The Studio
The studio is roughly 3m x 3m and occupies a room at the very top of the house. Along one wall I've built a big fitted desk, the full width of the room and a metre deep. Mounted on top are three racks which contain all of the outboard gear, leaving room for mixer, monitors, midi master keyboard and computer monitor, mouse and keyboard. The desk and all of the racks have cut-outs underneath and desk-style cable grommets for cable management purposes - it's still a nightmare of spaghetti back there, but it's a well hidden nightmare!
Everything in my studio has been bought on a shoestring - I've not spent what you'd call real money on anything. Most of the gear is from budget manufacturers, which is even cheaper at second-hand prices. My instruments are all licensed copies or budget brands. But... everything is well set up, well-maintained, and properly used - all of which goes an awfully long way towards producing a clean, polished result.
Rack 1
The left-hand rack contains outboard gear, nearly all of which came to me second-hand via eBay.
Rack 1 is 9U in height and contains:
Behringer Composer
Fantastic quality 2-channel dynamics processor (gate/compressor/limiter). I use this for kick, snare, vocals and bass.
Behringer Multigate
4-channel noise gate/expander. Keeps my hi-hat and tom mics from spilling into each other.
Behringer Multicom
4-channel compressor. I use this on my toms.
Marshall MGP9004 Guitar Pre-amp
Basic tranny pre-amp, on extended loan from Nigal Ratt, who I used to play with in Picture This! and Amelia's Nightmare.
Novation A-Station
awesome analog-modelling synth module, came to me dirt cheap via eBay. Stuffed full of instantly useable pre-sets, this also has tons of knobs on it so that you can get that hands-on tweaking experience that you just can't find with software-based synths.
Zoom Studio 1202
simple, knob-twiddling multi-effects unit, less versatile than the SE-50, but a better sample rate and nicer reverbs. Again, on loan from Nigal. This mostly gets used for it's really nice drum room patches.
Behringer ADA8000
dead simple 8-channel mic preamp/DA converter/ADAT interface. Although I barely use some of the features (I use my mixer's pre-amps and phantom power), this hooks up to the BCA2000 to give me 8-in/8-out simultaneous audio at 48khz, which is more than adequate for my recording purposes. As you've probably noticed by now, I've got a lot of Behringer kit. Behringer rule.
Behringer PX2000
48-way unbalanced patchbay.
Behringer PX1000
48-way balanced patchbay.
Perched on top of Rack 1 is my Behringer BCA2000, an absolutely wicked audio/midi interface, lots of i/o options, with tons of useful features and nice big faders (a must for someone like me, who's used to studio gear having thousands of knobs, buttons and sliders). I bought this new for 125 notes from nusystems.co.uk, which considering the features in it is a daft price.
Rack 2
The centre rack is smaller (4u), half of which is taken up by the outrageous power amp that I got hold of ;-)
Boss SE-50
Fantastic, classic 90's multi-effects unit. I used to own one of these, ages ago. Got a used one off of eBay, for twenty quid.
Alesis RA-300
If I told you what I paid for this absolutely outrageously gorgeous studio reference amp, you'd laugh and start chanting "Liar, liar, pants on fire", so I'm not going to tell you. Suffice to say, it was a fraction of retail. And wow, is it good. I've had my studio monitors for over ten years - I didn't actually hear how good they are until I got this thing in February.
My 19" flat-screen monitor lives on top of Rack 2, as you can see in the picture. Loads of screen real-estate, ideal for busy mixes in Cubase.
Rack 3
The right-hand rack isn't strictly speaking a rack case. Instead, this one's got shelves, for my hi-fi bits and pieces. It was built in the same way as the others, though, using cabinet joining blocks and contiboard, which I got pre-cut to size by my local DIY store, and there's always the option of adding rack strips to it at a later date.
Goodmans CD
A cheap CD player. It's fine. Except the backlight's packed up on the LCD display. What d'you need for thirty quid?
Philips DCC730 Digital Compact Cassette machine
Yeah, okay, I made a really bad format choice way back then in '93. BUT, this thing has a pair of superb A/D converters built into it, and the head is of outrageously high quality - just the thing for getting those old four-track recordings into Cubase. Still a nice piece of kit, if a bit funny in a betamax way.
Marantz PM-34
Decent middle-of-the-range hifi amp. Reasonably flat, sounds great, 'nuff said.
Nothing lives on top of Rack 3, which makes it a bit sad. But it's cheered up enormously by the Kylie calendar that lives on the wall down at that end of the desk :-)
Mics & Monitoring
Just about everything here is cheap as chips (apart from the Abso 2's, but I've had them so long that they don't exactly owe me anything), but performs really well.
Behringer C1
Outrageous. A big-assed studio condenser mic for thirty quid, brand-new. And it's so very, very good, too. This came from turnkey.co.uk. This mic gets used for vocals, acoustic guitars and (often as not), my mate Phil's hi-hats.
Red5 RVK7 drum mic set
Another "awesome quality, zero cash" experience, this set of drum mics have made me a very happy boy. The set comprises four dynamic mics for snare & toms, a kick mic and a pair of condensers for overhead duty. They sound great, they're hard, heavy slugs of metal, and the whole kit comes with clamps, a flight case, windshields, stand adaptors... for 200 quid. I bought the optional extra condensor mic so that I could cover the hi-hat separately, which adds another 35 quid to the price, but these are still really hard to beat for value. You won't find a poor review of them anywhere, either.
