ABSTRACT
The emergence of the project studio is a story of increasing access to ever more powerful technologies that allow music to be produced in increasingly diverse circumstances. In 1973 Melody Maker responded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to an emerging trend by offering basic advice about setting up a home studio: ‘about half the garages and basements in England must be echoing to the siren song of rock music by now; everybody’s building their own recording studios’ (Blake 1973). Théberge identifies the same year as a milestone in the emergence of a viable market for consumer music technologies because sales of electronic synthesisers were first tracked as a separate category (1997: 52–3). Technological innovation, economic viability, and the socio-cultural impetus to make music with technology coincided in the early 1970s to create the conditions for the eventual emergence of the domestic project studio.
