Mansfield Ave, Willimantic CT
The Dungeon was the home of Royal Kingdom Records since January of 2001. My father and I built a studio in the basement, constructed the walls and everything. It was a small room covered in white sound muffling tiles, there was a wooden door and a large window looking out into the basement which was in front of a small window to the outside (so we could have a little sunlight and tell what the weather was like). The room had a brown office style carpet, two celing lights and another single dimmer switch light bulb from the ceiling which we used to set the mood for recording. A long table acted as a desk on the long wall of the studio opposite the window where we wired in a socket strip in order to have enough plugs (we still didn't). Another desk was later added on to one of the shorter sides of the room creating an "L" shaped desk, at first this was for the keyboard and later for the second computer. There was also a small refrigerator in one corner and a lockable filing cabinet to store rhyme books and master copies of our work. We constructed a shelf for the table and placed some of the equipment up therein order to have enough space for it all. The equipment consisted of a digital recorder, a four track analog recorder, reciver/amplifier, keyboard, drum machine, 2 computers, CD recording unit, dual cassette deck, single cassette recorder, acoustic guitar, microphone stand and Gemini turntable. For a few months of my senior year of high school I actually lived down in the basement because my aunt and uncle were staying with us and they had my room. Duriing that period there was a fold out cot down there also that I would sleep on, this lasted from September to shortly before Christmas of 2001. Due to there usually being quite a few people in the small room and the lack of circulation it would get really hot and stuffy so we would frequently go to the garage where it was always cooler and hang out in there while the studio cooled off. It may not have been much, but it was home.