Spirit by Soundcraft Absolute Two
Fantastic big heavy nearfield monitor speakers. And they have blue cones. Blue cones look nice. But it's not just about looks. These sound great. Not just great, in a "wow, my stereo is really cool and loud" kinda way, but great in a "I can hear the drummer scratching his nuts between takes" kind of way. The fact that they're also cool and loud is just a bonus.
Gale Mini Monitors
Simple, friendly little entry-level hifi speakers, which combined with the Marantz amp provide a "home system" second opinion to the main studio monitors. Have a look on eBay for speakers like these - they're so cheap, they're practically free.
Behringer HPS3000 headphones
Not as closed as you might want from a studio headphone, these do the job just fine if you don't have a complete live band in the room (which I just don't have room for anyway!). Nice, fat full-range sound that goes plenty loud, all for 12 quid a pair. I got these new from Ministry Of Sound Shop.
Other kit
Soundcraft Spirit Folio SX20 mixer
Just lovely, this mixer. I used to have a Spirit Studio 16 in my 8-track studio, which was a serious, serious piece of gear. Way too big for this room, in fact, so I hunted around and played a bit of an eBay waiting game until the right "kid brother" mixer turned up - and it did. Real low noise, long-throw faders, lots of options, a couple of sub-groups, excellent pre-amps and EQ section. There're enough inputs on this little beauty to allow me the luxury of not having to reset things too often (the kit is pretty much permanently set up on channels 1-8, for example). And yes, again, it was cheap - in fact, the cabling cost more than the mixer...
Hartke A100 bass combo
A wall-shaking beast in an ickle box. Never had it up above "2" on the gain knob. Wicked loud, looks fantastic, has a really nice studio DI out, and it kicks back so you can hear yerself properly. Big shiny aluminium cone-in-a-cage, looks absolutely hard as nails. This amp is now pretty much permanently DI'd into channel 11 of my mixer - which is great, 'cos I can just grab the bass any time and know that the result is going to record brilliantly.
Korg Kaoss Pad
This fantastic FX unit/controller has a bloody great big light-up mousepad on the top. You use your finger to modify the parameters of FX, trigger samples, etc. in real time. Absolutely wicked, and utterly intuitive (my eleven year old son, Daniel, was the first to try this thing out, without a manual - he'd got the entire thing sussed in about three minutes). I've not yet tried using this as a controller for my synths or other outboard FX, but I'm sure it'll be a riot when I do. The Chemical Brothers, in a glowing plastic box. 'Nuff said.
Evolution MK-149 Midi Keyboard
Another eBay purchase, again for twenty notes. It's quite nasty and plasticy, but what the hell - it works OK, and I'm hardly a discerning (or even decent) pianist.
Hardware and software
The heart of my recording system is a Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo-P, an AMD Athlon 64-bit 3200/1 Gig RAM PC. For a shop-bought, non-specialist machine, it's remarkably quiet (the Athlon 64's run pretty cool, apparently); the noisiest thing in it is the CD/DVD drive, but that's never in use while recording, anyway. I record using Cubase SE3.
For mastering, I use Akai's Quadcomp multi-band compressor (I got mine on eBay, but you can get it free if you order enough stuff from turnkey.co.uk), Classic EQ and Classic Master Limiter plugins from Kjaerhus Audio (both free downloads, and highly recommended) and Audacity (which I could use as a complete mastering platform, but in reality I just use it for normalisation and removing DC offset).
After a real fit of downloading tons of VST instruments, I've finally settled on two that I really like, and find myself revisiting again and again: MDA Piano by Maxim Digital and the awesomely good Superwave P8 soft synth.
A similar story with VST FX plugins too - I went through a real heavy phase of downloading loads to try out and play with, until ultimately I'm using just the FX that came with Cubase and the Kjaerhus Classic Series of freeware VST plugins.
Instruments
Aside from synths and VST instruments, I've got some proper instruments. Yum.
Squier Standard Strat
This one came to me via Nigal Ratt. It's been heavily upgraded to Fender electronics, and re-shielding it 'cos it used to hum like a loud hummy thing that'd forgotten then words. Oh, and it no longer has any working tone controls, 'cos they're largely pointless in a studio instrument.
Squier P-Bass Special
My luvverly bass. Precision Bass body with a Jazz Bass neck, and BOTH sets of pickups. Big, phat and rumbly. Sounds uber-nice tuned to "D" and smacked really loud through the Hartke ("really loud" being about "1.5" on the Hartke. Scary). This instrument, above all others, proves once and for all that actually, yes, I do have very tolerant neighbours.
Hohner LW600N Jumbo Acoustic
Hohner knocked out zillions of these back in the early 90's - and this has matured really nicely. It's survived a half-assed attempt to fit a piezo bridge into it (by me) and various adjustments by Nigal - still sounds gorgeous, and with a fantastically low action (but with hardly any rattle).
Lorenzo Spanish
A very nice little spanish guitar, courtesy of my father-in-law who didn't want it any more. Sounds really warm and nice, and it's getting a lot of use lately - seems like spanish guitar is having a bit of a renaissance in general at the mo'.
Dan's kit
My son has made me proper proud by becoming a drummer. He's already in his first band (he's 11), and he's having a totally great time with it. Of course, the upside of this is that the nice little rock kit that I bought for him when he started learning now lives in the studio, where I get to play and record with it too.