After closing my home studio this past Spring, I’m now in the process of rebuilding. When I pulled the equipment, I’d left all the wiring in the racks intact and just took apart the harnesses between them. Now, in preparation for moving into another space, I’ve begun dismantling those racks, keeping what I know will be used in the next iteration and auctioning off the rest. What was amazing was that much of the wiring I’d put in place when I was still running ADATs back in ’08 was still intact, despite upgrading to three different DAWs and moving twice.

This next iteration is in many ways a return to the kind of setups I was using when I first built Love Tribe Studios. Back then, I was working with my old pal Nate Kunkel on numerous ‘location’ style recordings, dragging Sony 48-track tape machines and racks of mic pres all ever the place, from the monitor position of numerous live shows to houses in Silverlake to world-class studios. Nate has since gone on to perfect this modular and portable approach into what he has dubbed the ‘Studio Without Walls’.  Given the increasing costs of maintaining a fixed studio, whether in a home or commercial facility, I’ve opted to return to the modular/portable approach. The goal is to mount the entire studio in cases that can be moved anywhere in the world and be setup in couple of hours.

The other goal is to re-brand the business. Building upon my reputation for high fidelity acoustic recording for labels such as Smithsonian Folkways and Windam Hill, I’m pushing to re-establish myself as a ‘boutique’ operation for the discriminating artist. Nice theory, anyway. What that means in practice is that I’m really looking to reinforce the confidence my existing clientele have in my business and attracting new business with what I’m calling a ‘boutique-tweak’ approach.

To begin, I’m mounting my Mac Pro into the bottom of the last remaining pair of Jan-Al racks I’d kept, using hardware from Redco. My MOTU hardware will be mounted with it along with a Central Station from PreSonus. The Central Station is a discreet, hi-fi monitor controller that emulates the center section of a traditional console. The top rack will then house the two Mackie consoles I’ve been using as headphone mixers. This way I’ll have a complete multitrack studio in one rack space, with two cases of cables, a mic case and a portable table completing the system.

I’m making arrangements with Black Lion Audio to upgrade the audio paths/clocks in the MOTU converters, giving me 16 channels of high-fi I/O. In addition I will send my SM Audio PR8E 8-channel mic pre to Black Lion, giving me 16 channels of hi-res pres, counting my Neves and Demeters. This plus a number of other smaller enhancements should make the studio rack very powerful with a small footprint.

My other plan is to begin building gear of my own, tailored to my approach to sound. I have schematics for both tube and solid state mic pres I hope to build, as well as a couple of guitar amps. My goal for next year is to build mic pres, as well as a replica of an 18-Watt Marshall. I’ll be systematically documenting this process, so stay tuned…