The construction is basically finished. All we have to do now is finish the furnishing of the lounge and set up a few surround systems. Sorry to be so boring! Maybe there should be a "Studio Session" forum--lots of exciting things happening on that front. But they are not construction related.

I agree

A studio Session forum would be an excellent idea mate !!!!!!!!

I can really see that working.....

So how do we get this moving ????


Andy

+1 on the 'Studio Session' forum...lots of good vibe and inspiration in this thread - long may it continue.
Thank you Mr. Clueless for sharing all this with us and also thanks for your time spent answering the queries - really enlightening and a great insight.

This is really awesome. A tremendous amount of work (and money too I suspect) put into this studio of yours. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your studio, Clueless, you deserve it.

+1 on the studio session forum! Makes sense to have somewhere to post after our studio construction is complete!

This is really an inspiring place for me. Especially 'cause it seems you love the marimba as much as I do! Nothing compares to the sound of a 5 octave marimba. It is a complete miracle of a sound. Thank you for you for including this into your wondrous studio. I look forward to some day playing it there.

go clueless...just make us make some dreams one more time

Okay, okay. One more time...

These unusually large photos are from an unusually special session. With construction finished, we're finalizing the choices for our mic locker. If you know your microphones very well, you'll be able to recognize all of these wonderful instruments. To help us with the test, we had a five-time Grammy nominee sing a few songs into each of them. That was a treat in and of itself!

First, the establishing wide shot:



Now a little closer up:



I think that any singer, any engineer, and any producer will be extremely happy with the options we are able to offer.

Finally, a pretty picture of the koi ponds now coming into their own. I'm sure you can appreciate how nature's own diamond grid complements our own...

That is great, to be able to test your gear, in obiously a great room, and with a great voice.

About the pond........... are you sure your OK?..... Aren't you getting a little bit carried away with the diamond stuff?............heh

Seriously, that's awsome.... Did you find those by accident or did you know about their existance before you decided on the clouds/floor/diffusers?

Glad you appreciate it! The beauty of using nature as the inspiration for design, is that one can then incorporate the beauty of nature itself into the design. Wes and I "discovered" the Mosaic plants last year on a walk through the Sarah P. Duke botanical gardens. It was then I said "we need to design a water feature!" And so we did...

Michael that is total insanity man. 2 of everyone. Wow...

Michael congrats on the PAR article.

Auditioning a bunch of mics with one singer singing through them all will be useful for finding out which mic works best for that singer - surely that's not your main way of deciding which mics to buy for the studio?

Of course not! My main way is asking my engineer what he thinks we should get. It just that sometimes he doesn't know all the facts, and so he goes in search of data. Once he's confident of his data, he makes a recommendation.

What's your main way of making such decisions?

reading gearslutz

heh

Looks like a shoot-out between the old vs Telefunken USA ?

I'm curious. Was the five-time Grammy nominee Nnenna Freelon by any chance? A good friend of mine spent some time as her accompanist/musical director.

Now that's SEXY!!!!!

45minutes of reading/drooling/crying... mind blown! Simply amazing!!!

Hi Clueless. If you're bringing in a lot of outside engineers/producers, I highly recommend that you get the classic well known mics, not the re issues.

As I said, I think any engineer will be pretty happy with our mic selection, performance, and condition. We'll see!

As long as you have trusty gearslutz sm7 heh

Protools 10 will be able to use a network harddisk.

See this Protools 10 preview by AVID.
Avid Pro Tools Preview IBC 2011 - YouTube

Clueless,
Any plans to install a plate? What sort of options are you going to have on hand for reverb? Thanks

double post

Good question. At this point there are so many decent plug-in options, as well as nice hardware. It will be interesting to see what he picks.

FWIW, we see a lot of use of our EMT 140s. We have 4, but clients rarely use more than one. Clients also use the Lexi PCM96surround, 960, and they bring in their own racks of PCM96s, 960, TC6000, and 480s. Very few Bricasti...

GC

I'm interested as well ;-)

I can safely say that there will always be one thing the studio does *not* have. We try to keep our clients happy with what we *do* have. If/when, the clamor for plates is undeniable, we'll happily get a plate. In the mean time, we do have some funky ways to get pretty wet reverb. I think it may be one of the subjects of an upcoming article in a widely read publication.

It's a minefield out there, I tell you. Let's rewind the tape a bit. First there was this question:

There are three possible explanations for such a question:

1. Our console mix sucks so badly that it sounds no better than a camcorder.
2. The translation to YouTube sucks so badly that the mix sounds no better than a camcorder on playback.
3. The ears of the respondent suck so badly that they cannot tell the difference between something that was mixed to sound good and what comes out of a camcorder (even after YouTube compression).

I made the polite answer:

Now comes the stinger:

Of course not. There's translation and there's translation. Over 20,000 YouTube hits, lots of positive comments, and a Like vs. Dislike ratio of better than 97% tells me that this video does in fact translate. Even if it does sound pretty good to the general public, it excites a new level of chills when you hear the uncompressed audio on a good system, which is how REM management heard it. And it sounds even better when you listen in a proper room with proper monitoring, which is how I've heard it.

The general public pays their money and they takes their chances. If all they've ever heard is YouTube on a laptop or headphones, then they don't really know what they are missing. That's not a problem I know how to solve, with translation or otherwise. Big monitors in a great control room do make a good mix sound really good.

The sound was so good, they split the band and joined the choir...