As obsessions go, I’d guess that tweaking my studio is relatively harmless, unless you’re my back, which doth rail against the burdens of toil! Anyway I thought it might be fun to check out my crib, because I've put additional acoustical treatment up, and have made a few other changes.
As the pictures show, my studio is nothing special, but I get a lot of TV ad work done here. The reason I can record broadcast quality tracks here is that the room actually sounds good. It sounded good without the acoustical treatment, but there were some standing wave problems at the mix position. In 2022 I decided that needed to be researched and rectified.
There was a time when I had a ton of analog gear - 5 or 6 twenty space equipment racks loaded to the gills, analog tape, and a console. All that's long gone.
By ten or so years ago, the work couldn't be done with it due to the constant changes that became part of the business. We used to get picture, fully edited and finished, and score to it. That's not done often any more. Now we get works in progress, and when they change the picture editorial, which is like every two minutes it seems, we start over with the music.
Old projects have to be precisely recalled if a previous ad gets updated. All this has to be done immediately, if not sooner. There's no time to recall all the settings on a console and external processors. It's a luxury we don't have. So most of the ad composers have gone with 'in the box' rigs. In a way it saddens me, but the most important thing is capturing a good sound at the microphone, where the differences are huge; things like software compressors vs analog compressors are much more subtle. So it's OK. It works.
My studio is one fairly large room, 33 x 17, and since I'm playing most of the instruments, there's no need for a separate recording booth. The first pic below is the recording area. There are four amps, starting on the far left with a Mesa Fillmore sitting on a Cali Tweed 2x12 cab because I liked the Jensen Blackbird speakers better than the C-90s that came with the Fillmore cabs. I decided to have mine look different from the usual Fillmore. I liked the look of my '90s Tremoverb, and went with black leather, white piping and a black grille cloth to achieve that vibe.
On the left of the rear wall are RealTraps acoustical panels, bass traps that also diffuse the sound a bit, with two straddling the corners. All are a couple of feet apart. This treatment is a huge part of the solution to my standing wave problem in the low frequencies. I was getting a null at the mix position at around Bb on a bass, and there were other anomalies caused by the room (as there are with most rooms that aren't purpose built as studios). Having had panels and tube traps from ASC, that are also very good, I found the RealTraps to be a bit more effective. They also help control bass from the amps.
Left to right, the amps on the rear wall are a PRS DG30 with a pine DG 212 cab; a PRS HXDA with PRS' Big Mouth Cab that's very similar in dimensions to Mesa's Recto 212. Works great with the HXDA. This cab is birch ply. Next to that there's a rack with a Furman PF1800-PFR AC power supply that's kind of interesting. It stores 45 Amps of power that can be delivered to the amplifiers faster than via the power outlets in the room; the darn thing works, and now I'm spoiled. All the amps are plugged into it. It also has isolated outlets for other gear, and I plug my pedalboard into it. That way, the amplifiers and the pedals are powered by the same source, and that tends to reduce noise. The outlets are also filtered and if there's AC noise, I can't hear it. In fact, the amplifiers are dead quiet, even when all of them are turned on.
Above the Furman, the rack holds a KHE amp and cab switching system. KHE is a Swiss company that's doing a great job making these things. You can switch any of the amps into any of the cabs via toggles or via MIDI, and there is zero switching noise, zero ground loops, and zero tone suck. This is a very high quality device; one of the guys here turned me on to it. I love it, because during a session I can just hit a toggle or send a MIDI signal and go to the next amp without recabling, plus I can experiment with all the amps and cabs to get a sound I want.
To the right of the rack, there's a Mesa Lone Star 100. I love the Fender black panel style tones I get from it. All of the amps have NOS tubes; the PRS amps have British and German tubes from the '60s and '70s, the Mesas have RCAs and GEs from that era. I think the amps sound better, and I haven't had a tube go bad in years.
The bookshelf helps a little with diffusion, though its primary purpose is of course storage. I do have an old set of encyclopedias that I got when my kids were little, and they're there because I had no place else to put them. There are also some entertainment law books, and then a bunch o' junk in cases and baskets. The artwork on the wall over the bookcase is a signed-in-block Salvador Dali woodcut. In the workstation area I have one of my brother's watercolors that doesn't show in the pics, and a print by John DeMartelly, a very well known artist who did beautiful work. I like art on walls, not guitars. Sue me.
