music: "That's When I'll Stop Loving You" - Belita Woods (Moira 107a)

The studio was nearing completion. We were planning on opening early February, 1968. I had hired another guy, Bob Robinson, on the advice of Les Chasey to do carpentry work to help finish the studios. Bob was very good.

I seem to remember the catwalk being an addition that came later on. I think once construction of the studio got under way, we saw the convenience of a catwalk.

This was totally a Les Chasey design. It was pure genius. Constructed completely of two by fours you could have driven a train over it. He even made the hand railings out of two by fours which gave it a very safe, secure feel when you crossed.

I loved to stand in the center of that catwalk with my arms on the railings. I would be looking directly into the second floor control room on my right ( which was an awesome sight from that perspective ) or the second floor vocal booth and the studio floor over dub rooms on my left.
And all the studio floor space with it's bright blue carpeting directly below. It was a great place to stand. 

Regrettably, I never took a picture of this unique feature of Tera Shirma Studio B.

The vocal booth itself was relatively small, maybe 6' x 8'. It was heavily padded and extremely tight. It was hard to stand in that room for no reason. The total quiet consumed you. You needed to put headphones on just to hear some outside source of sound.

Being located at the opposite end of the catwalk from the control room, it was handy for the vocalists to cross over and listen to playbacks.

As you entered the studio from the waiting room, the piano was to the right. 

It was a Knabe, something over 6 feet but I don't remember the model. Knabe's were never my favourite pianos, but I had a stock holder in the corporation (Evelyn Brown) that worked for a large piano company. She was able to get me a very good deal on the piano.

Being a keyboard player, I always thought the piano played a little heavy, but I never heard any complaints about it and It recorded very well. 

I know Popcorn Wylie liked it and I seem to remember talking to Johnny Griffin about it and he told me he liked it.

The organ next to it was some sort of Hammond, but not a B3. It was always my intention to put a B3 in there (after all...it was MY instrument of choice when I was still playing) but I never was able to do it.

The doorway in the corner was an entry way to a storeroom. It was there that the EMT echo unit was stored.

For those of you that have never seen one...first let me explain...EMT's were the Rolls Royce's of echo units in those days. Very rich and full.....It resembled a large wooden crate...approximately 5 feet tall...maybe 6 or 7 feet long and about a foot wide. I think we also had a storage for microphone cables in that room.

In the picture you can just see two of the four studio monitors that are below the control room glass.

The light brown wood panel visible above the organ was a microphone input bay that fed the console from the studio.

Continued