Halion
New member
Here's the deal:
I study Music Production at the conservatory of my city in the Netherlands. We have 3 studio spaces:
Studio 1:
The big one. Small tracking room (just big enough for a medium drum kit). Medium acoustical treatment. Window to the control room. Sounds good for closemicing stuff (mostly vocals) but I don't like how drums or acoustical guitar sound in there. Mostly old rack gear (the bad kind, old samplers, dat machines etc.).
Notable gear:
1 x SPL ChannelOne (pre/de-esser/comp/eq)
1 x TC Elec. FireWorx
1 x Lexicon PCM something
1 x FilterFactory
1 x Mackie D8B
1 x Mackie HDR2496 (completely unused!)
Monitoring is done by a 5.1 surround nearfield Mackie HR824 system, and a 2 speaker main field FAR system. There's also a big-ass Genelec sub.
Currently the D8B is used for it's pres, routing options, monitor mixes and AD/DA conversion. It's connected through ADAT cables to an RME Hammerfall in a PC. We also have the latest Mac G4, which is currently not used.
Then studio 2:
Not much. 2 x HR824 connected to a Digi002 (the control surface one) connected to a PC. No acoustic treament. Bunch of synths, but nothing to write home about (although we do have a broken Juno and a Korg Prophecy). Recently a very nice studio desk what installed, which still has all it's rack spaces open. There's now also a Tascam US-2400, which isn't connected to anything yet.
Studio 3:
Small setup: MBox and small Midisport unit to a PC. Yamaha MSP5 monitors. Not much space.
We do have 2 things right:
Nice mics.
Good sounding rooms. There is a multicore through the wall to a medium theater with decent acoustics. There's also an organ room with a big amount of verb that sounds....decent. We are however connected to the music center of the city, providing us with 2 great sounding big halls.
We also have a mobile recording rack, futuring 2 x RME Octamics, a very limited samson talkback and headphone system, and a FireFace, offering 20 decent pres and a firewire connection (for recording with a laptop). It's nearly unused.
Now what we need. We have a budget of aprox. 11000 euros (not exactly sure but take that as an indication). The way see it is we don't need the D8B, it's got way too many functions. The school want's to make everything possible *in theory*. Therefor, *theoretically*, we can patch anything to anything, and use a whole bunch of software sequencers if we want (we have ProTools LE, Cubase, Logic, Ableton and more). This causes a routing mess like you won't BELIEVE! It's horrible. We have a perfectly functioning HDR2496 that is fairly useless, we could sell that. I've had this in mind:
Less all the obviously useless stuff that still gets us some money back. Move the Tascam US 2400 to Studio 1 as a main mixing console. Get a UAD, a TC Powercore and a couple of decent rack processors (I'm thinking a nice pre, comp and EQ at least). Hard wire the rack stuff to 1 channel which can only be patched within the sequencer. That we, we can do all the mixing in the box, but with hands-on experience (using the controller), and still getting to turn knobs and use some analogue stuff. No routing mess, always works, highly powerfull.
We also need some better preproduction and main production tools. I'm talking creation tools like synths, maybe a pod, some percussive stuff perhaps. We have some though, a roland e-drum kit, couple of older rolands synth (not vintage though).
Any thoughts? I know this is a long topic but that's for hanging in there!
I study Music Production at the conservatory of my city in the Netherlands. We have 3 studio spaces:
Studio 1:
The big one. Small tracking room (just big enough for a medium drum kit). Medium acoustical treatment. Window to the control room. Sounds good for closemicing stuff (mostly vocals) but I don't like how drums or acoustical guitar sound in there. Mostly old rack gear (the bad kind, old samplers, dat machines etc.).
Notable gear:
1 x SPL ChannelOne (pre/de-esser/comp/eq)
1 x TC Elec. FireWorx
1 x Lexicon PCM something
1 x FilterFactory
1 x Mackie D8B
1 x Mackie HDR2496 (completely unused!)
Monitoring is done by a 5.1 surround nearfield Mackie HR824 system, and a 2 speaker main field FAR system. There's also a big-ass Genelec sub.
Currently the D8B is used for it's pres, routing options, monitor mixes and AD/DA conversion. It's connected through ADAT cables to an RME Hammerfall in a PC. We also have the latest Mac G4, which is currently not used.
Then studio 2:
Not much. 2 x HR824 connected to a Digi002 (the control surface one) connected to a PC. No acoustic treament. Bunch of synths, but nothing to write home about (although we do have a broken Juno and a Korg Prophecy). Recently a very nice studio desk what installed, which still has all it's rack spaces open. There's now also a Tascam US-2400, which isn't connected to anything yet.
Studio 3:
Small setup: MBox and small Midisport unit to a PC. Yamaha MSP5 monitors. Not much space.
We do have 2 things right:
Nice mics.
Good sounding rooms. There is a multicore through the wall to a medium theater with decent acoustics. There's also an organ room with a big amount of verb that sounds....decent. We are however connected to the music center of the city, providing us with 2 great sounding big halls.
We also have a mobile recording rack, futuring 2 x RME Octamics, a very limited samson talkback and headphone system, and a FireFace, offering 20 decent pres and a firewire connection (for recording with a laptop). It's nearly unused.
Now what we need. We have a budget of aprox. 11000 euros (not exactly sure but take that as an indication). The way see it is we don't need the D8B, it's got way too many functions. The school want's to make everything possible *in theory*. Therefor, *theoretically*, we can patch anything to anything, and use a whole bunch of software sequencers if we want (we have ProTools LE, Cubase, Logic, Ableton and more). This causes a routing mess like you won't BELIEVE! It's horrible. We have a perfectly functioning HDR2496 that is fairly useless, we could sell that. I've had this in mind:
Less all the obviously useless stuff that still gets us some money back. Move the Tascam US 2400 to Studio 1 as a main mixing console. Get a UAD, a TC Powercore and a couple of decent rack processors (I'm thinking a nice pre, comp and EQ at least). Hard wire the rack stuff to 1 channel which can only be patched within the sequencer. That we, we can do all the mixing in the box, but with hands-on experience (using the controller), and still getting to turn knobs and use some analogue stuff. No routing mess, always works, highly powerfull.
We also need some better preproduction and main production tools. I'm talking creation tools like synths, maybe a pod, some percussive stuff perhaps. We have some though, a roland e-drum kit, couple of older rolands synth (not vintage though).
Any thoughts? I know this is a long topic but that's for hanging in there!