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From the live floor to the forest foor, Garth Richardson's got it covered
Nestled comfortably away on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, Garth Richardson has spent years working on his state-of-the-art facility, The Farm Studios. The Juno Award-winning and Grammy-nominated producer carries a legendary reputation not only for his vast experience and mind-boggling list of credits, but also for the studio that he has been growing for nearly two decades.
The Farm Studios has been an ideal destination for a unique recording studio experience for many years, and through many iterations. In fact, it never really remains the same for very long before Richardson changes things up in some way or another; as such, the screeching halt to the industry brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic provided a perfect opportunity for new additions to the experience at The Farm.
Going back in time, when Professional Sound last spoke with Richardson about renovations to The Farm in 2016, he told a story about the process of digging the frst channel to run cable underground from building to building. The long and short of that story was, shovels are slow, use a backhoe. So, when Richardson decided last March to run Cat 6 cable all throughout the property as part of a new networked audio system, he bought a tractor and got to work.
While the previous underground cable runs tied the property's main house to the band house where the control room was being moved at the time, the new Cat 6 lines serve a more compelling purpose beyond tying two buildings together. With the help of Focusrite's RedNet series of Dante-networked hardware, Richardson can now record anywhere on the seven-acre property. This includes the main house, the band house, the studio proper, the crew cabin, and even outside in the woods.
"I have a probably 500-ft. Cat 6 cable, so that if anybody wants to go out and record in the woods, they actually can. If you remember the Zeppelin record where they did some of it outside, ["Black Country Woman" from Physical Grafti], I have always been in love with that whole fantasy of being able to do that," Richardson explains. Of course, that's just one of the options brought along with the new...