Posts tagged ‘FAWM’
Next Weekend July 17-19 FAWM returns to Emlenton for its fourth weekend and concert. They will be performing at the Crawford Center on Saturday July 18 at 7pm. Doors open at 6:30PM. The concert is free and will be lots of fun.
Here are some parting shots of the third floor. The room beyond the Dekalb sign was used to store chairs but also had a 200 gallon backup water tank. The grain bin in the spotlight is a very small grain bin that still has gain in it. The only one I know of in the Mill still with grain. The last picture is of my friends from FAWM.
Since the third floor was closed to the public except for tours, we used it mostly for storage. Our homeschool library was here as well as storage for all sorts of things we had collected over the years. It’s amazing when you have space how it tends to get filled. The third floor had very high ceilings, a great place to fly quadcopters, and at least six storage areas off the main floor which I will detail in days to come. One picture shows the staircase to the fourth floor, great wood, and the other shows the main room set up as a FAWM recording studio in 2011. Later we added a stage for FAWMstock 2013.
2011 was also the first year for the “February Album Writing Month” FAWMstock at the Mill. We hosted musicians and singer/songwriters from all over the world. They spent four days at the mill, sleeping (infrequently) in the bunkhouse, writing original music and on Saturday they gave a concert that ran past midnight. The third floor was turned into a recording studio by the Canadian contingent using equipment Devin brought across the border.
My son, David, suggested that I write a blog about the Emlenton Mill and since this is February I thought I would start by writing about sound and recording, which I love. February, you see, is the month of FAWM (February Album Writing Month). For more information check out http://www.fawm.org. I figure that writing a blog every day is a little like writing a song every other day, except much easier. So, welcome to the Emlenton Mill blog. I’ll try to work in the Mill along with my love of recording.
The Emlenton Mill, built in 1875, houses a mill museum, an ice cream shop, a bunkhouse hostel, an Emporium that sells antiques, crafts and books and a number of secrets. One of these secrets is a recording studio in a gain bin.
Hidden away in a converted grain bin, on the third floor of the Mill, is a recording studio control room from the 1970s. It was originally located on the music practice floor of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. It was built by myself and some friends from the campus radio station WRCT. But more about that another day. The Mill has a large number of grain bins which were used to store the different grains that were processed at the Mill. They vary in size from the size of a closet to the size of a railroad box car. The grain bin we chose for the studio is a small room located just off the main area of the third floor and required very little alteration. Most grain bins are built with sloped floors so the grain would gravity feed to the center of the bin where the output chute was located. This grain bin only required a new floor to support the studio.
