the shack™

after years on the road, and working away from home a lot, i finally built my own studio at home. The shack is where i do a lot of tracking and almost all of my mixing these days.

I love working in this room. it has plenty of daylight and air-con for those hot eastbourne summers.

The studio is based around a pro-tools HD system, with krk and tannoy monitors. outboard gear includes

focusrite isa 215 dual eq and pre-amp
focusrite isa 428 4 channel pre-amp with digital out option
tubetech cl2b 2 channel valve compressor
summit mpc-100a mono valve pre-amp compressor
universal audio twin finity 710 pre-amps
trident s100 8 channel rack mixer
CLM db200 pre-amps
focusrite octa-pre 8 channel pre-amp
apogee rosetta 2 channel a-d interface

software includes

Pro-tools hd 8
logic pro 8
sonicstudio premaster cd software
waveburner pro
focusrite liquid mix with additional dsp card
Universal audio UAD-2 solo card
tons of plug ins

i started my career as an engineer back in the days of analogue, before pro-tools and computers. we recorded 24 tracks to 2" tape. ocassionally we'd sync up another tape machine if we needed more tracks but normally if you couldn't say it with 24 tracks it wasn't worth saying. I remember adat's coming in and then the radar machine, which was really the first digital recording format that professionals could take seriously.

digital Technology has vastly moved on in recent years. pro-tools now sounds really good, and it's so fast and easy to manipulate audio, and recall mixes. on the other hand you can't beat the sound of good analogue outboard gear. when i work i like to combine both. during a mix, i'll often run things out of pro-tools through my outboard gear, and i bring my pro-tools outputs back out through a trident s100 desk for analogue summing.

other studio bits and pieces include

roland re-201 space echo tape delay unit
wem copycat tape echo unit
Great British Spring reverb
TC electronic m300 digital multi effects unit
lexicon lxp-15 digital multi effects unit
spl vitaliser
mackie hui daw controller

mics

2 earthworks sr77 condensers
2 se electronics z3300a condensers
cad m9 valve
alctron large diaghram tube condenser
2 audio technica at2020 condensers
2 shure sm57 dynamic
mxl r144 ribbon

instruments

1968 vox ac30 guitar amp
1974 marshall bluesbreaker amp
cornish company, washinton nj 1890 harmonium
fender strat
fender tele custon
fender squire p bass
epiphone sheraton
takemine acoustic
tons of guitar fx pedals