As mentioned in my previous post, I spent a week in NY visiting my Mom and other family and also spent two days with my brother Brett and my bandmate/friend Chris at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, CT. The objective was to record drums and percussion for our upcoming album, Legacy. We accomplished this task and then some!
It's a beautiful studio on the north side of Stamford and a place that I've gone occasionally over the last 30+ years (somehow). There are several things I like about this particular studio and it is how those things come together that make this the perfect spot to inspire creativity and artistry. FIRST, the people - Johnny is the original and current owner and has seen it all. Great stories about the many artists that have used his studio to create some legendary music. McLee is one of the engineers who knows his way around and was able to help me with navigating the whole studio including signal flow and getting everything where it needs to be. They are both friendly and welcoming and made being there a stress-free time where we were all able to have a few laughs while creating some great (IMHO) music. SECOND, the rooms - the design of the control room, live rooms and isolation rooms is exactly how I like things. The drum room is a cool mix of stone and wood and has a pleasant tuned sound to it. It's very live without additional treatment, but in a good way. The drums sounded great in there. The larger of the two main rooms is a beautiful wood paneled room. The control room is exactly right. The right size, great sounding and has a good view of the two large tracking rooms.
THIRD - the gear - the centerpiece is a well maintained SSL 4000E which sounds great. I brought a lunchbox with my API preamps and we used that to front end several of the drum channels, but the SSL brought it all together as a front end that eventually routed to ProTools (our tape recorder!). I had great luck in that Johnny had just received back his fully refurbished pair of RCA44 ribbon mics and we used them as overheads on the drums. Wow, what a cool sound. He literally got them back a day before our session started.
I used mics from the studio for the rest of the kit and are the same ones I own back in Colorado so they all had a familiar sound to me. I also brought two mics with me. One from Roswell Pro Audio and my new favorite from Vanguard Audio Labs, their V44S stereo condenser. What a cool piece of kit that sounds great on so many things. In this case, I used it as a stereo room mic setup several feet behind the drum kit.
So, for me, it's the way that the people, the rooms and the gear come together. Carriage House has it just right.
We're inching closer to having the next Soul Rash album done and I feel like this one sounds even better than the last in every way. We're looking forward to mixing and releasing this to the universe. Thank you Johnny and McLee for a great couple of days.