Hi there! Welcome to my Studio, It’s not the most advanced studio in the world but it is digital (mostly) and it does work. For the technically minded amongst you it is based around my 2 computers.The 400 Mhz Celeron does all the mastering via the SPDIF input on a SoundBlaster Live card (OK so it’s the cheap option) fed by a Tascam DA20 DAT machine, it also does all the dog work, office work, accounts, bookings for ABBOTT & CRABB, surfing the net, making this web page and so on.

The other machine is a 450 Mhz Pentium II, which runs Emagic’s “Logic Audio Gold” Audio/MIDI Sequencer through an Emagic Audiowerk8 card. It also has a SoundBlaster Live card for the odd sample I want to throw in plus a, now old, AWE64 Gold card, which is probably just using up resources.

I’m afraid I’ve become a “Logichead” a large group of people who are totally addicted to Logic Audio and refuse to contemplate anything else, even though the other packages (Cubase and Cakewalk are the main two) are extremely good. For those of you who are curious about Logic Audio mail me at cricket@iafrica.com and I’ll give you my thoughts. In a nutshell, if that’s possible with Logic, it has the steepest learning curve of all the sequencing packages by far, but once you get into it you’ll continually find new features you couldn’t do without, I’ve been using it for about 3 years now and just about every session I do I find something more that I can do with Logic.

I also run Winjammer shareware (I have registered) sequencer, as it can often sort out rogue midi files, I use the Winjammer shareware player on stage with ABBOTT & CRABB, it’s very fast and very solid and plays Wav. files as well.

The outboard gear in the studio consists of a Roland JV1080 (the best machine I ever bought), a Korg M3R, which has some brilliant Organs on the PCM card complete with Leslie’s that speed up and slow down, not the real thing but…well… nice. I have a Sansamp for guitar, the rackmount model, which means I rarely use a Marshall Valvestate S80 which sounds great but the Sansamp is just so much more convenient when you’re in a hurry (always!!!)

I still use my old Fostex Compressor although I think it’s days are numbered, a BBE Sonic Enhancer for brightening things up and the effects are a Digitech TSR24 and a DigitechDSP128+, there’s a Microverb II which is useful for adding a little Room verb occasionally. The desks are a Mackie CR1604 and a Spirit Folio (VERY clean) for the Audio, there’s also a little Behringer 602A which I use for adjusting monitoring in the control room and the booth. The mike is a Rode NT2, which is excellent, plus I have a ShureSM58, a Sennheiser ND421 and an old Eagle condenser mike which is great for picking up ambient noises and crowds and the like (not that the studio can hold many people)

Here are a couple of photo’s of DADS: -

The Equipment Rack, Keyboards and Vocal Booth

View from the Vocal booth to the door