Nashville (pt2)
Left-Brain
Search for a House
Around 1983, we started (as couples often do) to look for a house of our own to buy.
But it ended up being a somewhat tricky endeavour due to a the requirements we had on our "must have" list.
Not the least of which was the $450 / month. price tag (which equates to about $1,500 in 2025 dollars).
At the time, that was about half my salary, so we drew a hard line in the sand, realizing how that would affect the quality of the neighborhoods we'd be looking in.
The other "must haves", were 2 bedrooms and a basement. I had concocted this hair-brained idea that if I wasn't going to find work in a real recording studio, then I'd just build one of my own and start doing it there.
So, in early 1984, after looking for almost a year, we ended up buying our first house together in Nashville, TN.
And several construction projects began immediately.
Redesign
I think the first night we were in the house we made the hasty decision to tear out the wall between the dining dining room and the kitchen.
The layout just made no sense at all to us with all these tiny 1950s style rooms.
So, that first night in the house, before unboxing any of our stuff, I took a hammer and knocked a big-ass hole in the wall (don't worry -- I did check to see if it was load bearing first.)
Clean or Gut
The other immediate concern was the kitchen.
There was--to put it mildly--quite a rodent issue afoot. Throughout all the kitchen cabinets and under the lower drawers we found nesting and bedding material along with loads of poop. It was disgusting!
So when I posed the question to Brenda, "Clean up and paint -- or just gut and start over?" without hesitation (at all) she choice the later.
That's a picture of our new house after just a couple of days, including the gaping hole between the dining room and the kitchen. Now we had no kitchen at all.
We literally tore out every cabinet in there. (along with some perfectly good mouse habitat.)
Right-Brain
The Studio is Born
I don't remember the exact timing, but I do know that it was very early on that I started the basement deconstruction as well.
Our Realtor had made a big deal about the "studio apartment" in the basement. But all I saw was a sorry attempt at stapling some ugly paneling to some flimsy 2x2s and calling it an "apartment."
It was gone before you knew it was there.
My vision for the space was different. I saw a complete--albeit small--recording studio.
Complete with a control room separated from the studio by a double wall with soundproof glass.
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And here's a shot from the studio looking back into the control room.
The very first iteration of the studio utilized my homemade mixer and a really horrible sounding Ampex, 1/4" 4-track tape deck.
The first console was my homemade 12-channel board that I built from scratch.
Due to severe technical issues, it went through 2 versions from -1 to -2: the Nason-1 and the Nason-2.
Overtime, I updated from the original 4-track deck, first to a Tascam 1/2" 8-track (pictured here) and later, to a Tascam MSR-16, 1/2" 16-track along with a Tascam M-520 console.