What gear do y'all use?

[Chadwick]

Digi 002 modified by Black Lion Audio

Black Lion Audio are really nice guys and have great ideas on all sorts of mods. Its just a matter of time before they release their own great gear on a big level.

I'm working on a preamp based on a 1980's Seck Mixer 18 channel.

[Suburbanite]

amd athlon 1.8 laptop with a lot of wires hanging out
alesis firewire 16 multimix
cubase le, fruityloops, audacity and logic
1 sm58, 2 sm57, red audio drumset mikes (actually pretty good)
and only 1 mic stand and a lot of gaffa tape
oh and some blood and tears for good mesure

[Capacitordeath]

HEY!

hi.

I'm using an HP Pavilion dv9000 with 2g of ram and a dual 1.8 processor.
ASIO4all
Temper (free MIDI/sound multitracker)
1/4 - mini plug that I bought for 2 bucks at Target
ART Tube preamp Studio
MXL big cheap condenser mic
Korg nanoPAD that I friggin love
stock sound card (very loud...I wanna get an outboard model)

For drums...
nanoPAD > Session Drummer 2. Fretted Synth came out with a really nice drum program that I plan on using, and it's free. I just need to organize it and set up the .wavs and velocities. I either use an Antress compressor or Floorfish 'fore for compression, and Roommachine844 'aft for ambience. Maybe a little Fuzzplus2 for some thick, fake sounding drums.

For Bass...
bass > ART pre > DIG. It's been a really nice guitar amp VST, on par with Amplitube. I usually use some sort of slight distortion on the bass, so I seldom need to much compression. Sometimes I'll juice it up with Racktube.

For Guitar...
guitar > ART Pre > DIG, or Dirthead80. That's such an awesome VST!

other...
Minimogue (moog VST), Arp2600 (arp VST), Spook Keys (theremin VST) Random DSK VSTs that all are pretty friggin good.

The best thing to do is go to Gersic.com and start DLing all the VSTs to your taste. You can pretty much get anything you want, built for free. It's great!

[NickH]

Here is my home setup:-

[Mic Pre's]
• Aphex 207D
• Apogee Mini-MP
• Audient ASP008

[Monitoring]
• Goldpoint SA2X
• 2 x Adam P33A's
• Grado RS-1
• 2 x Yamaha HS50M
• Yamaha HS10W

[Pro Tools HD Setup]

• Pro Tools|HD2 Accel - (PCI)
• Apogee ROSETTA 800 192 with X-HD Card
• 96 I/O Interface
• Command|8
• Digidesign Custom Keyboard (WIN/USB)

[DAW Computer]

• Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad Processor
• Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional - Motherboard
• 2 x ASUS 7600 GS - 512MB Silent Graphics Cards
• 8GB (4 x 2 GB) Corsair Dominator TwinX DDR2 PC2-8500 (TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF 4GB Matched Pairs)
• Panasonic TX-37LZD70 LCD Monitor - [37" - 1900 x 1080]
• 2 x LG L1915S TFT Flatron Monitors - [19" - 1280 x 1024]
• 750GB Seagate Barracuda ST3750640AS - 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive (System)
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda ST3200822AS - 7200.7 SATA/150 Internal Hard Drive (Backup)
• Glyph GT050Q 500GB Audio Drive
• 2 x ADS Pyro Firewire Cards
• 19" Rack Server Case

The full list is stupidly long, as I pay the bills with this type of gear, but for the sufficiently bored & with time to kill here it is:-

Full Gear List

Cheers



N

[Steve Conner]

Very nice! How long before it all pays for itself?

I'm in the process of selling off all my studio gear, I'm going down to just a good pair of monitor speakers, a mic pre, and a Macbook Pro.

Random selection of music from the scopeboy studio here: scopeblog Steve’s Music

[NickH]

Very nice! How long before it all pays for itself?

Well.. audio engineering's my day job, so it paid for its self years ago.. I work in commercial studios during the day, that's just there to pull mixes up at night & do bits of homework, nothing to serous..

I'm in the process of selling off all my studio gear, I'm going down to just a good pair of monitor speakers, a mic pre, and a Macbook Pro.

Cool, what more do you really need, especially if you are not recording simultaneous multi track stuff, sometimes lots of gear just gets in the way.. And the plug ins are getting really suburb nowadays.. especially the Waves SSL suite & Steven Massey's stuff

Random selection of music from the scopeboy studio here: scopeblog Steve’s Music

Sounds great Steve, really hypnotic! great stuff..

You can here some of my mixes here http://www.nickhemingway.com/Showree...]-Showreel.mp3

Cheers

N

[Steve Conner]

Hey Nick, thanks for the feedback on my stuff! I did most of it years ago, but I recently decided to give up and concentrate on just playing guitar and bass.

