all right so let's go into the recording studio here this is the 40-foot container that we've turned into a recording room so in this room as you can see it's it's it's got plate glass on one side which was a that was our biggest challenge I think from from designing the studio is how do you do this with a giant piece of glass on one side of the recording room and make it sound good so really the plan was to go dead and just make it as dead as possible so behind this what I guess five or six centimetres of this acoustic material there's rock wool in frames than some heavy wood walls behind that that are sealed with acoustic caulk and then some fiberglass in between that and the metal shell to reduce any vibrations from the actual container itself so the approach was one of making the room as dead as possible to compensate for this really reflective surface over here we also took the glass and tilted it out I think it's seven degrees I can't remember the exact it's between five and seven degrees to try to direct some of the reflections at least up and out so it's not just right back into your face and you know I think that's worked reasonably well I've actually been very surprised at how good the drum sound in here and I don't have some weird slap sound or anything like that it's it's worked out pretty good so you know simple lighting we've got the air conditioning in here to keep everybody comfortable that's worked really well this week so let's take a look we've got the instruments that we have got from Yamaha here they really helped us out a great deal we have this drum kit here that's I'm not sure what the is it's a Yamaha Club I can't even see it well they sound great and in addition to that we had DRS here in our hosts provide us with these lithium cymbals which are awesome they're Turkish cymbals and just hooked us up with a set of them I was really surprised it's I've never heard of the brand before and they sound wonderful so yeah drums so let's let's go from the drums to the bass Gensler hooked us up with the magellan 350 and this 212 cabinet I actually had to pull the thing off I didn't know it was a 212 I had to pull the grill off to figure out where the speakers were her so I could mic it you know correctly sounded great actually I was very surprised I mean this little teeny head has a lot of a lot of power to it and just had a good tone the DI was clean a lot of times amplifiers have let's say second-grade D eyes on them but this one actually sounded really good and I'm pretty pretty particular about bass D eyes I'm a bass player myself so that worked out really good then moving along we have the Yamaha guitar amp this is like a modeling guitar amp it has a bunch of different settings that you can get into on the front and the back and the DI sounds really good on this but we were using it mostly with the 212 cabinet and we had so many different guitar players coming in most of the time we kept it on clean they had their pedal boards and that worked out really well so real simple setup we just aim the cabinet into the wall so we can deaden it down as much as possible for bleed into the drum mics and it worked out really great so the C it's a Yamaha 2 12 and this modeling amp I forget what the model number is but here you can see it we did use this cabinet with an AC 50 a Vox AC 50 and it sounded absolutely brutally awesome that was that was a great sound in rig so but it also sounded great with Yamaha head of course so here we've got the broad base this lovely bass Yamaha has always made excellent basis so that one's just you know sort of your standard-issue jazz pickup and a P pickup sounded awesome we used it quite a bit this guitar it's sort of like a p90 remake on the pickups it sounded really good everything came you know in sedated well and I was very pleased with that so this this worked out quite well I was surprised that ever seen this model before very very nice now here this is special this is the guitar that blew my mind this is a lovely guitar it's just it's a signature series of some sort a 3m this recorded just amazingly well a lot of people played this everybody was blown away the only thing we haven't figured out where the batteries are kind of figure out what it was batteries are gonna change the batteries but the guitar itself is lovely cutaway plays like a dream intonation it's perfect it's just just sounded great DPA mics we have the little DPA clip on with the DI killer sound killers not very happy with that Yamaha MX 88 all-purpose keyboard and it's really fun for sound engineers to go through all the loops and like play all the demon loops and each has all these drum loops and stuff in it but we use it both as a MIDI controller and as a sound source worked great that's nice weighted key feel to it and everything that that worked out really good some people brought in their own keyboards but a lot but most of the time they were using this so super thanks to Yamaha for all that because that really fleshed out all the gear that we needed to make music so on to the next stuff sennheiser sennheiser provided us with two different types of headphones these the hd25 lights and it's a small looking headphone I was actually surprised at how well these sound you know at first look you think oh maybe that's not gonna put out the bass I really need but they they performed quite well okay so here's the other model Sennheiser the 280 pro and these were the ælis we were using these were the drummers and the singers excellent sound they worked out great just lovely Sennheiser thank you so much the the headphones system that we were using was really interesting it's it's provided by clang so we have the clang Kel boxes here I know we've had to label which mix was on what headphone amp these are Dante enabled headphone amplifiers so each channel on the amp has dedicated left and right Dante inputs and we were using this together with the clang Fabrique which is a binaural 3d headphone mixing system where you can use an iPad to mix your own mix and you can pan things not only left and right but forward and behind you in a binaural effect and even up and down this was super flexible for us because it gave the the musicians more space in their headphones headphones can often be disorienting for people who are not used to them because you know when you're sitting inside of the headphones like this you're just you're like isolated from the world and what what clang is done with the fabric is pretty interesting it's pretty new technology so we're kind of fascinated with that that's worked out lovely and we can we can show that over here at the rack in this studio we have all the mic preamps and all the processing is here in this rack in the back corner consisting primarily of the da da x32 which has all of our routing mic preamps D to a converters AAS Madi Dante this thing is a beast a really great sounding beast every microphone that we recorded with was was run through the DI D in addition to that our interfacing with the PA system was through Madi we had also other conversions AES for the prototype 10 audio speakers they had an aes input we had to do