, only just visible in this shot), a Clavia Nord Lead can just be seen poking out on the second tray, and the virtually unused Novation BassStation can be seen at the bottom. The window on the extreme right of the picture gives a view of the neighbouring vocal booth/drum room.

Leeroy made a fine choice of collaborator on his studio project in Joe Morena, a part‑time computer engineer with a reasonably successful second career in remixing (Eternal, Simply Red, Dave Stewart), and a sideline in studio construction. Joe had set up some gear for Liam and built him some custom studio racks, but it was his attention to detail in getting Maxim Reality's studio fit for him to finish his solo album in that made Joe the first port of call for other Prodigy members who wanted their home studios upgrading. Leeroy: "It was like a hustle for a bit. Everyone wanted Joe to work on their studios. And everyone wanted what he was installing for the others, as well!"

Joe: "I've always been interested in the technical side of studio construction — I built my own studio and have worked in quite a lot of the big studios in London, like Whitfield Street and The Strongroom. That's interesting, because a lot of them look lovely on the surface, but when you start poking about and opening up cupboard doors, all the wires start to fall out in great tangles, and you think 'I could do it better than this myself!'"

Leeroy had decided that the studio at his new house, the converted windmill, would be spared no expense. The room he planned to use was in a high ceilinged outhouse connected to the house, but separately accessible via its own door to the outside. "It was a double garage that the people before had started to make into a room. It was a concrete shell when I moved in, really," explains Leeroy.

Planning & Preparation

Leeroy's MOTU MIDI (left) and audio (right) interfaces nestle under the Mackie D8b monitor in one of Joe's custom racks. The left rack also houses his three Akai samplers, while the right rack contains a host of effects and synth modules from his old studio. Classic Prodigy gear can be seen here, such as the three Boss SE70 effects units (favourites of Liam Howlett), the Roland E660 digital parametric EQ, the Ensoniq DP Pro multi‑effects, and the Emu Vintage Keys and Roland JD990 synths.

Much discussion and planning with Joe ensued as to the best way to convert the space into a studio, with Joe keen to establish exactly how Leeroy intended to use the studio and what quality of recordings he hoped to be able to make with it. He considers this part of the planning stage very important in studio construction. "Everything I do for people is custom‑built. Some studio design companies insist that things have got to be done in a certain way on every project. But everyone works differently, and so I think studios should be built around the individual. The individual should not be forced to work around the studio."

Joe drew up a plan for a predominently digital studio centred around Leeroy's existing Cubase VST/Mac setup, but upgrading to a G4 Mac and adding top‑quality monitors, a digital desk and a digital patchbay. Space was set aside for a vocal booth and tie‑lines were planned in around the control room so extra gear could be patched in quickly. Joe: "I designed the layout, too. Leeroy sits the middle and can get to everything — he doesn't have to go behind racks to access anything. That's why I made the digital loom and digital patchbay. If you get an idea, you want to try it out quickly, not spend ages trying to connect gear up first. I don't care what anyone says about not needing a patchbay in their studio. You can't run everything into the desk live, unless you don't have more than about two bits of gear — and you're not going to get very serious results with two bits of gear."

"Liam did!" interjects Leeroy, grinning again. Ignoring him, Joe continues. "Any engineer can come here and just plug straight in because of the tie‑lines and patchbay. You can cross‑patch everything in that room. It took me about a week to figure it all out and plan it!" Serious for a moment, Leeroy agrees: "Joe's done it totally properly. We took time to do it right; I believe in only doing things once."

Leeroy's outhouse is situated only 25 metres from his most immediate neighbours' house, so careful planning was necessary to ensure the studio was well soundproofed. Furthermore, he and Joe realised that the room would need to be properly acoustically treated in order to enable Leeroy to do professional, release‑quality mixes there, so they sought some quotes from specialist studio design companies — though Leeroy won't name names! "I got a few companies down to look at the space, and some of the quotes I got were just ridiculous. Seventy‑five grand — that was with carpets, desks and some chairs, but no equipment. It makes you laugh. Some of them walked in and started talking in technical jargon and trying to pull the wool over my eyes, but I wasn't having it. I used to be an electrician anyway, and I'm not stupid. I already had an American book on studio construction, and it isn't the black science it used to be, thanks to articles in magazines like yours! So... I let a couple of companies draw up some designs to see where the bass traps should go, and then decided to build it myself!"

Joe adds, "I looked at the plans with the chippy Leeroy was using to restore the rest of the windmill, and we thought, 'It can't be that hard to do...' It's not like it was special wood or anything — it was stuff you can buy at the builders' merchant."

Designing & Building

Leeroy's mastering rack. Joe has wired a stereo feed from the D8b's AES–EBU stereo digital outputs to the TC Electronic Finalizer mastering processor here, and then on to the DVA 10HP distribution amp at the top of the rack. From there, simultaneous copies of the same Finalized stereo mix can be made on up to 10 destination recorders, including the HHB CDR800 CD writer, the Tascam DA302 dual DAT and the Tascam DA30 MkII DAT seen in this rack.

Joe and Leeroy drew up plans for a classic room‑within‑a‑room construction, with a double‑skin wall supported on vibration‑deadening neoprene rubber, which Leeroy's carpenter then built. "The first inner wall was isolated from the concrete wall of the outhouse by a two‑inch air gap, and rested on neoprene pads underneath and neoprene supports all around. The studio floor was isolated from the inner wall by more neoprene as well. The first inner wall was two layers of plasterboard, a joist, another layer of plasterboard, and then a two‑inch air gap filled with rockwool. Then there was a second inner wall built the same way. We lost four feet all around the room just by putting in the walls, and about a metre off the ceiling, because of all the air‑conditioning ducts and electrics. Luckily, it was a high room to start with, so it just seemed like a normal‑sized room at the end of it all.

