One day when Patrick and I were working with either Tom Hall and the Plowboys or Thomas Coolidge and the Leftovers, we dreamed “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had jacks in the walls where we could plug microphone and instrument cables in instead of running them all over the Woodshed floor like a snake pit just waiting to trip someone up and send them careening into the forest of mic stands and instrument?”

And that’s how the Woodshed works; necessity is the mother of invention.  My profession is intimately integrated in communication infrastructure – mostly data and voice – but audio is in my realm.  In December of 2012 I began drafting the schematics and component specifications to completely wire the Woodshed with distributed patch panels to ease the setup of instruments and microphones and provide maximum flexibility for the wide range of musical groups that come through the shed.  Patrick and I spent many hours trading ideas, looking at sketches, brainstorming and e-mailing back and forth and finally came up with a design.

We began the construction of the Main Patch Panels in mid-March of 2013 and we hope to have the project completed within the next 6 weeks.  It ought to make it a lot easier to work in there and hopefully to play in there, too.  Here are a few renderings of the working drawings from the project.  Stay tuned for updates as the project progresses.  And look for some of Jerry Allen’s most excellent pictures documenting the project.