multiple routings between dante a aes and Madi channel 4 channel and the only box that I know that really does that is the D ID that saved our butts on this one because the routing was so complicated going back and forth between the video video world over there needed a feed with talkback the PA needed a feed with talkback we needed a you know feed coming we needed preamps from the front house console to come back in that we could use for audience mics it was crazy and this this this was really the the clincher plus it sounds amazing I mean the quality of the da D preamps they're just super clean that they call it you know wire with gain and I have to say that that's very true this is the clang Fabrique this is what does all the 3d processing for the headphone system here's another one of the the quell boxes so we had three of these so with four mixes on each box that's 12 mixes we could do and the clang is sort of a variable setup the more inputs you use the less mixes you can get out of it but we essentially were running eight eight headphone mixes and the cool thing is Sebastian and flex the guys who are taking care of the headphone mixes in the front of house sound could just walk around with an iPad and be mixing everybody's headphones and the front-of-house sound off their console that worked out really well so that the clang allowed us to have a big multi-channel headphone system which is key when you're trying to get a whole bunch of musicians to work together in a small space everybody's got to be able to hear everything just the way they they need it so they can perform well and especially while they're on video getting videotaped the whole time so that brings us to the microphones into the da D is all the microphones of course and DPA really helped us out here and I am just actually I've been a DP a fan you know you know most of my life ever since I've used them from the old days prior you know the the 4011 this is that this is the classic microphone that I used at Berklee College of Music it was a Bruin kyer back then but it's this it's the essentially the same microphone I fell in love with them because they were so true sounding and the DPA is every bit that this what you hear what you hear in the room is what you get in the mic we had these on the drum overheads fabulous we also had the 2011 kick and snare and we used it for various percussion things like Cajon stuff that they would bring into the studio we had a whole we've had so many different bands I can't keep tracks like 30 30 plus bands and you know five six days so here's the DPA 4099 this is kind of the all-purpose DPA live clip-on mic you can use it anything from strings violins cellos bases to drums guitar amplifiers we hook this up to that to the Yamaha 212 cabinet when he was playing through the AC 50 we had a 57 on one side and this on the other awesome I was blown away by this it was like the right mid-range on a guitar amp which is there's a very difficult thing to do right I think the tom-toms snare bottom we even put this clipped it on the boom stand for the overhead and use it for the hi-hat it sounded fabulous these are just really true microphones the the Yamaha coup stick that we use this was again the microphone for it on a clip when a singer/songwriter was was working in here we would have this aimed down away from their mouth and then the vocal mic up here and the cancellation was great so we really had control between vocal and guitar and that's another tricky thing I think to do well so versatile they go anywhere and you know you look at it and you don't think you're gonna get the low end out of it do not be fooled you get the low end out of it it's it's a really great microphone we have a bunch of those that we've been using and then which brings me to the de facto and you know I've heard a lot of really nice handheld microphones but I think this one takes the cake I could not believe the detail that this thing gave us meaning you know in the studio we would typically use a large diaphragm Norman or something like that for all the air and detail on a voice and have him sitting back a few inches but this mic that you could get right up on it and eat it and the proximity effect was minimal let's say and the detail the detail when in any position but especially when you were up close was just so good everybody sounded good on these things I was I was the most impressed with the de factos I thought you know a handheld mic in the studio is going to be a compromise no this was great I I'm gonna have to get me one of these really like that microphone we had a couple extra mics that we brought in to supplement things but by and large most everything was recorded with the DPA DPA microphones here we had some di D eyes from radial of course industry standard stuff these guys sound great we've had the pro 48 we had some stereo D is for the keyboards and stuff all of the radio stuff always sounds good I've got a bunch in my studio as well so thank you to radial for open us up that made life easy sometimes we had some DJ's come in here and had all kinds of outputs and we were running eight channels di just to get the tracks into the computer and stuff so the one other thing I'd like to talk about Tina box hooked us up with these summer boxes this was key to our wiring system they're basically a customizable panel and box system that you can configure any way you you like and that allowed us to do a lot of creative things here we have eight mic inputs this is our cat seven lines for Dante also for video control for the video guys they were using this RG 6 for SDI video but also could be used for Madi lines or word clock we had a couple of tile inés between here in the vocal booth in case we wanted to run a guitar amp separate from the head or you know I have a singer and with electric guitar would have the amp outside we have these power con adapters which our snakes are hooked up to so that are very secure in the wall and we get a whole bunch of outlets on a standard power con connector and we can make new power strips depending on what country we are in depending on what kind of fitting we need for the AC inputs to the guitar amps and various gear in the studio and then of course some they call them suku is it suku the type of outlet here in Europe it's a certain kind of outlet fitting it's different from the Danish grounding system so that we're more versatile because the whole point is to take this container all over the world and have a work so we had to design a system that was going to be super flexible when it came to traveling in and out of other countries and stuff like that so kina box with the summer boxes really allowed us to build the system effectively so it's been great just want to thank all the the suppliers again I mean the the stuff that they provided for us really made a project that actually worked and that I think at the end of the day that's really that's the truth it worked we were here schmuck Fest 2018 30-plus bands all recorded all different kinds of styles and stuff and this performed flawlessly I've really had no hang-ups with with our gear very happy with everything