Studio

This page is an introduction to my home studio that I use for recording demo’s and ideas. I have compromised a home studio setup with a portable setup, to allow me to move my recording kit with me to venues to record live performances.

I use Digi Design’s Pro Tools version 8 software on an 17” Apple Macbook Pro, 2.6 GHZ, Intel Core2Duo CPU, with 4GB of ram, connected to a Apple 30” monitor in a dual head display

I use Mackie HR8mk2 studio monitors connected to a Digi Design Rack 003R firewire audio interface

I use OCW Mercury Eilte external firewire 800 drives for recording audio data and Mercury Elite external firewire 400 drives to create backup clones of the live disks.

My firewire 400 express card is Siig 2 port card

My audio hardware includes 2 Focusrite OctoPre LE 8 channel preamps connected to the rack 003 to augment the rack 003 additional 4 inputs, and provide an additional 8 channels of input. I use a Lexicon MX400 reverb unit connected to the rack 003 via SPIDF to provider two channels of hardware reverb.

I use a Behringer (get version model) noise gate which I patch in when recording live drums, this is just used as a pass through for certain live drum sounds.

Finally I patched a 24 XLR input bay to the bottom of the rack to allow for easy front access to inputs. This makes audio routing easy at home, but even easier in live recording situations

I rely a lot on software plugins for demo writing due to not having a full band and studio kit on hand, this works out very well until I can get people together to record.

My audio plugins consist of

• Toontrack Superior 2 Drum sofware and expansion drum kit packs
• Komplete 5
• Vienna Symphony string libraries
• Dig Design !Xpand
• DigiDesign Velvet
• DigiDesign Eleven LE
• I.K Multimedia Ampeg SVX Bass Amp Simulator
• Massey Plugin Package

There are a few others that I use on occasion but as these are normally used for my own personal recordings these are the ones I chose to mention as a key part of my recording setup.

I have a limited set of microphones, but a good selection for a home recording and ad-hoc live recording setup. I use the following microphones

• Sure 8 pack drum microphone setup
• 4 x Sure SM57′s
• 2 x Sure Beta 58′s
• Rhode NT1
• Rhode NT 1-A
• Sennheiser E906
• 2 x Peavey crap things