"The windows are triple‑glazed, about nine or 10 inches deep, and we put in a dual air‑conditioning system, completely silent, with acoustic baffles for each unit. I think the baffles were about 1500 quid! At least it doubles as a heater in the winter..."

Both Joe and Leeroy profess themselves delighted with the results of the soundproofing. "When we were testing the new monitors later, a friend went outside and said he couldn't hear anything, but he could feel it on his chest — just a sensation. But the important thing was that he couldn't hear it from near the neighbours' house."

Getting Into Gear

Above Right: Enough compression for you, Mr Thornhill? From top to bottom: Dbx 262 Project 1 dual‑ channel compressor/limiter, Dbx 160A compressor/limiter (x3), LA Audio 4x4 four‑channel filter/gate/compressor, Dbx 1066 compressor/limiter/gate, Drawmer MX30 dual gate/compressor/limiter, Drawmer LX20 dual compressor/ expander, TL Audio C5021 valve compressor, and TL Audio VP5051 valve channel strip.

After all the planning and building work, upgrading Leeroy's studio equipment was viewed as the fun part. Much was brought over from Leeroy's old studio, including the old synths, effects, compressors, and NS10 monitors, but far‑reaching changes were made to bring the studio as fully into the digital domain as far as possible. A digital desk was to sit at the centre of the studio, connected digitally to the G4 running Cubase VST via three MOTU 1224 audio interfaces, giving 24 channels of simultaneous I/O. New, high‑quality monitors were needed, and Joe also specified a TC Electronic Finalizer mastering processor and a distribution amplifier so that simultaneous copies of the same stereo mix could be made from the Finalizer to up to 10 mastering recorders in a variety of formats, including CD‑R, cassette, and DAT.

The choice of new desk was between the Yamaha O2R and Mackie D8b. Joe: "I didn't think the Yamaha had as friendly a user interface at all — there was too much page‑flicking. The Mackie is laid out logically and you can use it quickly, whereas the Yamaha was a case of hitting this button 10 times and then that gave you six pages and they gave you more pages... all on that tiny screen."

Unsurprisingly, the Mackie won the day. "The only criticism that you could have against Mackie, really," comments Joe, "is that they've been slow with their upgrades, but then they don't seem to put out software that doesn't work and then have to keep revising it."

When it came to choosing monitors, Leeroy and Joe plumped for a large pair of active mid‑field Genelecs, partly because the built‑in amps helped them to save space, but mainly as a result of being impressed by the service from UK Genelec distributors SCV, who gave them a demonstration of several models and then lent them a pair of their favourites to try out. When their pair arrived, Joe designed some custom rockwool‑filled wooden soffits in which to mount them. "When we put them in the soffits, it totally changed the way they sounded."

Done & Dusted

The studio was completed by some curved, brightly coloured oak‑veneered wooden racks, also designed by Joe. Leeroy is delighted with them. "I love the colours; it's a bit of stimulation. And I like the curves, too. Why have straight edges? The vibe in the studio is so important. If it's static, like an office, you'll never get anywhere."

Vibemaster Morena agrees. "The furniture side of my design business seems to be taking off now — people don't want those cheap black chipboard racks any more. Basically, if you come up with an idea, I can build it, provided you've got the money! Doing racks like this is a bit more expensive, but you're getting a one‑off, and you know it's been properly designed to fit in your space."

Leeroy reckons that however you look it at, using Joe to design his studio saved him a great deal of money. "It cost me about 25 grand in the end. That doesn't include people's wages for building it, but it does include the materials. And five grand of that was for the soundproofed air‑conditioning units."

But was it worth it? Would Leeroy not have got a better acoustic environment by paying professionals to do it? Joe is dismissive: "The only things the original companies said was that we'd have problems above the door and by the window. So we put irregular bits of foam above the door..."

"...and I thought 'Well, we'll have some curtains by the window!'" adds Leeroy.

"We also borrowed an idea from looking at the walls in the Strongroom," adds Joe. "The walls are covered with stretch fabric, hessian, stapled and with white foam underneath. That's quite absorptive. I admit we were mucking about a bit, trying different things, but you soon get used to how the room sounds anyway, your ear compensates. And I think Leeroy's got used to the sound of it now." Certainly the soundproofing and acoustics were good enough for a real drum kit to be set up and recorded in the studio's vocal booth for one of the tracks on the Flightcrank album.

The Logical Choice

Joe's good working relationship with Leeroy shows no signs of coming to an end with the completion of the studio. His current ongoing project is to serve as Leeroy's live technician when he takes Flightcrank on the road in the Autumn. "Leeroy throws challenges at me. He nicknamed me 'The Sorter'," laughs Joe. "It doesn't matter what you need, Joe can get it or put you in touch with someone who can," agrees Leeroy. One recent challenge for Joe was to obtain Leeroy a copy of Emagic's Logic and teach him how to use it — another example of Leeroy wishing to stay ahead of the game. "I was thinking that if I was in a situation where I was producing someone and they turned up with Logic, I wouldn't want to have to leave them sitting around for 10 hours while I got their song into Cubase," explains Leeroy, "and it was something else new to learn."

"We got the album out of the way, and then we spent some time sitting down and learning it," remarks Joe. He pauses, then reflects on his employer and friend, "Leeroy's really good at picking things up; you only have to tell him something once."

Not bad for the tall geezer out of The Prodigy, eh?