Dav Waldron's Blog

Some of you are aware of a place I call the Bat Cave.  Some of you have even visited!  It’s where J-Cloth practices, or should I say practised…

The lads who own the place are closing the doors.   They’ve apparently been hit with a big rates bill that they just can’t afford and so have decided to wind the company down.  We’re all completely gutted.  The BatCave was a second home to most of us.  The studio bit we spent a long weekend (not to mention a fair whack of money) soundproofing and you could hear nothing outside the building because of that.  We often worked out there will 3 or 4 am and it bothered nobody.

Just last week we had got all our recording setup figured out after several long weeks of tweaking this and that and re-wiring both the sound desk and the ProTools PC attached to the DigiDesign desk.   I will now have to spend Wednesday (when I get back from the States) clearing my gear out of the Cave and trying to squeeze as much as possible into my tiny flat. I have my big amp, my effects board + pedals, 3 guitars, a computer, various books and DVDs (we have an extensive library built up over the last year).   We also have to find place for our PA, 2 bass-bins, 2 speakers, all the cabling that goes with that, 4 MASSIVE stage curtains that are used for sound proofing on the walls, various bits of furniture (tables, desks, couches), a TV, some computer monitors, another 2 PCs, all sorts of stage equipment odds and ends, etc, etc – the list goes on and on…

Miserable doesn’t even begin to come close to describing how I feel about this whole thing, but I’m trying not to let it ruin my holiday.

So if anyone knows of a warehouse/big room somewhere in the Dublin area that we could rent, please let me know.  As it stands, we have 24/7 access to this place which suits us well, so that’d be ideal, but not completely essential.  It has to be somewhere that’ll just be us though.  A shared studio is too expensive and restrictive.

I hate when shit like this happens

I’m in a band called J-Cloth, may or may not have mentioned that somewhere along the line

Last week we got delivery of a few important items and so we got them set up this week.  I’m really chuffed at how it’s all worked out.  Behold, a picture of the Bat Mixing Desk, the Bat Recording Desk, the Bat Recording Computer and the Bat Speakers.

Musics are processed and messed about with here.

Naturally, this being my blog, I should put a pic of my own gear up, so here it is:

Axes, Amp, FX and Mic.

From Left to right: Harvey Benton 7-String (standard BEADGbe) tuning, Godin SD (standard tuning), Wireless vocals mic, Boss ME 30 Guitar Effects, Marshall Valvestate 265 J-Cloth Edition + foot switch, Ibanez IC-200 “Iceman” (open A tuning).  There’s also a mic on top of the amp for running it into the sound desk and a heap of plectrums, my ear plugs and a big mug of tea

Until last night, I had a 4 X 12 Marshall speaker cab too for a full-on Marshall Stack, which was awesome.  However, our drummer and engineer spoke about having a monitor for the drummer to hear it all come together and so we took the cab (since I didn’t really need it for power) and have put that over in his corner.  Pics to follow on that, he wasn’t there when we did it and re-arranged his kit after I put the camera away.

The only real ramaining step is to get the recording desk (smaller on on the front right of the table above) hooked into the desk and a quick introduction to Pro-Tools and the rest from Mick and we’ll be laughing!  I have some solo stuff I wanna get recorded as well as proper band stuff too.

Fun times…