There's also a pedalboard to talk about. I decided to get one of the Schmidt Array boards because it's just so flexible, great to work with, and f#cking cool as all get-out. There are four Pettyjohn pedals - two are overdrives, but very low gain overdrives, there's a buffer/preamp, and an EQ. If you open one of these guys up ya won't believe the quality of the electronic parts. Studio stuff.
On the top row are four of John Suhr's pedals - a clean boost, a compressor, a tremolo, and a terrific chorus pedal. There's also a tuner and a little amp channel switcher for the Mesas.
I use two Eventide H9s, one usually for modulation, or micropitch algorithms (Eventide does them better than anyone) and one for delay or big reverbs when I need them. The white Mission Engineering pedal is an expression pedal that gets plugged into the H9s.
All cables that lay on the floor in the recording area are covered in Techflex, both to make them last longer, and more important, the Techflex forces even uncooperative power cables to lay flat on the floor, and it reduces tripping hazards.
Why a rug on top of carpet, you ask? I like the look. It also helps dampen the sound, so the room is reasonably free of ringing.
Below is the workstation area. On the shelves of the keyboard stand on the left are an Avalon direct box, a Focusrite mic preamp, and the keyboard is a nice feeling Yamaha 88 key controller. The rack has a BAE 1073 mic preamp, a Focusrite Red 4 preamp that has been in my studio since it came out in 1994 (now discontinued, unfortunately), a Universal Audio Apollo interface, and some other stuff I need. The keyboard on the desk is a Dave Smith Prophet 12. Monitors are the wonderful Event Opals. These came out when Rode bought Event, and decided to do a cost-no-object studio monitor. I love their accuracy and each one has 470 watts of power. So they're clean as a whistle. Hidden behind the rack is a 2,000 volt isolation transformer made by Equitech that balances the AC (works like a humbucker conceptually) and has multiple isolated AC outlets that power all the studio gear. This reduces residual AC noise in the studio by about 8 db, as measured on my studio tech's oscilloscope (sadly, he passed away).
Once again, there are 6 RealTrap bass traps to tame the standing waves, and 2 real trap first reflection absorbers to prevent comb filtering resulting from first reflections.
All the guitar amps and studio gear that have removable AC cords get Essential Sound power cords. They work. It's actually pretty amazing, because the last thing I wanted to do was spend a lot of money on power cords, but they made me a believer, and now everything's gotta have them. All the studio gear is wired with Mogami Neglex. All of the guitar and amp audio cables are Van Damme (many are the PRS branded Van Damme cables, but several are custom lengths), except the first cable from guitar to pedalboard is a special Sommer cable - they came out with one that has the lowest impedance of any cable made, and you lose less high frequencies. The Van Damme is also wonderful, but the connection from the pickup to the first pedal (my first pedal it connects to is a studio grade buffer) is crucial.
I use some high end, ultra low impedance Sommer cables for mics as well. I actually did a test I posted on my old forum, and most of the people who heard the test heard the difference with these mic cables.
In the computer there are hundreds - literally hundreds - of plugins that do different things. I probably only use 100 consistently, but WTF, I have 'em, I'm gonna load 'em into the machine. My DAW is Logic Pro, though I'm also very good with Digital Performer and not bad with Pro Tools.
In the corner behind the workstation you can see some heavy duty mic stands. I've got good mics, they need stands that can hold them properly. I use a Mic King for large mics for vocalists and acoustic guitar, and the very strong and convenient Triad-Orbit smaller stands for miking up amps, percussion, etc.
Finally, my brother and I built the black painted oak furniture with the maple trim. We welded the legs, glued and rolled out the formica on the tops, and these have lasted in incredible shape since we made them in 1994! All the corners are mitered, screwed and glued, the tops are extra thick with heavy wooden reinforcement underneath, and basically if WW3 starts, I'm hiding under them because they're bombproof!
