i'll probably regret sharing this and i'll try to keep it short.

i rent a house in the woods in MN that is surrounded by wetlands. my studio is set up in an unfinished section of the basement. concrete block walls, creepy crawl space, etc. in march of 2015, a snake appeared while working on a song. i thought it was kind of odd to see one in the house, but there are a lot of snakes in my yard. so, i threw it out and moved on. a month or so later, another snake appeared. again, while woodshedding a song.

i'm not afraid of snakes, but i don't really like the idea of wild animals in my house. i tried finding an opening in the foundation, but to no avail. i put sand on the floor along the walls (to track them back to their hideout) but didn't have any luck. it was pretty baffling. over the next couple months, a few more appeared, but once winter hit, it stopped.

fast forward to spring 2016. after everything thawed out and nature was in full effect again, i started hunting for them outside. i gathered up all the snakes i could find in the yard (around 20) and moved them to a nearby park. in spite of this, i kept finding lots of them outside around the house, so i switched to more lethal means. i think i got rid of another 30. from then on, i didn't see any around outside or in the studio. maybe 2 or 3 outside for the whole summer.

then, fall came. while working on another bassy song, i ran upstairs to get a beer (hamms, i think). when i came back, there was a snake perched up on one of my monitors. while attempting to grab it, i noticed another one (a baby) on the floor behind my desk. not cool at all. i lost it, tore down my setup and moved it to the other side of the room. underneath where my desk sat, there was a cluster of about 20 white spots (about the size of a cr2032). i guess i had company all winter while i worked.

it had always seemed pretty clear that the vibrations were attracting them. but the source was still unclear. a few days later, i set up my DAW, jx10 and a few other synths (casio fz10m, esq-m) a few feet away from the wall. i set out to make the ugliest grinding vibrations i could get out of the jx10. after about an hour of extreme noise, a head appeared at the top of the block wall. directly above where my desk used to be. it was clearly working, so i left it up there and kept composing. a little while later another one appeared next to the first. then another. my anxiety was off the charts, so i took all that stress and poured it into finishing the song. i did a quick mixdown, crude mastering job and immediately tore down my stuff and moved it out.

the next day, i called my landlord. he sent out a hilariously skittish exterminator who did pretty much nothing. that debacle is a whole story itself. anyway, he left me a bunch of traps. i'm not even going to say how many i caught over the next month. after several visits to the house, the landlord finally discovered a .5" x 4' crack in the foundation underneath the siding. they were just coming and going and living in my walls.

tl;dr: if you have 1 snake in your studio, you have 100 snakes in your studio.