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“WTF is this guy on about?” I hear you ask.

Well, last week I got my hardback copy of “The Creative Act: A Way Of Being” by Rick Rubin sent through to me via Amazon and I couldn’t be more pleased.

I had known of Rubin through him being one of the founders of seminal Hip Hop label Def Jam as well as his music production exploits with artists such as Run DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.

However, it was when he produced the Johnny Cash version of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails for Cash’s last album, that I really started to take notice of the genius that is Rick Rubin.

This song never fails in reducing me to tears

In terms of sheer inventiveness and depth of musical vision I put Rubin up in my top three producers alongside Trevor Horn and Brian Eno.

Anyways, I found a lot of videos on YouTube singing praises about Rubin’s book that I just had to check out and in doing so I discovered two things that astounded me…

First of all he’s practised meditation since he was 14 years old and secondly (and most importantly) his views on creativity and the process that surrounds it is very similar to my views and it’s because of this that I just had to acquire his book.

Many years ago I purchased “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron and really gravitated towards her concept of the morning pages which is writing (at least) three A4 sized pages of stream of consciousness thinking every morning.

This eventually morphed into my daily journal writing ritual.

For me, The Artist’s Way was a big influence on my life at the time and I know that The Creative Act: A Way Of Being will become just as influential or even more so. I can’t wait to get my highlighter pen out and really start getting into the pages.

I’ll be sharing with all of you what I learn and discover through this blog so watch this space.

Peace,

Corey 🙂

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Well, as of yesterday (Thursday May 16th) all of the major building work has been done with my Dad finishing painting all the walls as you can see below…

All that is left to do now is…

  • Make and install the doors.
  • Buy and install glass for control room window.
  • Put up acoustic foam on ceiling.
  • Lay down all of the carpet tiles.
  • Sort out electrical issue (the circuit board keeps tripping out at the moment).

Once all this is done the fun part begins, bringing in all of the hardware and setting it all up, testing it all out and making test recordings to see if the recording workflow is going to be seamless between the analogue and digital systems working together. 

Plus, along with all of that, the studio speakers also need to be installed as well. This is primarily going to be Sandy’s job with me helping out. 

It’s starting to come to the pointy end of the build and I’m really excited about all of the possibilities that lie ahead for me. Now, it’s my goal that everything “should” be ready to go by July 1st but, we’ll see what happens.

At this point my fingers are crossed.

Peace,

Corey 🙂