Studio Tour

Before the gear list and pictures, I'm going to let you in on something first. I'm not doing this full-time, so I am only taking on projects of friends and family. But if you like what you see here, there's another studio in town that is very similar to mine, and has a very similar no-nonsense approach to recording. That is Rob Smith at Rocky Mountain Recording Studio. In addition to some excellent gear, he has some of the best ears I've seen, probably one of the fastest mixing engineers I've seen, and some instruments to make your recording sound most excellent. His discography includes Kris Demeanor, Tom Wilson, Highwater Jug Band, Tim Williams, Deep Field South, Steve Fisher, Heather Blush, and oh my, so many more. I've recorded with him a few times and my experiences there are very similar to a lot of session musicians and singer-songwriters around town. My favourite studio to record in. If you have a project and this kind of studio seems right for you, give him a call.

Gear list (you can't see most of it but here's the list)

The board, a Soundcraft 2400. It has been re-capped and cleaned, one channel at a time. The patchbay and all I/O has been balanced, too. My preamp rack can be seen to the right of the board. I run those back through the 2400's 'SYNC' tape return patch points, as a digital recorder tends not to have those. I can then patch direct from pre to recorder if I want to avoid running through the board twice.

 

The external equipment rack for everything non-preamp related. I am in the process of adding a few DIY'ed digital reverb and multitap delay lines to this rack once I get them all put together. This is a work-in-progress... as racks tend to be. Note the TC M5000, that thing sounds wonderful. It has no AD-DA card in it - I built an external one. Right above it is my DIY reverb based on the Wavefront AL3201.

The preamp/recorder rack.

The DA-88 rack, and more patchbay space

 

The newest addition to the family, an Ampex 440C. It has a DC servo capstan drive and is set up for 30/15ips. I prefer 30ips if for no other reason than the IEC EQ curve is better for noise than the NAB curve often used on 15ips. I got the heads re-done at Sprague, and they carry a full line of spare parts including the brake bands that this machine so desperately needed. I've mixed down one album on it so far, and it sounds quite nice, as you'd expect.