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Journal blinder's Journal: Studio Upgrades 7

Journal by blinder

This JE is more of a working list of things I want to do to the studio, upgrades an all that, over the next year.

One of our plans is to get some more $$$ from the equity we have built into our home... to mostly finish off the place... interior whooz-its and what-not.

So, like a big chunk of that will (according to the plan) will go into the "basement" which is the home theater and recording studio. Nothing is set in stone mind you... but right now here's a working list of things I want to do to upgrade the studio.

1. upgrade the console. right now i have a less-than-excellent console, a 24-channel, 4-bus Mackie console. Its okay, not great. The EQ section on the channel strips is, well... bad, and the routing flexibility is well... um, not very flexible (yeah, great, route signal to either buses 1-8 [dual bus system] or to master L-R). The pre-amps are probably the biggest disappointment. weak, very weak.

I'm looking at the Soundcraft Ghost 24LE console. Its a 24-channel Mix-B configuration console with 8 buses (triple bused). "Mix B" means that each input channel has two inputs, and is used to run outputs from your recorder so that you don't need to tie up the standard channel strip for that. "Triple bused" means that each output bus has three outputs, meaning you can run each bus channel to a 24-track maching without repatching anything. Very nice.

Soundcraft has been making high-end consoles for the better part of 30 years, and basically invented the "British EQ" sound (well, Rubert Neve and John Oram played a not insignificant role in that as well). The "British EQ" is a very musical EQ meaning its curves are very smooth and its Q very percise. The Soundcraft's mic pre's are amazing and well, that's one of the stronger reasons to use Soundcraft in the first place. The 24LE runs around $5,000. Not cheap, but for what you get, its actually unbeatable in price/performance/features. The Mackie 8-bus series consoles are the closest thing there is, and while Mackie sells more of these than Soundcraft does theirs, the Soundcraft is like a Porsche where the Mackie is a 3-series BMW. Its nice, but its no Porsche :-)

2. Acoustic Foam. i need some serious acoustic treatment to my space. The actual studio space is a 10'x12' bump-out in the basement. Sheet-rock walls, berber carpet with very expensive padding under that. The space has two parallel walls and well, if you know anything about parallel sheet-rocked walls... then you know all about slapback. Ugh, its horrid. I get a lot of frequency cancelation like you wouldn't believe. So, $600 worth of professional acoustic foam (diffusors mostly and bass traps) will do wonders for that space. The idea is to not make it a "dead" space. That's almost as bad... but to eliminate the transients and slapbacks that plague the space now.

3. Pro Tools - I got my money together to actually get a Pro Tools rig now (the Digi002 rack)... but I'm waiting till the first of the year. Doing this for a number of reasons. First, because PT is just about the best there is for editing, mixing and mastering. Most commercial studios will track onto standard recorders, using analog mic pre's but then dump that into a PT system for everything after that. Its a model I like, and wish to practice. Second, well, I want to collaborate on pieces with other folks (like Sam and Mekka and others) and well, PT's flexibility will make that easier.

4. Akai MPC2000 - These are finally starting to come down in price. I need a decent sampler/sequencer. If you know this piece of gear, then you know its the defacto standard... and now down to the $1,000 range... its now do-able.

5. Decent rack cabinets. Yeah, its all about the esthetics. But... alas, decent rack cabinets go a long away in cables management. If you were to look at the studio now... your eye would probably be drawn immediately to the massive tangle of cables. I know some of you think you have a huge collection of cables and what a "spider nest" you may have... but trust me when I tell you... you probably can't come *close* to my monstrocity. Remember I have a 24-track recorder... and a recorder is input AND output... so that's 48 right there... then there's speaker cable, insert cables, patch cables, effects return and send cables (12 right there), um, mic cables, instrument cables, midi cables... the drum-kit alone consumes 20 individual instrument and midi cables. I have 4 8-channel snakes alone thrown into this mess for various patching functions... and all of this is just crammed into a corner or running against the outside wall. Its not pretty. Decent rack enclosures can not only hide that mess but also make it managable. Okay... don't believe me eh? that's it! I'm going to take pictures of it tonight and post them... so you can witness the calamity first hand!

Well, that's it for right now. Pretty interesting eh?

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  • The studio where my roommate was broadcasting his radio show from was using Pro Tools. It was really cool all the things they could do with it. I'm not an expert on that stuff, but I remember all the musicians coming in and Oohhing and Ahhing over it.
    • but I remember all the musicians coming in and Oohhing and Ahhing over it

      Heh, yep, that is what we do. strange aint it?

      Anyway... yeah, PT is pretty revolutionary, especially now that Digi is opening up the market and providing interfaces and tools to support FireWire and USB. Their proprietary interfaces (via the HD series) is astronomically expensive. An HD 3 | Accel can run up to $15,000 !!! Ha!!! Yeah, okay maybe if you run a $10 million commercial facility... but completely out of reach to us lowly
  • out of curiousity, have you considered going to a soft synth for your sampling needs? you have a mac. there are several programs out there that are really great stuff. most can read akai samples, too. then all you'd need is a controller. i have a roland a-37 and love the way the keys feel. the only thing i don't like about it is that it's hard to keep it from sending midi messages at power-up (things like bank assignments and such). i use fxpansion's DR-008 for drum sampling and speedsofts vsampler f
    • out of curiousity, have you considered going to a soft synth for your sampling needs? you have a mac. there are several programs out there that are really great stuff. most can read akai samples, too

      Yes, I have considered it... but having used many a MPC2000 and even older units (anyone ever see the MPC60 [retrosynth.com]?) I feel pretty comfortable with this unit. Also, I have tried a number of soft samplers but I just don't like the way they feel. Using a dedicated hardware solution, there's more of an immediate and rea
      • you're not that much older than me, you know. i think it's all about preference.

        my first exposure to sampling was with gear. to be totally honest, it wasn't a good representative. it was a casio. after that i got to use some real samplers. the problem for me was always the interface. i was always wishing you could use differently. computers come pretty close to what i've always wanted.

        i think a lot of is that it is easier for me to work with things that are visual.

        Heh, you'd be (possibly) surpris

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