Recording Rig (and a little history)
A couple of people have asked me about how my studio is set up. Generally speaking I’ve sort of thought this is the most boring stuff in the world (except to me) so I’ve never really gone into it, but for anyone who’s interested - here’s the thought processes behind my set up.
Background
First a quick bit of background: for what it’s worth, I am a trained audio engineer. I went to school at Harris Institute for the Arts in Toronto and graduated from their “Producing Engineering Program”. My original idea for a career (after “rock star”) was to become an audio engineer. It was a 12 month program that I attended in 1994-1995. The time period is significant, because it was the beginning of “affordable” digital audio at that point, although it hadn’t yet become totally mainstream. As such, I was one of the last people to learn on the big old analog 2-inch tape machines, but also had a chance to play with the (then brand new) ADAT and DA-88 digital tape machines, as well as the brand new world of ProTools.
At the time, the breakthrough was this - while in the past you would need at least $500k to build a real professional studio (tape machines, main monitors, console etc) and could easily spend millions, the amazing new digital 8 track machines (ADATs) only cost around $4k each, meaning you could get a 24 track rig for around $16k, then spend another $5k on a Mackie 8-bus console in order to come in for $25k or so and be able to pump out recordings that were almost as good as the $500k rooms.
Shortly thereafter, the ProTools environment also started getting hot. Originally it seemed to get the most traction in the audio post world (sound for film and TV) but then someone (and I want to say Nine Inch Nails, but I’m not sure) decided to record an album on it. At that point people started to really buy in to the hard disk recording approach.
Of course, $25k was still well beyond my means at that point.
So about 5 years ago I checked back in on the state of the art and discovered that the pricing had dropped another order of magnitude. For a couple of thousand dollars, I could now match that $500k room (almost). But I would need to adjust some thinking about how I did things.
The other thing is, I live in an apartment in New York City. That means noise is an issue. While it might sound fantastic to get power-tube distortion on a guitar amp, or to record live drums, it’ll also get me a citation. I needed a way to record that would get me the quality I was looking for, but without the noise.
The DAW
I was already using Macs, so I set off to find a good Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that could be the foundation on which I would build the studio. I had used ProTools way back in the day somewhat, but I noticed that all of the plugins and hardware associated with ProTools were more expensive than any other platform. While I’m sure its good, I was suspicious that there was a “ProTools Tax” going on there, and that I could get a perfectly good alternative for less expense.
So at first I tried out a DAW called Tracktion. Originally made by an independent software company, it was then later acquired by Mackie. I loved Mackie stuff anyway (they made the first affordable-yet-high-quality mixers back when I was in school) so I thought I’d give it a shot. Also Tracktion has an amazingly innovative UI.
After awhile however, I realized the kind of stuff I wanted to do with music was overwhelming Tracktion. It didn’t take kindly to my multiple time signature changes, and so about 2 years ago I jumped ship and went with Logic.
Logic was originally a sequencer program for MIDI-heads, not a digital audio program like ProTools. It was made by a company called Emagic, and I used it in school and HATED it. However since then Apple bought it and had apparently totally revamped it, both making it a full-fledged DAW and redesigning the UI from scratch.
Oh yeah, they had just recently cut the price from $999 down to $499. Nice.
Once you have your choice of DAW, you are signing up for a plugin standard. Here comes the acronyms. ProTools plugins are TDM. A lot of PC-based systems use a standard called VST, and Apple’s plugin standard is AU (Audio Units). So now, when looking for plugins, I need to make sure they are AU compatible.
The Audio Interface
The next fundamental is an audio interface. Sound has to both get into the computer (an analog to digital (A-to-D) conversion) as well as out (D-to-A). While it’s true that Macbook Pro’s have A-to-D in, you don’t want to use them. The vulnerable analog signal is too close to electronically noise components (like your hard drive) that can screw up the sound before converting it to digital. For that reason an outboard audio interface is the best bet.
The ultimate in audio interfaces is a PCI-board based system that you plug into your Mac Pro, but I’m working with a MacBook Pro, so I needed a USB based system. Again going with Mackie, I bought a system called Spike, which mostly consisted of the Mackie XD-2 audio interface. Audio in and out, 2 mic pre-amps (needed to boost mic level signal up to line level before A-to-D conversion), MIDI in-out etc. Used to work great, now it half works great, and is half unusable.