So that's it! My life is down in this stupid room day in and day out. I jokingly call it Studio Craptastic because it's not a big deal room.
As the pictures show, my studio is nothing special, but I get a lot of TV ad work done here. The reason I can record broadcast quality tracks here is that the room actually sounds good. It sounded good without the acoustical treatment, but there were some standing wave problems at the mix position. In 2022 I decided that needed to be researched and rectified.
There was a time when I had a ton of analog gear - 5 or 6 twenty space equipment racks loaded to the gills, analog tape, and a console. All that's long gone.
By ten or so years ago, the work couldn't be done with it due to the constant changes that became part of the business. We used to get picture, fully edited and finished, and score to it. That's not done often any more. Now we get works in progress, and when they change the picture editorial, which is like every two minutes it seems, we start over with the music.
Old projects have to be precisely recalled if a previous ad gets updated. All this has to be done immediately, if not sooner. There's no time to recall all the settings on a console and external processors. It's a luxury we don't have. So most of the ad composers have gone with 'in the box' rigs. In a way it saddens me, but the most important thing is capturing a good sound at the microphone, where the differences are huge; things like software compressors vs analog compressors are much more subtle. So it's OK. It works.
My studio is one fairly large room, 33 x 17, and since I'm playing most of the instruments, there's no need for a separate recording booth. The first pic below is the recording area. There are four amps, starting on the far left with a Mesa Fillmore sitting on a Cali Tweed 2x12 cab because I liked the Jensen Blackbird speakers better than the C-90s that came with the Fillmore cabs. I decided to have mine look different from the usual Fillmore. I liked the look of my '90s Tremoverb, and went with black leather, white piping and a black grille cloth to achieve that vibe.
On the left of the rear wall are RealTraps acoustical panels, bass traps that also diffuse the sound a bit, with two straddling the corners. All are a couple of feet apart. This treatment is a huge part of the solution to my standing wave problem in the low frequencies. I was getting a null at the mix position at around Bb on a bass, and there were other anomalies caused by the room (as there are with most rooms that aren't purpose built as studios). Having had panels and tube traps from ASC, that are also very good, I found the RealTraps to be a bit more effective. They also help control bass from the amps.
Left to right, the amps on the rear wall are a PRS DG30 with a pine DG 212 cab; a PRS HXDA with PRS' Big Mouth Cab that's very similar in dimensions to Mesa's Recto 212. Works great with the HXDA. This cab is birch ply. Next to that there's a rack with a Furman PF1800-PFR AC power supply that's kind of interesting. It stores 45 Amps of power that can be delivered to the amplifiers faster than via the power outlets in the room; the darn thing works, and now I'm spoiled. All the amps are plugged into it. It also has isolated outlets for other gear, and I plug my pedalboard into it. That way, the amplifiers and the pedals are powered by the same source, and that tends to reduce noise. The outlets are also filtered and if there's AC noise, I can't hear it. In fact, the amplifiers are dead quiet, even when all of them are turned on.
Above the Furman, the rack holds a KHE amp and cab switching system. KHE is a Swiss company that's doing a great job making these things. You can switch any of the amps into any of the cabs via toggles or via MIDI, and there is zero switching noise, zero ground loops, and zero tone suck. This is a very high quality device; one of the guys here turned me on to it. I love it, because during a session I can just hit a toggle or send a MIDI signal and go to the next amp without recabling, plus I can experiment with all the amps and cabs to get a sound I want.
To the right of the rack, there's a Mesa Lone Star 100. I love the Fender black panel style tones I get from it. All of the amps have NOS tubes; the PRS amps have British and German tubes from the '60s and '70s, the Mesas have RCAs and GEs from that era. I think the amps sound better, and I haven't had a tube go bad in years.
The bookshelf helps a little with diffusion, though its primary purpose is of course storage. I do have an old set of encyclopedias that I got when my kids were little, and they're there because I had no place else to put them. There are also some entertainment law books, and then a bunch o' junk in cases and baskets. The artwork on the wall over the bookcase is a signed-in-block Salvador Dali woodcut. In the workstation area I have one of my brother's watercolors that doesn't show in the pics, and a print by John DeMartelly, a very well known artist who did beautiful work. I like art on walls, not guitars. Sue me.