I listened to the first few tracks on your showreel, they're just plain brutal It actually reminds me of Fleming Rasmussen's production on "And Justice For All", I hope you don't take that as an insult.

[ajkStrungtheoretic]

Nice setup, Nick. Your gear and your website very much remind me of a guy with whom we used to record a few years back. Although, the one thing on which I would have to disagree with you is the Marshall Mode Four amp. IMO, that thing is a nothing more than a bloody overpriced piece of dog-crap. I've known several people who have owned own, myself included, that were monumentally unhappy with the product. I personally struggled with getting a desireable sound out of the thing, meanwhile, a couple of other unlucky bastards I knew had nothing but problem after problem with them, including everything from blown valves to multiple footswitch issues to general grab-assery itself. IMO, you're better off getting your hands on a good old JCM head. Other than that, NICE SETUP.

[NickH]

Nice setup, Nick. Your gear and your website very much remind me of a guy with whom we used to record a few years back. Although, the one thing on which I would have to disagree with you is the Marshall Mode Four amp. IMO, that thing is a nothing more than a bloody overpriced piece of dog-crap. I've known several people who have owned own, myself included, that were monumentally unhappy with the product. I personally struggled with getting a desireable sound out of the thing, meanwhile, a couple of other unlucky bastards I knew had nothing but problem after problem with them, including everything from blown valves to multiple footswitch issues to general grab-assery itself. IMO, you're better off getting your hands on a good old JCM head. Other than that, NICE SETUP.

No disagreement here

The Mode 4 is a POS... However... it's got me out of the crap more than a few times when bands bring guitars with those god awful Bare Knuckle pickups in... (or some other nasty passive) Oddly it really makes them quite usable.. (for extreme metal) Still much prefer EMG81's into a nice 6L6 amp for meat & potatoes rhythm work any day...

If I need that Marshall sound for any reason we have a Marshall Model 6100 - 30th Anniversary that I converted back to the EL34 factory spec that does the job...

Cheers

N

[ajkStrungtheoretic]

Quite right.

You'll have to excuse my ranting, its just that whenever I see or hear mention of the Mode Four amp I just see RED and fly into a homicidal rage, lol. Of course that could have something to do with the grand or so that I blew on the damn thing. The music that I play IS actually rather heavy, and still I struggled to get a good sound out of that amp, worthless p.o.s. it was. Believe it or not, for recording purposes I actually went back to the solid state HDFX MG100 head. The thing is unbelievable, especially on the od/2 channel. It actually has a heavier distortion than that bloody f-ing MF. (As I'm sure you can tell, I've come to refer to the thing as MotherF--er.) With MG head, even with it being a S.S. head, the DDS feature along with the emulated line-out make it the ideal head for recording purposes. After experimenting a bit, I found that a mix using sounds from both the em. line -out and a mic-ed celestion cab pays off very well for heavier-end music. I'm not going to lie though, if you're looking for a good super-clean sound, its probably not going to happen with that head, unless you don't mind your clean tracks having just a bit "thump" along for the ride.

ajk

[Tele-Cat]

Mac G4 with a Digi 001 and a Presonus Digimax Mic pre for primary recording. Macbook Pro with an MBox 1 for mixing and overdubbing.

Alesis RA150 power amp and Alesis Monitor 7s for mixing. Grado S80 phones. Pro Tools LE 8.

[tboy]

Pro Tools LE 8.

How do you get the old Digi hardware to work with that?

[Tele-Cat]

How do you get the old Digi hardware to work with that?

I don't - bad writing on my part - I use 6.4 on the G4, and then import it into 8.01 on the MBP.

Sorry about the bad writing. The G4 is a great platform for recording but it has about 1/5 the horsepower of the MBP. I can only do crude mixes on the G4.

[tboy]

I use 6.4 on the G4, and then import it into 8.01 on the MBP

That explains the 001, but I thought Digidesign had also kicked the mBox 1 over to the "unsupported" side of the road. Does it still work with PT8?

[Tele-Cat]

That explains the 001, but I thought Digidesign had also kicked the mBox 1 over to the "unsupported" side of the road. Does it still work with PT8?

To the best of my knowledge that has not happened and I recorded some guitar just yesterday with the MBox and PT8.01 so my guess is it's still supported, maybe "unofficially," I don't know. I can see I'll have to keep my eye on that.

Edit - 8.01 is the last version compatible with the Original MBox but since I don't foresee making another record any time soon, I'm not too worried about it. PT has a good record of being backward compatible in opening sessions from previous versions. I've got enough plugs in 8.01 (some damn good deals over the summer) that I should never need to upgrade the SW as long as I have a Leopard partition on my hard drive.

All is well.