Here’s the issue, and an important gotcha. When Apple upgrades their operating system, sometimes manufacturers of third party audio interfaces don’t keep up with their drivers. As a result, after upgrading to Snow Leopard, I can no longer record audio on the Mackie XD-2. The signal fills with digital dropout noise interspersed (sounds like crackling).
As a stupid impulse buy at one point, I bought an additional audio interface - the Native Instruments Guitar Rig controller. It’s dedicated towards guitar and has various foot switches and such - but it also now happens to be the only functional audio interface for recording I have - so I use it to record, and the XD-2 just for monitoring and MIDI recording.
Monitors
The third fundamental are audio monitors - the only part of the rig you actually hear. I have a pair of first-generation Mackie HR624 nearfield monitors. They cost about $900 for the pair. This is a really worthwhile area to spend some cash, since the quality of the monitors will seriously influence the quality of your mixes, more than any other part of your rig.
One of the great leap forward with monitors is the rise of active monitors or, monitors with the power amp built right in. This is because the amplification is perfectly matched to the speaker, and it allows for bi-amplification of the tweeter and woofer cones, meaning that, for example, heavy bass usage won’t drain all the power out of your tweeter, causing you to lose the highs. You can buy passive nearfield monitors, but I’d highly recommend considering active monitors.
Okay…instrumentation:
Drums
For drums I realized I needed a non-acoustic solution for the noise problems mentioned above. My friend Michael turned me on to BFD2. B is for Big. D is for Drums. I’ll let you work out the rest.
BFD2 is drum recording nerd software par excellence. I can’t imagine how mind-numbingly boring it must have been for some drummer to record all of those amazing kits, one…hit…at…a…time. It comes on 5 DVDs, which should give you an idea of the amount of audio data included. You can swap out different drum kits, virtually screw around with the mic’ing, and mix every individual mic down to a stereo submix before pulling it into your DAW. Nicely the presets are just fine, so you can either go with those, or fiddle to your hearts content on getting the ultimate snare sound. I tend to use the Ludwig and DW kits a lot.
Guitars
For guitar I found Guitar Rig, a product made by Native Instruments. This essentially is amp simulation software - you record your guitar straight into the audio interface - with nothing on it, then it’s like you have a whole room full of highly desirable amps to choose from. They aren’t allowed to use the actual trademark names of the amps, so you have to interpret a bit but it’s not that hard to figure out. For example, I use an amp sim called “High White” a lot, which is in reality a Hiwatt simulation. (What does a Hiwatt sound like? Go listen to the Who.)
Microphone
The other big part was coming up with a decent microphone for vocals. This would be what is called the “large diaphragm condenser mic”. Now in the professional world there are basically two big players here- the Neumann U-87 (about $3k) or the AKG 414 ($1k). I am a 414 man. However I still didn’t have $1k to spend, so I went looking for alternatives.
Lucky me, AKG makes a line of mics called the “Perception” series which are RIDICULOUSLY CHEAP. I picked up the AKG Perception 200, WITH hard case, WITH a spider clamp, for about $180. Unbelievable. Now it’s not quite the shimmery touched-by-angels quality of the 414, but it’s amazingly good, given the price.
If I was to upgrade here, I’d probably splurge for the AKG 214. It’s about $400, it’s pretty much the same mic as the 414, but it has fewer options for pickup patterns (I think it’s just locked to cardioid).
Side note: mics are the only thing in your rig that doesn’t lose value. I mic that is properly taken care of will continue to be worth almost as much as what you paid for it. Some mics even appreciate value.
Other Software
To round this out, I got the Native Instruments Komplete package, mostly for Kontakt 4, which is their sampler. This is my main pull whenever I need a sound that I can drive by MIDI. It also has a zillion other weird synths that I don’t really understand. Probably great if I ever need to score a sci-fi soundtrack.
That’s the core of the rig - there are some other interesting doodads here and there, ask me on twitter about them if you’re interested, or if I should continue talking gear.
