Steve Hackett never intended to have a studio in his house. The former Genesis guitarist had originally planned to build or buy a commercial studio to use as a base for his own recordings, which have included 15 solo records, and collaborations with Yes guitarist Steve Howe, Queen's Brian May and others. But after spending over a year looking for suitable premises without success, Hackett and his manager Billy Budis began to seriously consider the consequences of setting up a home studio.

"My fear was that it would start to take over my home life," Hackett reflects, "you know, a kitchen full of roadies, and neighbours complaining about the noise. As it turned out, I'm extremely happy working at home". Since the studio was built in 1990, Hackett has used it to record significant portions of five solo albums, including all of the basic tracks for A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he assembled over a seven-year period. (The classical-guitar-with-orchestra suite spent several weeks on the UK classical charts and became one of the biggest hits of 1997 for EMI Classics) Hackett's studio occupies a ground floor room in the elegant five-story house he shares with artist Kim Poor. The Victorian-era home is situated in the leafy London suburb of Twickenham, and the studio control room occupies a front-facing basement room that was probably once the servants' parlour. The original fireplace remains, but the rest of the room has been rebuilt by studio consultants Recording Architecture. The walls have been covered with acoustic panels, and a suspended ceiling features an arresting arrangement of two-by-fours in a chevron pattern. Bass traps are concealed in the rear wall, which also features a window looking out onto the garden. Next to the control room door is an isolation booth, panelled in wood and equipped with several of Recording Architecture's reversible baffles, each side offering a different absorption characteristic.

Though the control room acoustic treatment is comprehensive, little structural work was necessary. The doorway to a closet area in the rear corner of the room was widened in order to accommodate a Studer A80 24-track tape machine with Dolby, and this required the removal of several courses of brickwork. However, after Hackett and Budis switched the studio over to ADATs, the 24-track was sold and the tape machine bay now houses the ADATs, a tape library and part of Hackett's extensive collection of weird and wonderful stomp boxes. "There's even a Colorsound fuzz box named after me," says Hackett, looking slightly bemused.

The console is a secondhand 36-input Amek Angela. "It's not exactly state-of-the-art," he concedes, "but it sounds good, so I see no point in changing it". A video monitor occupies the centre of the wall behind the console, a piece of equipment that Hackett and engineer Roger King used when mixing the 48-track digital tapes for a TV broadcast of a recent Tokyo concert. The control room monitors are UREI 813s, supplemented by Yamaha NS-10Ms. Final mixes are committed to Panasonic and Sony DAT machines. The studio also recently acquired a 16-track Pro Tools 4.0 system. For recording his K. Yairi classical guitar, Hackett usually uses a AKG C414 mic into a Focusrite Red 6 preamp and records straight to tape. The 414 is also pressed into service, occasionally in combination with a road-abused SM58, to record Hackett's selection of electric guitars. A typical recording configuration would include a Peavey Classic 4x10 driven with a SansAmp preamp, with additional treatments provided by a Lexicon PCM90, Roland SE70 and an Alesis Quadraverb. This configuration varies, even from take to take, as Hackett is constantly changing his rig and prefers to record immediately rather than attempt to recreate a sound later. The outboard gear racks are in a constant state of rearrangement, since they get partially stripped for Hackett's onstage rig when he tours. Mainstays include a Joe Meek compressor, Lexicon PCM90 and Quadraverb and Quadraverb 2 reverb units, Drawmer gates and a Drawmer 1960 compressor, and a pair of UREI 1176 compressor/limiters. Particular favourites include a Klark Teknik D780, of which Hackett says "That's a good one for drums-it 'powerfulizes' them".
Studio 1 at Air Lyndhurst. L-R Matt Dunkley, Roger King, Steve Hackett, Billy Budis	Though the ADATs allow track bouncing, offsets and fly-ins that would be impossible on a conventional 24-track, Budis (who often handles engineering chores) has reservations about their reliability and synching speed. Nevertheless, ADATs provide a degree of convenience that is hard to beat. On the Genesis Revisited album, for which Hackett re-recorded early Genesis tracks that he felt deserved a modern interpretation, several of the players recorded their parts in remote locations. "I simply sent ADAT tapes to Chester and Alphonso in Nashville," says Hackett, referring to drummer Chester Thompson and bassist Alphonso Johnson.
Though Hackett is not particularly interested in developing his chops as an engineer, he is quite capable of recording himself; Budis or Roger King simply set him up and troubleshoot when necessary. And when a larger room is called for, Budis just books the studio time. But whenever Hackett enters a top-flight (and expensive) commercial recording studio as a paying customer, he can comfort himself with the thought that one of the best-selling and most popular classical records of recent years was recorded in his own front parlour. Written by Chris Michie (Mix magazine)