There's also a pedalboard to talk about. I decided to get one of the Schmidt Array boards because it's just so flexible, great to work with, and f#cking cool as all get-out. There are four Pettyjohn pedals - two are overdrives, but very low gain overdrives, there's a buffer/preamp, and an EQ. If you open one of these guys up ya won't believe the quality of the electronic parts. Studio stuff.
On the top row are four of John Suhr's pedals - a clean boost, a compressor, a tremolo, and a terrific chorus pedal. There's also a tuner and a little amp channel switcher for the Mesas.
I use two Eventide H9s, one usually for modulation, or micropitch algorithms (Eventide does them better than anyone) and one for delay or big reverbs when I need them. The white Mission Engineering pedal is an expression pedal that gets plugged into the H9s.
All cables that lay on the floor in the recording area are covered in Techflex, both to make them last longer, and more important, the Techflex forces even uncooperative power cables to lay flat on the floor, and it reduces tripping hazards.
Why a rug on top of carpet, you ask? I like the look. It also helps dampen the sound, so the room is reasonably free of ringing.
Below is the workstation area. On the shelves of the keyboard stand on the left are an Avalon direct box, a Focusrite mic preamp, and the keyboard is a nice feeling Yamaha 88 key controller. The rack has a BAE 1073 mic preamp, a Focusrite Red 4 preamp that has been in my studio since it came out in 1994 (now discontinued, unfortunately), a Universal Audio Apollo interface, and some other stuff I need. The keyboard on the desk is a Dave Smith Prophet 12. Monitors are the wonderful Event Opals. These came out when Rode bought Event, and decided to do a cost-no-object studio monitor. I love their accuracy and each one has 470 watts of power. So they're clean as a whistle. Hidden behind the rack is a 2,000 volt isolation transformer made by Equitech that balances the AC (works like a humbucker conceptually) and has multiple isolated AC outlets that power all the studio gear. This reduces residual AC noise in the studio by about 8 db, as measured on my studio tech's oscilloscope (sadly, he passed away).
Once again, there are 6 RealTrap bass traps to tame the standing waves, and 2 real trap first reflection absorbers to prevent comb filtering resulting from first reflections.
All the guitar amps and studio gear that have removable AC cords get Essential Sound power cords. They work. It's actually pretty amazing, because the last thing I wanted to do was spend a lot of money on power cords, but they made me a believer, and now everything's gotta have them. All the studio gear is wired with Mogami Neglex. All of the guitar and amp audio cables are Van Damme (many are the PRS branded Van Damme cables, but several are custom lengths), except the first cable from guitar to pedalboard is a special Sommer cable - they came out with one that has the lowest impedance of any cable made, and you lose less high frequencies. The Van Damme is also wonderful, but the connection from the pickup to the first pedal (my first pedal it connects to is a studio grade buffer) is crucial.
I use some high end, ultra low impedance Sommer cables for mics as well. I actually did a test I posted on my old forum, and most of the people who heard the test heard the difference with these mic cables.
In the computer there are hundreds - literally hundreds - of plugins that do different things. I probably only use 100 consistently, but WTF, I have 'em, I'm gonna load 'em into the machine. My DAW is Logic Pro, though I'm also very good with Digital Performer and not bad with Pro Tools.
In the corner behind the workstation you can see some heavy duty mic stands. I've got good mics, they need stands that can hold them properly. I use a Mic King for large mics for vocalists and acoustic guitar, and the very strong and convenient Triad-Orbit smaller stands for miking up amps, percussion, etc.
Finally, my brother and I built the black painted oak furniture with the maple trim. We welded the legs, glued and rolled out the formica on the tops, and these have lasted in incredible shape since we made them in 1994! All the corners are mitered, screwed and glued, the tops are extra thick with heavy wooden reinforcement underneath, and basically if WW3 starts, I'm hiding under them because they're bombproof!
So that's it! My life is down in this stupid room day in and day out. I jokingly call it Studio Craptastic because it's not a big deal room.
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So incredibly well done my friend!
