Frequently Asked Questions

What gear do we need to bring?

For the most part you should bring whatever gear you use, as it’s all part of your sound, unless you want to experiment with other sounds.

We have a nice selection of industry standard mics and top of the line pre's available so you won’t need any unless you own a personal favorite. Singers should bring plenty of water for hydration.

Drummers – For the most part drummers like their own kit and set-up as that’s what they’re used to. We do have a nice kit around if you need one.

For keys, the studio has a Korg T-1 88 weighted keys for piano and synth pads hooked to a Yamaha Motif sound module, a Hammond B-3 w/leslie and a Fender Rhodes. We also have many virtual instruments for Pro Tools.

What’s the best way our band can prepare for a session?

Well, not everything works for everybody, but I think there are a few things that can really work wonders for a session.

• Knowing the arrangement and having the lyrics in your head really adds a confidence level to your performance.

• Vocalists need plenty of sleep and lots of water to hydrate those vocal chords. Keep in mind it takes twenty minutes for water to get into your system to do any good. A good warm-up can also help you hit the high notes. Just don't overdue if you have a lot of material to record.

• The best thing drummers can do to compliment their sound is new heads. Old heads sound dull and thuddy instead of clear and resonant. Also check for loose or broken mounts and hardware. You don't want a squeak or rattle to ruin a great performance!

• Guitarists need new strings for maximum clarity and tunability. Stretch those new strings out before coming to the studio so they don't go flat during recording. Don't forget to bring extra strings and picks. Other things you should consider fixing before recording could be loose jacks, bad cables, old batteries, etc. Bring a spare batteries if you have active pickups or stomp boxes. If you need an allen wrench to change your strings, bring it. We have tuners but you can bring your own as well.

• Bass players may or may not need new strings depending on what type of sound you like. Sounds and tonalities are very subjective, so if clear and resonant is what you’re after, new strings might be a consideration. If your bass requires a battery try to have a spare on hand.

What are the advantages coming into a studio as opposed to the D. I. Y. approach?

Well, maybe none, depending on whether you have to make excuses for it while you’re playing it for others.

I’ve seen it pretty much come full circle... people are realizing that they don’t feel like spending most of their creative time "figuring it out" on their project no less. Considering the cost of the gear, education, and the years it takes to learn to make great recordings, it’s much more cost effective to split $300 between a few players just to keep from pulling your hair out.

Unless, of course there’s someone that has the time, talent, money, and desire to learn what it takes to make records. Even in that case, we have the acoustic spaces, equipment and expertise to make your own productions even better.

We can also handle a hybrid project for those who have Pro Tools, Reaper, Cubase, Cakewalk/Sonar or any other DAW that can handle WAV, MIDI and/or OMF files. For example, if you track guitar parts at home to a click track, we might be able to integrate them with drum parts recorded at our facility. It all depends on the quality you are able to achieve at home. We can also re-amp guitars and bass in case you use guitar amp simulator softare at home. Just bring us the clean DI track without the amp sim on it so we can feed that to a real amp/cabinet/mic/pre-amp signal chain. Simulators have gotten much better but there are more options in mic positioning with real hardware. Cabinet IR files also don't emulate speaker breakup like you get with the real thing.

Other ways we can help a hybrid project is to track final drums and scratch tracks at the studio first. Then you can overdub or add tracks at your home studio later on at your own pace. Got your backing tracks all set but want to track your vocals in a world class room with top of the line mics? We can do that too.
 

What is a copyright and how do I copyright my works?

Check out our Copyright Presentation guide by Bo Davis. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the document.

I have my own background music/audio. What format do you need it to be in?

The best format would be a 24 bit stereo WAV file but we can also handle 16 bit WAV as well as MP3 (320k is best). Be aware that MP3 is a 16 bit "lossy" compression format which will not sound as good as the WAV format. Also, 16 bit won't sound as good as 24 bit.

Once we import your sound file we can add whatever tracks you like using our high quality mics and gear. This is perfect for karaoke-type projects and voice-over work.