While we had some downtime around the holidays we were busy doing some little updates around the studio. Here’s some of what we were working on, be sure to stop by and see it for yourself!

Speakers in the Live Room

No more holes in the wall! We finally filled up the speaker cabinets above the control room window. It’s now much easier for us to playback audio into the studio. This is great for bands wanting to listen back to that last take, as well as for cue for filming videos!

This leads right into the next update…

New studio monitoring!

We added new JBL LSR 308 monitors in place of our trusty Mackie MR5’s. The JBL’s have larger drivers and an extended bass response over the Mackie’s. We’re now handling our monitor switching through a Presonus Central Station Plus in the control room. Not only does this allow us to route audio to our new live room speakers, it also allows easy input switching between DAW playback, our turntable, an iPod/phone hookup and other external sources.

All of this required some updates to the wiring, which leads us to our last update:

Patchbays

All right… for most of you this probably doesn’t sound super exciting, but we installed 2 52pt ¼” patch bays in the rack under the desk. Now all of the inputs in the live room are routed into the patch bays, and can be patched into any source in the control room (no more climbing behind the desk to change patches!). Along with this brought the cleaning up of the wiring under the desk. We added a Furman power conditioner to handle the power for the rack (and provide a little light on the situation). We also fixed the several broken mic inputs that were in the live room and iso booths. There’s now a total of 38 mic inputs coming from the live room/iso booths into the control room. We also wired up tie lines from the 2 main panels in the live room to the control room which can be patched in as instrument lines or additional headphone sends. Big thanks to our good friend Joey Pasternak for coming by earlier this year and helping us straighten out the wiring.

Facility updates

Those of you who stopped by over the last couple months surely noticed the construction going on in the hallway outside the studio. Our friends and neighbors Pitties and Kitties pet rescue were working on their new office space. That’s all been finished, and the hallway has been cleaned up and turned into a shared lobby for us, Pitties and Kitties, Bloodmoney Irons and our friends at Couture Tattoos. We also did some maintenance on our HVAC system to keep the studio more comfortable and had the leak on the roof in the live room taken care of.

Software updates

We also made sure that our recording software was up to date which included making the jump from Pro Tools 11 to Pro Tools 12. The updates not only gave us some great new features, it also sped up workflow and made sharing projects easier than ever before!