Studio

Basically, I consider the studio itself to be a musical instrument. Like any instrument, you get good by practicing, trying different things, experimenting, mimicking, tweaking, mixing…. After a while, it dawns on you that making music is a craft, the mixer is its workbench, and the studio is it’s laboratory. You supply the creativity, your musicality, your quest for musical beauty. You capture your tracks then tweak it down to a work of art.

Like most people I don’t have the money to go into a recording studio whenever I get a cool idea in my head, so I did the next best thing.  I have been building and rebuilding a home recording studio for myself for the past 10 years.  Maybe the rent-a-studio aint such a bad idea after all.

All the rules have changed in the past few years for putting together a recording studio and they keep changing. It used to be that you needed expensive multi-track recorders and mixdown machines, a roomful of outboard gear and processors, and more cables than you would want to count. Of course, you still can make a large studio with tons of outboard gear (which sounds better than ever), or you can let computers and modern digital multi track machines replace hundreds of functions that used to require separate hardware units.

Im  not talking about a cheap, hissy, unprofessional sound, like we used to get with old 4 track cassette studios. Those days are gone. With the dawn of modern recording software (called sequencers), with their full-featured digital mixers built right into software, I got a sound to rival the big boys in the studios downtown. Yes. It’s true! For a modest investment in microphones, preamps, audio interfaces and software I am on my way. I’m going to tell you all about the gear I have today and wax nestalgic about the gear of old.